Hey, I’ve been building on WordPress since 2006, professionally since 2011. 6 years running my own (profitable) theme and plugin shop, four years as a vetted contractor, and a few as as a senior engineer at an agencies in US & Europe. I’ve worked with hundreds of corporate clients over that time, mostly ecommerce, NGOs, government and SMEs, which is where I specialise. Several plugins on wp.org, around ten themes (most now outdated), and I contribute to core.
2022-2024 I had multiple contracts running at once, earning roughly what an L5 to L6 engineer at a big tech company makes. I was turning work away, with extremely happy clients.
I’ve been looking for 8 months. Somewhere north of 100 applications sent, 2 responses.
I’m not posting to complain and I’m aware these posts usually have an obvious answer the poster can’t see. I’d like to know if others are seeing the same thing.
Three observations:

Remote mostly isn’t. I’m in Nairobi. Most postings say “Remote” and mean “remote inside the US,” and many don’t say so they just ignore you, I’ve had not more than 10 responses, mostly automated.

The mid-market thinned out. Plenty at the top and plenty of fixed-price template work at the bottom, increasingly with AI-generated listings. Agencies hiring salaried senior engineers feels much smaller than three years ago.

It isn’t only WordPress. I also work with startups using Next.js and Laravel, and it’s the same story there. So I don’t think this is a WordPress problem, or at least not only one. Something has changed in how companies hire developers generally, and I can’t tell what.

For what it’s worth, I still have hope for WordPress. It has paid my bills for over a decade, it’s still the best CMS for the clients I serve, and I’m not leaving until the last lights are off. I’d just like to know whether anyone is still hiring people to build on it properly.

Happy to hear it if I’m doing something obviously wrong.