Why it's so easy to fire tech employees these days

These days? Every experience in my software career has resembled exactly what was described in the article since around 2010. Back then talent was hard to find. As a front end developer you were paid about two thirds, or less, what a Java developer was paid. The only people doing that work were either extremely passionate about it or just really shitty at being a developer. As a result there were far too many openings and too few competent people to fill the chairs, so and business started looking at alternatives.

In most cases employers wanted to raise wages, but were powerless to do so because front end developers were considered marketing assets and not product development. That resulted in severely restricted departmental budgets and thus restricted compensation.

The first thing most employers did was look for any possible abstraction that made the job easier, so that less competent people could participate. I can remember when jQuery exploded in popularity and suddenly there was a tremendous increase in the number of available candidates. The output was shitty, but whatever. Eventually the abstractions became far more complex and tiresome than operating without them. Now front end developers are called full stack developers, toil all day in layers of frameworks, are paid ridiculous wages, and yet many of them still cannot actually program anything original.

Its like when Duke William of Normandy conquered England. He, at an instant, became far more powerful than the King of France. He still considered himself a loyal subject of the French king. What could possibly go wrong? This resulted in hundreds of years of war between England and France when England under Henry V nearly conquering France.

Most of these developers are absolutely now easy to fire commodities, except they cost more, deliver slowly, and struggle to communicate anything in writing.