[orange8]

> from a giant pool of cheap, generic, interchangeable, fully replaceable developers

A giant pool? Sorry, not really. JS skills are highly sought after, and finding good, experienced front end developers is very hard. Inexperienced developers are easy to find in any language, including your favorite one, whatever that is.

The "cheap, generic, interchangeable, fully replaceable" part just sounds bitter and vindictive, no need to respond to that.

[kitsunesoba]

When compared to the hiring pools for iOS and Android devs, the size of the web front end pool is certainly larger, because that’s what’s currently hot and has the lowest barrier to entry. You’re right that quality is just as hard to find, but given the performance issues that continually plague most modern web apps (with apps like VS Code serving as evidence that it need not be that way), I’m not convinced that quality is the highest priority with these hires.

I will concede that I am a bit bitter. It’s frustrating to watch the industry push ever harder to render specialized developers unnecessary.

[orange8]

If you compare the demand for websites vs mobile apps, we have about a total of 5 million downloadable apps and about 644 million active websites according to netcraft, which can be interpreted as 131 web devs for every 1 app dev. The pool for webdevs should therefore be much larger.

As for quality, correctly accessing a devs level of competence can be very tricky, regardless of the required skill-set. With web devs, its even more tricky because an "over-qualified" desktop/app devs can do just as much damage in terms of technical debt as a poor quality web dev. A webdev is also a specialized developer, but due to the low entry barrier, many don't realize this.