> Rather, people with web programming expertise don't get acqui-hired anymore, because those skills have diffused through the population enough that you can get

> Rather, people with web programming expertise don't get acqui-hired anymore, because those skills have diffused through the population enough that you can get them easily on the open market. And not necessarily even by hiring anyone - a lot of the stuff that a decade ago you needed a reasonably competent programmer for, have become commoditized in the form of services or even opensource solutions. For example, you needed at least a programmer and a designer to build a website for your company, or had to buy those services from another company. Whereas nowadays you can set up a wordpress site, buy a nice looking template, set up a medium blog, or a shopify store for a few bucks a month. Of course, if you want custom stuff, you have to pay someone to customize it but it no longer requires as much of the knowledge you needed to build a site from scratch.