In the United States, my friends on LinkedIn who are plugged into the Drupal community are not talking about AI very much right now. Instead, they are wrangling with how to service their customers in a rapidly changing commercial and economic landscape.

On the surface, the reasons for the shift are catalyzed by the economy. Dig deeper and it becomes more interesting.

I recently attended a job interview, for a development role at a large and prosperous local business. At the end of the interview, when it was time for me to ask any questions I might have I asked; “Does your agency currently use Drupal or do you have any customers that do?”

The interviewer said that they had never heard of Drupal before that moment.

Now before you jump to conclusions, this is not a small or trivial business. They have more than a handful of top tier clients, great rep in the community and good employee retention. The fact that they have never heard of Drupal has nothing to do with the business.

It has everything to do with where the business sits.

One factor that will not help Drupal to be more widely used in the United States is the trend to return to the office. Fewer and fewer Drupal agencies are advertising for remote Drupal devs. This on the surface may seem innocous but in practice it would seem to relegate Drupal developers to State defined economic zones.

Another thing which underscores this is many companies hiring for remote workers now place restrictions on the US States they will accept job applications from. The goal being to circumvent State specific regulations which protect remote workers or to avoid hiring remote workers in States which require a greater employer contribution to State funded programs.

Some companies now publish a wage scale, which lists compensation levels for Drupal developers based on their US State. For States with a relatively high cost of living, a higher wage, etc.

Soon, this full stack developer role may morph into a paradigm that if you want to be a successful Drupal developer, you need to relocate to a different State. This sounds fanciful at first but one example is that in the US, one of the biggest groupings of companies that service the IT needs of the Federal Government are in Maryland and Virginia. Some of these companies that I know of have a new policy specifically for IT hires which states that an employee may work remotely if they are already on the payroll, but new employees must work from the office.

Clearly they are leading the charge.

This in my opinion is circumstancial — it’s way too complex for just one blog post as there are a lot of pieces in play. Also – things may change soon, but in the interim, I will leave the reader these thoughts to ponder.

Although the economic situaton is about the numbers, companies are hedging their bets. The current trend of streamlining and using AI will continue, but it’s not the biggest threat to commercial agencies that service their customer’s Drupal websites. The challenge moving forward will be to find the right talent. In leu of that, there is always the competition…