The state of employment, WordCamp Sofia, hiring at DevriX

The past 7 days were involved:

• the annual “Black Friday weekend” sprint with 24-hour shifts with the team

• a massive WordCamp in Sofia + Contributor day

• local budget activities within the IT community (related to 2026 planning)

• and an active recruitment sprint with 2 new people starting this December so far (and 2 applicants pending a third interview)

I’ll leave the political aspect aside, with this edition focusing on the state of employment and community work.

400+ community members for WordCamp Sofia

The local organizing team did an incredible job gathering over 400 members - developers and designers, hosting companies and support teams, plugin and marketplace engineers, translators, systems engineers, marketers, business owners.

A full day packed with events on Saturday + contributing back to WordPress on Sunday.

My career in the early 2000s started with communities - from media networks publishing content from foreign sources, to forums and moderating communities, to local networks of translators and curators, to bootcamps, volunteering at international events, translating foreign software, administering IRC channels and forums.

The earlier Internet days before cloud computing and SaaS were drastically different from the IT job market of 2018-2023. SEO teams were helping on content pillars, engineers were teaching at universities, experts were publishing blogs and tutorials (before video was popularized as a medium). WordPress was one of these active communities over the past 15 years, growing steadily, with meetups, support forums, videos, blogs (naturally), and more.

Advocating for an involved employment market

Given my background, I attribute my career progression to hard work, innate curiosity, and coincidental networking through communities, volunteering, and giving back.

I’m a great proponent for pet projects and training, having authored dozens of open source plugins myself, and thousands of hours teaching at universities, colleges, bootcamps, and schools.

I’ve advocated for a stronger tech ecosystem across popular mass media, too, including Forbes, Inc, Entrepreneur, with breakdowns like this one from 2018:

As the job market has generally slowed down over the past two years, our hiring has been active over the past 6 months. Yet again, innate curiosity and extracurricular activities are rare.

Some of my videos from 2017-2019 talk about that, too - part of my educational series to level up the ecosystem at the time:

The AI transformation is expanding the gap

While the market has been generous to hires who are comfortable with a 9-to-5, in a slower ecosystem with long sprints, large teams, annual roadmaps, and missing KPIs, the ongoing layoff rounds over the past 3 years are clearly showing a change of heart and a heavier focus on operational efficiency.

With faster prototyping, automated code reviews, quicker debugging and troubleshooting, top performers can 5x to 10x their productivity in certain areas while lower performers are lagging behind.

Moreover, while our teams have been deploying LLM usage in dozens of ways (and we’ve initiated machine learning models as early as 2014), we’ve conducted over 100 interviews with people in their late 20s and early 30s with strong track record in various IT companies, but no practical experience with copilots, vibe coding, LLM PR reviews, n8n flows, or many many many other principles we’ve been running in production for a couple of years now.

A similar gap in marketing interviews with no experience in data research, quotation and citations, image generation with nano banana or any other model; no recollection of NotebookLM, Clay enrichment for leads, prompt engineering using content frameworks - I can keep going on.

The lack of innate curiosity means missing out on innovations while skipping conferences, blogs, podcasts, newsletters. Or pioneers on social profiling in these.

This gap will grow larger in the coming year.

As we hire for multiple roles here, these criteria apply to our selection process, too. While learning on the job is expected for different principles (team org, company structure, project specifics, workflows and what to do/not to do), studying productivity and process deployment with globally available tools used by tens of millions of people is now a job requirement in itself.

The bootcamps of the future can tap into this market alone and grow the next generation of Gen Z and upskill the current millennial and boomer generation into solutions that rapidly increase productivity and efficiency. I do this daily and can personally vouch for that jetpack-alike experience.

Mario

Still, responsible AI use is important. Otherwise, you can blow up your hard drive:

 Books I read this month

• “The Algebra of Wealth” by Prof. Scott Galloway (55% in)

• “The Hard Thing About Hard Things” by Ben Horowitz (70% in)

• “The Sweaty Startup” by Nick Hueber (85% in)

• Ray Dalio’s “How Countries Go Broke: The Big Cycle” (55% in)

• The FP&A Handbook: Mastering Financial Planning & Analysis (40% in)

• “Revenue Architecture” by Jacco van der Kooij (55% in)

• “The Sales Acceleration Formula” ✅ 

• “Hooked” - on habits and cues and product alignment ✅ 

🧑‍💻 I submitted 2 patches to the PHP AI SDK this weekend at the Contributor Day, channeling my inner engineer again:

🔖 Build accessibility into your strategy. Investors are focusing on top-tier accessibility design firms that broaden reach and reduce legal risks.

🔖 Make risk a growth driver. A new approach to enterprise risk management ties mitigation directly to long-term strategy.

🔖 Unlock post-purchase growth. Case studies show how smart cross-selling strategies built over 25x ROI for growth-stage brands.

🔖 Align email with EU rules. Learn how to safeguard campaigns with GDPR-compliant AI marketing workflows.

🔖 Protect marketing with better compliance tools. These platforms streamline CCPA compliance and reduce risk at scale.

🔖 Simplify boards and budgets with smarter queries. Learn how AI dashboards improve access across teams.

🔖 Get multi-channel attribution reports faster. These linear attribution tools sync data across platforms to clarify PPC spend.

🔖 Ideas don’t ship themselves. MIT research shows how execution frameworks drive momentum better than polished theory.

🔖 Structures that outlast founders. Explore how businesses use community ownership to sustain long-term value.

📰 Shopify weathers Cyber Monday outage. Brief downtime disrupts merchants on peak sales day before fast recovery platform incident.

📰 Markets eye 7,000 on S&P 500. Fed caution and political shifts fuel investor optimism about near-term gains future rally.

📰 Rubrik adds Amazon Bedrock controls. New integration offers centralized oversight of AI agents across cloud environments security layer.

📰 Teens drive Black Friday traffic. Brands like Edikted and Kendra Scott see higher conversions thanks to TikTok influence youth demand.

📰 Microsoft backs European AI sovereignty. Satya Nadella says wide AI adoption and reskilling can secure regional independence AI strategy.

📰 Zero-click search reshapes traffic. Publishers face revenue impacts as AI gives direct answers without user clicks search shift.

📰 RADPAIR partners with Fovia AI. Their agentic AI platform adds voice control to radiology workflows for faster analysis clinical AI.

📰 Zillow removes climate risk ratings. Real estate listings no longer display exposure metrics after agent objections exposure metrics.

📰 Rituals fortify company culture. Creative meeting starters and founder-led traditions reinforce values and alignment over time culture rituals.

📰 ChatGPT turned three last week. Investors track the S&P 500’s new AI tilt with Nvidia’s surge market rebound.

Let’s see the latest offers from Flippa. Don’t forget to sign up for their newsletter for daily/weekly/monthly offers like these.

Automotive Affiliate Site: A nine-year-old passive automotive blog earning around $2K per month with 99% margins. Running entirely without new content, it monetizes through Amazon, AdSense, and affiliate tools - selling for $78,299 (reduced 21%).

Email and SMS Marketing Agency: A boutique automation agency with strong recurring revenue, 81% margins, and high client retention. Built for effortless scalability with refined systems and premium positioning - available for $655,768.

Digital Software Brand: A high-margin eCommerce business offering digital tools for creatives with fully automated operations. With $20K in monthly profit and 100% margins, it’s a turnkey growth opportunity - listed at $380,000.

Jewelry and Wellness DTC Brand: A direct-to-consumer brand operating in the jewelry and wellness niche with nearly $1M in trailing revenue. Low-maintenance and consistent, it brings $13K in monthly profit - offered at $305,000.

AI Music SaaS Platform: An AI-powered studio enabling vocal transformation and content creation for over 3M registered users. Generating $46K monthly profit and strong subscription retention, it’s priced at $2,400,000.

Working with me

Here are the main projects I focus on:

🌐 Scaling $50M - $500M+ companies on top of WordPress. DevriX provides full RevOps consulting + delivery with GTM enablement for PE-backed portfolio companies, traditional tech, healthcare, finance, and professional service businesses pacing toward revenue growth initiatives. Our standard monthly retainers between $10K and $100K include revenue lifecycle services for marketing and sales leaders, FP&A for financial teams, pipeline enrichment through websites and dozens of lead sources, automations and delivery integrations, CRO and ongoing testing, product delivery and platform integration solutions, and more through our consulting solutions.

🚀 1:1 Consulting. At Growth Shuttle, I run two popular plans: Async Advisory ($3,500/mo) for $5M - $50M founders and executive teams and the smaller Strategic Growth Circle ($997/mo) for $100K - $1M entrepreneurs, agency founders, and scale ups.

📈 Building US LLCs from Europe. I help European and Asian founders scale faster through doola and their “Business in a Box” model. Also suitable for US citizens (given their bookkeeping solution), but in very high demand across Europe.

📊 Post-Merger Integration. I support M&A initiatives through Flippa’s marketplace. Working closely on PMI initiatives for PE companies and fast-growing startups integrating new companies within their portfolios, enabling data pipelines, and securing more deals through my personal network.