It’s 2025, and companies have no budget for developers for multiple fields (backend, frontend, devops etc.). So what do they do? They hire a backend dev and just give them all the tasks. It’s big 25 folks! There is no need for backend vs frontend fights anymore, all of you have to do some fullstack work, and maybe some social media management.

What’s happening in the sector?

Well, companies really don’t have the budget sometimes. The rise of brand culture killed small solutions and made them into a niche group itself. Some companies can gain some traction for their products that touch to an essential need of a sector(like Notion). But other than that, the demand for small(er) software is getting only less and less, except B2B solutions because they actually benefit from using specialized software that is suited for their needs precisely.

But problem is much much bigger than that. With Elon Musk firing nearly all staff from Twitter and still somewhat maintaining the website, some corpos have the idea that they can get away with firing some staff if they have an established product. Google, Microsoft, Meta and bunch of SP 500 tech companies did layoffs, despite being hugely profitable companies. But for corporations, no profit is enough, and it never will be. The culture of making interesting and innovative stuff is dead for a long time. What we can do, in the best conditions, is just optimizing the existing solutions. You, even as a big corpo, can not make a better alternative for anything. We saw Tiktok clones (Reels and Shorts) and Twitter clones (Threads and Bluesky), but we’re not seeing a new solution from the western big tech space in last 10 years. Best we see is indie companies doing somewhat profitable stuff and getting acquired by big tech and big tech is getting credit for it. The best example I can think of is Oculus. They got acquired by Meta and the products don’t have Oculus name anymore, Meta literally absorbed them and getting credit for the solutions they did. Of course Meta developed their products after acquiring them, but the example I want to give is that, after getting bought, Oculus was completely vanished from the world. Meta wanted to people to think that it is an in house product, but not something they simply bought and developed on top of an existing product and technology.

Middle sized companies are catching up to. Innovation doesn’t pay compared to monopolies. Once you have a monopoly on even the most smallest sector, you can just infinitely gain profits. After establishing a customer base, there will be a point of no growth, because the potential of your innovation has come to an end, the ‘best’ approach is locking your customers to your solutions for milking them. It’s the age of SaaS, there’s no company not doing this because big tech pushed the sector with a lot of good and free/really cheap solutions for doing the same in the later (and collecting personal data in the progress). Smaller companies can’t compete with billions in R&D budget. So what they do, just capitalize on a small market and just try to play the ‘big tech’ of that sector.

Okay, but what all this have to do with being a solo dev?

Well, in the age of optimization and monopoly, you are expected to maintain the applications and technologies your company has. If not, you are expected to do a lot of things because regardless of your organization’s size, you will wear many hats. Sometimes it’s not their fault, and sometimes is, but ultimately you (and everyone in the tech sector) will be affected by it. It’s a growing culture, especially with small sized companies. Big tech fired 1 DevOps person for every 10 they had (just giving an example), but small companies didn’t had a DevOps in the beginning. You will be expected to cover DevOps duties. Full Stack is getting more and more popular, and it’s not because developers choosed it that way. I, for my organization, have frontend, backend and DevOps duties. I am a whole orchestra. While I am not really good at some sections of my job, I still can do it with some help (LLMs and studying mostly). But developers who can’t wear that many hats can’t get junior roles. Junior roles exist for people will do anything and everything in their organization. After that, maybe you can just focus on your role that you actually good at and like. We all know the saturation of frontend devs because of countless JS and React courses in Udemy and bootcamps just fueling the hype, regardless of the nonexistent demand for it.

Pros and Cons

Well, wearing many hats, even when you didn’t wanted it eventually, can have some benefits. For example, I learned a lot of skills that I can use for develop the products that I’m working on, or progressing in my career in the future. But I would say that it’s a perspective thing of mine. I like learning new tools occasionally. Also, if you work for a small organization, you have to liberty to dictate how product will be at some extent. Using it also gives you a pretty good perspective for product management skills.

As for the cons, by far the biggest one is, some thing that you can’t learn but you still have to make a product out of them. For example, I am really bad at design and frontend stuff. I get away with it by just making LLMs do my job at those tasks. I can do it because coincidentally (or not) rise of LLMs came at the same time with rise of ’this’ tech culture.

This culture is here to stay, and best we can do is adapting to it unfortunately. Innovating, having interesting ideas doesn’t pay the bills because you can’t compete with giants. Do what you gotta do and don’t be evil 😌