The market right now is poor for a developer without a fancy CS degree, or one without the luck of a golden pedigree from a previous high profile company. Or "

The market right now is poor for a developer without a fancy CS degree, or one without the luck of a golden pedigree from a previous high profile company. Or "pedigree" in the form of recent experience of certain high-value technologies or frameworks (as if most of these weren't trivially learnable). I also have the sense that there's a "J-curve" of sorts with regard to demand: certain categories of developers are deemed "hot" and are in very high demand, for certain reasons; for others, it might as well be the mid-2000s, for you -- especially if your skillset reads like it would have been "hot" in that era. And as usual, should you have the misfortunate to be unemployed for whatever reason, for any lengthy of time -- you're fucked, of course.