Laravel Job Market: My Mini-Research on AI Impact

Hello guys, today will be a video presentation. I will repeat the presentation that I did in Laravel Greece meetup online about Laravel job market. So it will not be that technical. But I had a question to myself. So are we basically doomed as developers? Because social media is full of predictions like we're out of jobs soon no one will pay us. We will have no projects, no jobs, nor nothing because AI will do everything for us. So I decided to check the reality on the ground and see how many jobs do we have. What are they now for Laravel specifically and is the shift to AI already happening on the ground for real developers. So I will summarize the same presentation here on YouTube in I hope 10 minutes or so. So first what I did I asked around I asked fellow developers both at Laracons and online and in local meetup in Lithuania and the answer kind of surprised me. This is the full tweet I posted recently. This is basically the answer in short. Everyone seems to be saying that we're doing fine. Everything is cool. No jobs lost. No hiring freezes. In fact, many companies reported to be searching for good developers. Still still shortage of seniors developers. So that surprised me that no one actually reported that something is bad. That said, I think that segment of who I asked is kind of biased because most of them are senior developers which are safer I guess. Also, they are established companies most of them. So their jobs are more stable just because of that. And also if you can afford to enter Laracon then probably you're fine financially. So many of the developers that struggled because of AI wasn't at Laracon at all. I think that said a few of developers told that some companies stopped hiring. Not specifically strict hiring freeze but they just noticed no new developers appearing to the team as they used to be. So that's maybe small indirect consequence of AI. What is direct consequence? What I heard quite a lot is internal pressure on developers to deliver more faster and stuff like that. But sometimes actually that is happening from the developers themselves because they feel they can deliver more and if they are interested in the company well-being and in the business in general, they try to deliver more, automate more and be generally more useful to the company to not lose their job in the end. But I don't think that is the actual reasoning. It's just that we actually can deliver more with AI in many cases. So that was my first piece of research. I just asked around. And then the second piece of research was online survey I made a few weeks ago with 26 responses. Not too many. I was expecting more. And let's quickly read through responses. No one actually mentioned any names, so it's safe to just read out loud. The survey was anonymous. And the answers differ. Some people answered no to do they notice any AI related disruptions. Some answered just yes and some shared the stories. So the story of a freelancer in Germany seems like good jobs are disappearing. So real story. Another story and I think that is a good point. Some colleagues getting laid off but none due to AI and this is I think very important point from economy point of view. So a lot of news articles and tweets are talking about devs losing jobs because of AI. But actually that is happening because of economy downside downturn because they were overhired like 5 years ago. So remember during COVID and after COVID there were golden days of raising funding companies hiring left and right and offering good salaries. So at some point economy went worse and companies just have to downsize. Not directly because of AI, it's because their business model got worse. Let's read a few more stories. Similar thing, we're expected to ship faster. Another similar story. Noticeable that we have not hired anyone during past year. So, no hiring freeze. But actually, something is happening. But in another company, it's more strict. So, management at work froze dev hiring. A few more sad stories. colleagues have been left without jobs at least four in 20 people circles for WordPress websites the demand is almost zero also another story someone used to work under a developer but now doesn't get more jobs it's probably the weakest link the most vulnerable link the junior developers who got the jobs or some tasks delegated something that senior developers don't want to do and now senior developers can delegate to cloud code or codeex and a few more stories are also pretty sad layoffs are happening feeling impact personally not getting the freelance projects or just the general conclusion that the market is tough the last couple of years so it's not necessarily because of AI but some of the respondents from 26 people do have personal impact and also if we get back to the presentation I quoted one email that I got like a week ago from someone who does have anxiety because the job is unclear the future is unclear no full-time position at the moment and sometimes they feel uncertain about the future of my career. So look how fundamental it is. It's not just about losing jobs. It's about how people feel for potentially losing jobs or not getting jobs for quite a while. With the AI hype all over the place, they kind of tie it together with AI, although the reason may be unrelated, but it's just the general pressure and uncertainty about the market in 2026. I even had a video a few weeks ago kind of reacting to a viral video about 10x engineer being obsolete and useless. If you haven't seen that one on my AI coding daily channel, I will link that in the description below. It's not about the job loss, it's about how do you feel as a developer in 2026 with AI being better and better. But now let's get back to the main presentation again. And I performed job market research. So what is actually on the ground on Lara jobs on Upwork on Indeed? Are there Laravel jobs? Do they have fewer positions? And is AI mentioned inside of them? And this is basically the result. I found 49 jobs. I didn't have too much time to have deeper market research. So it's not like thousands or hundreds of jobs, but this was the main list of keywords mentioned. And we can read more details on Chad GPT here. So basically same keywords that were in job descriptions for many years is still the same AWS. So developers are now expected to be full stack with JavaScript web developers and also participate in deployments. So CI/CD pipelines, AWS and Radius and Docker are all mentioned in the job descriptions. But surprisingly AI wasn't mentioned as much as I was expecting. So AI usage in job descriptions. It's only six out of 49 jobs. And they mentioned just like very surface level GitHub copilot, CHIG GPT and only a few of the jobs contain something like this like heavy user of AI tools but I was actually expecting AI to be part of the description of like integration of AI into projects and that is even more rare in web development in Laravel projects. My assumption here is that for AI first projects they are created initially not with Laravel with stuff like Python and Django and Nex.js JS on front end maybe, but this is just an assumption. Out of curiosity, if we take a look at React versus Vue versus Livewire, 18 points for React, 18 mentions, then Vue is pretty similar, but LiveWire is just an honorable mention with four jobs from the list. But basically, from these jobs, I didn't find any AI impact at all on current jobs on the market. Another question, were there fewer jobs for Laravel than it used to be a little earlier? Not sure. It's hard to calculate because I don't have the statistics for previous years and I haven't found any official comparison or any chart. But for example, here's a tweet that there's 16 jobs listed on Lar jobs, which seems to be official Laravel job board. But the tweet is from 2024. It's one and a half years old. So it was always like that. Larara Jobs currently has 15 jobs last time I checked like a few weeks ago and it was always like that because Larara Jobs is not free to put the post on. So it was never really overcrowded. But what about other job boards? I've saved some links about Greece because I made that presentation in Greece. But let's take a look at worldwide trends. For example, if we look at indeed com and search for Laravel remote, we have 50 plus jobs. And if we open random job senior Laravel developer as usual quite a lot of keywords including AWS exceptional portfolio and stuff like that. Then also the titles of software engineer PHP developer advocate. So there are jobs 50 plus it is saying for example if we search for United States only for example we have 75 plus jobs. But look if we change Laravel to something more popular for example Python Python United States so we have 100 plus jobs and on indeed.com they don't show the exact number it's just 100 plus jobs but for smaller jobs for example glass door Laravel and remote gives us 71 specific number of Laravel jobs some of them are repeating as I see from the same company but still 71. What about Python remote? The number should be much higher. So see 6,000 Python jobs again. Some of them repeating from the same company. And here you see Meta and Uber again repeating multiple times. So even that number is actually incorrect. But for example, if we go for React, then the number also should be quite high in the thousands again compared to Laravel doubledigit numbers. If we go to workable.com and post Laravel, we see a lot of jobs from Laravel at Laravel company. It means and this is also duplicating. So those job boards are not really accurate, but we see 230 jobs for Laravel. Is it good or bad? Let's compare with Python. See the difference. Let's look at React. Almost 3,000. So this was one of the conclusions I made from that research. And if we get back to the presentation, let's get to conclusions. At least my conclusions from the angle of the internet I kind of researched. So first I don't see that AI is changing job market at least in Laravel community massively yet. At the same time I saw quite a few individual cases of job search problems whether it's related to AI or not. And then the third probably most surprising but actually realistic I'm not sure this is probably the thing that we should discuss in the comments a lot that Laravel has much fewer jobs on job markets compared to market leaders like Python and React and it may be for a few reasons. First, web development in general may have fewer jobs because if you look at product hunt for example, top 10 startups are usually AI related something on the back end, hardware, infrastructure, chat bots and stuff like that. So, web is usually only like the layer for landing page that could be generated with AI as well. So, maybe there's a general market trend from web development to AI first or AI related products, software projects. That is my one assumption. Another assumption is that new developers, new projects, new starters are happening with the sexy text stack. Like I mentioned, React, Nex.js or Python even at like schools or universities. From what I know, from what I asked around, majority start with Python and JavaScript. So, not that many new startups are created with Laravel. I guess it's a pretty sad conclusion, but at the same time, as niche as Laravel is, it's still pretty huge in itself. So, we have Laracons with thousands of people. We have still hundreds of job posts and probably I didn't find many of them. So, there's more. Also on Twitter, I see things happening with Laravel community. So, new projects, new ideas, new tools released related to Laravel on top of Laravel and stuff like that. However, in general, my advice would be in general to diversify. Not because of Laravel, but in general to have better chance of not losing the job or getting new job. I think in 2026, the broader your tech stack is on top of Laravel in addition to Laravel like full stack things, the better it is for your career. So, yeah, that's all about presentation that I gave for Laravel Greece community. I repeated the same on YouTube. And what do you guys think? What would you add to my mini research? Of course, I'm not pretending to be right in here in any way. I serve it just my corner of the internet with pretty limited time, but I hope I gave you a few points to think about about your career in Laravel and around Laravel. Let's discuss everything else in the comments below. That's it for this time and see you guys in other