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You are probably young and don't remember previous downturns. It is true that it's not possible to find any freelance project these days. And not just freelance

You are probably young and don't remember previous downturns. It is true that it's not possible to find any freelance project these days. And not just freelance, companies who sell outsourcing services to companies, have budgets for in-person visits, exhibitions and conferences, and have professional leadgen and sales teams , also can't sell anything at all - i'm in contact with several of them. It has nothing to do with Upwork or connects. For the time being, custom development market is dead. It's probably not worthwhile to keep kicking a dead horse. I for example, gave myself a sabbatical. But in late 2008-late 2009 there was exactly the same thing going on. It's natural and repeats once in a business cycle. Same factor that usually plays in favour of contractors: ability to satisfy short term demand without committments means commanding much better pay than full-time staff - plays against us in downturns; when there is slightly less demand for coding, contract market instantly saturates. Get back to it in a year or two, things will fix. It happened many times in history before, now is not at all an exceptional time, all old-timers remember these days. Good time to have a kid if you don't have one yet. That's what i did last time.

someothherguyy 2y ago
> Get back to it in a year or two, things will fix. It happened many times in history before, now is not at all an exceptional time, all old-timers remember these days. Ah, yeah, just like it did for electronics repair shops /s. Just because cycles happen doesn't mean they'll continue. Try to find targets to sell to, in a downturn, few seek.
- anovikov 2y ago
  Thing is, individual freelancing or small-sized development agencies, they never economically worked. They always lost money to clients, never generated net positive returns. It's just a form of systematic mistake of the market caused by human psychological flaws such as Dunning-Kruger effect and the like. This is why it's so survivable. It does not depend on any actual economic mechanisms that can "put it out of business/made it obsolete". It only suffers downturns when people who become clients, lack disposable income, or are distracted by other toys (they are currently massively distracted by promise of quick AI-driven riches). It's like Forex trading. Never worked. Could never possibly work even if there were no scams (and there are scams everywhere). And yet it never dies, because it's in the nature of humans. [i have no idea about large development agencies. never talked to owners of them. maybe they also never worked, or were/are merely a form of corporate corruption.]
  - rl1987 2y ago
    By what metric freelancing never worked? As long as someone needs something done that they cannot or don't want to do themselves it is quite simple to get paid for doing the work for them. Self-employed artisans and professionals existed for centuries.
  - gregjor 2y ago
    > Thing is, individual freelancing or small-sized development agencies, they never economically worked. They always lost money to clients, never generated net positive returns What? Freelancing has certainly "worked" for me (15 years), and many other freelancers I know personally. It has also worked very well for the many small agencies I have worked for over the years. I don't know what data you have, or what information informs your opinion, but it doesn't match my experience.
    - anovikov 2y ago
      It worked for freelancers and freelancer agencies SURE! But what about clients? That's who i meant. Demand was never economically justified/it was never a mean of producing capital - they always spent on freelancers more than the value those freelancers created for them. Have you seen a SINGLE successful software product built by an outsourced team and/or freelancer(s)? Because the demand is not really economical, it never worked, thus it can never stop working. It's just a form of final consumption.
      - rl1987 2y ago
        You seem to imply there is fundamental irrationality on the parties buying the services, but is there really? At small scale, I have personally derived positive ROI from services I bought from freelancers. While outsourcing can certainly fail, it is not that different of a challenge from other business activities that entail managing people and making things work out financially. Do we really think that every single dollar spent on services of freelancers was wasted?
      - gregjor 2y ago
        > But what about clients? That's who i meant. Demand was never economically justified/it was never a mean of producing capital - they always spent on freelancers more than the value those freelancers created for them. You need to qualify or support absolute statements that start with "never" or "always." > Have you seen a SINGLE successful software product built by an outsourced team and/or freelancer(s)? Yes, more than one in fact, and I have 15 years freelancing experience, and 45 years in the software field. I have seen failures too, both from in-house teams and from outside teams and freelancers. Software dev presents a lot of difficulties, which is why most projects fail or come in late and/or over-budget, regardless of full-time vs. outsourced. I have personally worked on at least five big projects in the last few years that I would call successful, and the client would call successful. > Because the demand is not really economical, it never worked, thus it can never stop working. It's just a form of final consumption. All of that "never" again, as if every single business, every decision maker, has not figured out something you present as obvious and absolute. Do you really think so many companies would continue to hire freelancers and agencies if they got no value from it? Eventually people figure that out, and businesses have about fifty years of experience with software dev now. Many, if not most, small/medium-sized businesses cannot justify or afford full-time IT staff, and even if they have work and budget they cannot attract or retain good people. Silicon Valley and the "tech" industry act like black holes sucking in most of the talent. Small/medium businesses with the Excel spreadsheets and CRUD apps and PHP and Java don't look sexy enough. Those companies hire freelancers like me, and hire out to agencies, because they have to. And outsourcing can end up costing less when you add in the overhead, taxes, benefits, insurance, etc. of hiring and maintaining a team of employees, especially knowing they will quit as soon as they get through leetcoding and get an offer from Amazon or some trendy startup. You should talk to small/medium business owners and managers before making sweeping statements like you have. In large companies and government agencies outsourcing has different goals and reasons, and because of that the teams and projects do frequently fail and cost way more than they should have. To give one example, the US federal government gives preference to contracting minority-owned businesses (which includes woman-owned businessed). Some of the people who run contracting firms and agencies to take advantage of that preference do a great job and hire good people. Some don't. Big corporations and government agencies don't hire those teams with technical interviews or careful screening, they hire the agency based on competitive bidding (in theory) and/or schmoozing, and take what they get. I don't work in that world (not anymore, I did for a time). Edit: Let me define what I mean by "successful" in terms of software development for a business. It means adding value, which can take the form of reducing costs, increasing market share, finding efficiencies, improving productivity. It can also take more nebulous forms, such as upgrading a code base to more modern languages/tooling, which the business hopes will pay off in the future, or help them attract more IT/software dev talent. Small and medium-sized businesses that don't have venture funding and must turn a profit to stay afloat work like that. Startups and big companies that focus on "shareholder value" (i.e. stock price) have different goals and may just fill cubicles with warm bodies to give the impression of constant growth, or to deprive competitors of talent.
- anovikov 2y ago
  I talk to a lot of my previous clients. At the moment, all of them just don't have cash to hire and they keep laying off their full time staff too.
- ggm 2y ago
  Horses were common, now horses are rare and expensive. At the sharp end of the decline in horses you wouldn't suggest a kid become a farrier. Now? They'd be making bank. Electronics repair shops still exist. They want $2000 minimum, to strip down and rebuild my KT66 Quad valve amp, shipping not included (the transformers way 2kg each) It just becomes bespoke.
- necovek 2y ago
  Yeah, it's also very hard to find steam locomotive repair shops today. But that wasn't the point: sure, if nothing replaces a need for software development, you are looking at things coming back strong. Electronics repair has become too expensive compared to new production, esp in countries where cost of labour is high. It's still going strong in poorer economies.
- bigfatkitten 2y ago
  > Ah, yeah, just like it did for electronics repair shops /s. There is always work in the right niche. I have a good friend who specialises in troubleshooting and repairing switched mode power supplies. That's all he does, he's been doing it for about 30 years, and he has more work than he could ever hope to take on. Large corporate and government (particularly military) customers pay top dollar for his unique expertise in repairing and refurbishing PSUs from extremely expensive and important pieces of equipment for which no replacements are available.
gregjor 2y ago
I see plenty of freelance work available, but how much and how well it pays depends a lot on the kind of work. If all you have to offer is a couple of years writing React or installing WordPress plugins the market looks terrible. At the same time I get small/medium businesses asking for help with cloud infrastructure, security, compliance. Experienced cloud infra people don't grow on trees and the big providers snatch them up. I could probably coast into retirement just tuning relational databases left behind by the "move fast, break things" cohort. Today, in this market, experienced Salesforce and Oracle consultants (freelancers and agencies) can't find enough time or people to meet demand. The software business follows trends and fad and fashion, and developers follow along. I wouldn't call that a cycle, it looks more like the constantly-changing fashion of teenagers. Look back a few decades and see what has lasted a long time (Unix/Linux, relational databases, system administration, networking, C-family languages, security) and make some of those the foundation, rather than whatever has buzz on Hacker News this week. Anecdotally when I talk to or read posts from young developers, sometimes recently laid off, about how they can't get a job or break into freelancing, a few things stand out: - Few or no professional contacts. - Limited tech skills, often just one language and framework. - No business domain expertise. - Thinking in terms of what they want/need rather than what their potential employers or customers might want/need. That's what happens when you follow fads to the exclusion of everything else, and just want to get left alone to code and ignore the business that writes your paycheck, and make fun of the people in management and marketing and other departments for calling too many meetings or socializing around the proverbial water cooler.
- anovikov 2y ago
  I specialise in video (ffmpeg and webrtc, in essence - on the level of "build me a demuxer for format ffmpeg does not yet support" or "build me a from-scratch C++ implementation of webrtc endpoint tailored for a particular narrow use case"). This involves a lot of "C-family languages", reading and understanding RFCs, and other "hard" skills that are not passing fads at all. And i can tell that the market has become terrible, and it is the same for some colleagues of mine with less narrow specialisation. I stopped looking for contracts: it just can't work now, i need to wait. As for lack of business domain expertise, well that's spot on. I barely seen/participated in any actual working businesses in my life, probably because i never held a full time job in my 25 years of career, and i'm in Europe where it probably doesn't make sense doing anything (or at least i haven't seen anyone succeeding), so i'm stuck being an "offshore outsourcer" for Americans.

someothherguyy 2y ago

> Get back to it in a year or two, things will fix. It happened many times in history before, now is not at all an exceptional time, all old-timers remember these days. Ah, yeah, just like it did for electronics repair shops /s. Just because cycles happen doesn't mean they'll continue. Try to find targets to sell to, in a downturn, few seek.

anovikov 2y ago
Thing is, individual freelancing or small-sized development agencies, they never economically worked. They always lost money to clients, never generated net positive returns. It's just a form of systematic mistake of the market caused by human psychological flaws such as Dunning-Kruger effect and the like. This is why it's so survivable. It does not depend on any actual economic mechanisms that can "put it out of business/made it obsolete". It only suffers downturns when people who become clients, lack disposable income, or are distracted by other toys (they are currently massively distracted by promise of quick AI-driven riches). It's like Forex trading. Never worked. Could never possibly work even if there were no scams (and there are scams everywhere). And yet it never dies, because it's in the nature of humans. [i have no idea about large development agencies. never talked to owners of them. maybe they also never worked, or were/are merely a form of corporate corruption.]
- rl1987 2y ago
  By what metric freelancing never worked? As long as someone needs something done that they cannot or don't want to do themselves it is quite simple to get paid for doing the work for them. Self-employed artisans and professionals existed for centuries.
- gregjor 2y ago
  > Thing is, individual freelancing or small-sized development agencies, they never economically worked. They always lost money to clients, never generated net positive returns What? Freelancing has certainly "worked" for me (15 years), and many other freelancers I know personally. It has also worked very well for the many small agencies I have worked for over the years. I don't know what data you have, or what information informs your opinion, but it doesn't match my experience.
  - anovikov 2y ago
    It worked for freelancers and freelancer agencies SURE! But what about clients? That's who i meant. Demand was never economically justified/it was never a mean of producing capital - they always spent on freelancers more than the value those freelancers created for them. Have you seen a SINGLE successful software product built by an outsourced team and/or freelancer(s)? Because the demand is not really economical, it never worked, thus it can never stop working. It's just a form of final consumption.
    - rl1987 2y ago
      You seem to imply there is fundamental irrationality on the parties buying the services, but is there really? At small scale, I have personally derived positive ROI from services I bought from freelancers. While outsourcing can certainly fail, it is not that different of a challenge from other business activities that entail managing people and making things work out financially. Do we really think that every single dollar spent on services of freelancers was wasted?
    - gregjor 2y ago
      > But what about clients? That's who i meant. Demand was never economically justified/it was never a mean of producing capital - they always spent on freelancers more than the value those freelancers created for them. You need to qualify or support absolute statements that start with "never" or "always." > Have you seen a SINGLE successful software product built by an outsourced team and/or freelancer(s)? Yes, more than one in fact, and I have 15 years freelancing experience, and 45 years in the software field. I have seen failures too, both from in-house teams and from outside teams and freelancers. Software dev presents a lot of difficulties, which is why most projects fail or come in late and/or over-budget, regardless of full-time vs. outsourced. I have personally worked on at least five big projects in the last few years that I would call successful, and the client would call successful. > Because the demand is not really economical, it never worked, thus it can never stop working. It's just a form of final consumption. All of that "never" again, as if every single business, every decision maker, has not figured out something you present as obvious and absolute. Do you really think so many companies would continue to hire freelancers and agencies if they got no value from it? Eventually people figure that out, and businesses have about fifty years of experience with software dev now. Many, if not most, small/medium-sized businesses cannot justify or afford full-time IT staff, and even if they have work and budget they cannot attract or retain good people. Silicon Valley and the "tech" industry act like black holes sucking in most of the talent. Small/medium businesses with the Excel spreadsheets and CRUD apps and PHP and Java don't look sexy enough. Those companies hire freelancers like me, and hire out to agencies, because they have to. And outsourcing can end up costing less when you add in the overhead, taxes, benefits, insurance, etc. of hiring and maintaining a team of employees, especially knowing they will quit as soon as they get through leetcoding and get an offer from Amazon or some trendy startup. You should talk to small/medium business owners and managers before making sweeping statements like you have. In large companies and government agencies outsourcing has different goals and reasons, and because of that the teams and projects do frequently fail and cost way more than they should have. To give one example, the US federal government gives preference to contracting minority-owned businesses (which includes woman-owned businessed). Some of the people who run contracting firms and agencies to take advantage of that preference do a great job and hire good people. Some don't. Big corporations and government agencies don't hire those teams with technical interviews or careful screening, they hire the agency based on competitive bidding (in theory) and/or schmoozing, and take what they get. I don't work in that world (not anymore, I did for a time). Edit: Let me define what I mean by "successful" in terms of software development for a business. It means adding value, which can take the form of reducing costs, increasing market share, finding efficiencies, improving productivity. It can also take more nebulous forms, such as upgrading a code base to more modern languages/tooling, which the business hopes will pay off in the future, or help them attract more IT/software dev talent. Small and medium-sized businesses that don't have venture funding and must turn a profit to stay afloat work like that. Startups and big companies that focus on "shareholder value" (i.e. stock price) have different goals and may just fill cubicles with warm bodies to give the impression of constant growth, or to deprive competitors of talent.
anovikov 2y ago
I talk to a lot of my previous clients. At the moment, all of them just don't have cash to hire and they keep laying off their full time staff too.
ggm 2y ago
Horses were common, now horses are rare and expensive. At the sharp end of the decline in horses you wouldn't suggest a kid become a farrier. Now? They'd be making bank. Electronics repair shops still exist. They want $2000 minimum, to strip down and rebuild my KT66 Quad valve amp, shipping not included (the transformers way 2kg each) It just becomes bespoke.
necovek 2y ago
Yeah, it's also very hard to find steam locomotive repair shops today. But that wasn't the point: sure, if nothing replaces a need for software development, you are looking at things coming back strong. Electronics repair has become too expensive compared to new production, esp in countries where cost of labour is high. It's still going strong in poorer economies.
bigfatkitten 2y ago
> Ah, yeah, just like it did for electronics repair shops /s. There is always work in the right niche. I have a good friend who specialises in troubleshooting and repairing switched mode power supplies. That's all he does, he's been doing it for about 30 years, and he has more work than he could ever hope to take on. Large corporate and government (particularly military) customers pay top dollar for his unique expertise in repairing and refurbishing PSUs from extremely expensive and important pieces of equipment for which no replacements are available.

gregjor 2y ago

I see plenty of freelance work available, but how much and how well it pays depends a lot on the kind of work. If all you have to offer is a couple of years writing React or installing WordPress plugins the market looks terrible. At the same time I get small/medium businesses asking for help with cloud infrastructure, security, compliance. Experienced cloud infra people don't grow on trees and the big providers snatch them up. I could probably coast into retirement just tuning relational databases left behind by the "move fast, break things" cohort. Today, in this market, experienced Salesforce and Oracle consultants (freelancers and agencies) can't find enough time or people to meet demand. The software business follows trends and fad and fashion, and developers follow along. I wouldn't call that a cycle, it looks more like the constantly-changing fashion of teenagers. Look back a few decades and see what has lasted a long time (Unix/Linux, relational databases, system administration, networking, C-family languages, security) and make some of those the foundation, rather than whatever has buzz on Hacker News this week. Anecdotally when I talk to or read posts from young developers, sometimes recently laid off, about how they can't get a job or break into freelancing, a few things stand out: - Few or no professional contacts. - Limited tech skills, often just one language and framework. - No business domain expertise. - Thinking in terms of what they want/need rather than what their potential employers or customers might want/need. That's what happens when you follow fads to the exclusion of everything else, and just want to get left alone to code and ignore the business that writes your paycheck, and make fun of the people in management and marketing and other departments for calling too many meetings or socializing around the proverbial water cooler.

anovikov 2y ago
I specialise in video (ffmpeg and webrtc, in essence - on the level of "build me a demuxer for format ffmpeg does not yet support" or "build me a from-scratch C++ implementation of webrtc endpoint tailored for a particular narrow use case"). This involves a lot of "C-family languages", reading and understanding RFCs, and other "hard" skills that are not passing fads at all. And i can tell that the market has become terrible, and it is the same for some colleagues of mine with less narrow specialisation. I stopped looking for contracts: it just can't work now, i need to wait. As for lack of business domain expertise, well that's spot on. I barely seen/participated in any actual working businesses in my life, probably because i never held a full time job in my 25 years of career, and i'm in Europe where it probably doesn't make sense doing anything (or at least i haven't seen anyone succeeding), so i'm stuck being an "offshore outsourcer" for Americans.