Stop following hype and focus on practical business solutions. You'll have no problem finding work after doing so.
You need to remember that things like Wordpress solve the majority of business needs and skills related to it are in demand next time you feel like you need to keep a constant pulse on what's popular to the HN crowd.
I work on enterprise "Line of Business" applications and WordPress has no place in that world.
I'd agree it solves most of the "we need a website" needs. And some of the "we need to be able to sell shit through our website" needs. But not "the majority of business needs".
Though I agree with your fundamental assessment of just focus on how to deliver business value and less on hype. It's true. But I'm going to hazard a guess and say it's possibly more true for some segments of the population than others.
I don't know, I don't ask for their take on the market. However, I've consulted with businesses where "We use Wordpress for X" is incredibly common to hear and they don't have problems with it, even if it wouldn't be my first choice of a platform.
> But not "the majority of business needs".
The majority of businesses are small or medium-sized, where Wordpress with a few standard or custom plugins are enough to suit their needs.
Wordpress certainly isn't a good platform for IT and software, and I'm not aware of any SaaS companies trying to use it for their business.
Wow. Ok. Some businesses even use it for inventory management. Can't work out whether that's slightly better or slightly worse than a spreadsheet. I guess there are all kinds of options on the market and someone somewhere has whipped up a WordPress version.
Barrier to entry is low and there's a glut of cheap Wordpress developers out there, too, so companies that don't have a budget for an entire IT department can still get by with hiring a few engineers when they're needed.
Again, not my first choice, but it seems to work.