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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 wri

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.
- gregjor 2y ago
  I work for US companies (don't live there anymore though). I don't know anything about your specialty so I can't comment on it or the apparently evaporated market for your skills. I specialize in small/medium-size businesses. My background centers around enterprise logistics, accounting, relational databases, and system administration. Almost every company needs one or more of those things. I see more compliance-related work now -- companies forced by changing laws and regulations, or international expansion, to improve infrastructure and processes. I see lots of cloud infrastructure work, that niche always seems to have a lot more demand than supply. In previous downturns (2000 and 2008/9) I fell back on logistics, because no matter how bad the economy and job market gets businesses still need to keep their supply chain moving and get products to customers. That work involves some of the least sexy tech imaginable: Oracle or DB/2, COBOL, BASIC, stuff like that. Every company with even moderate logistics needs uses a lot of software, that industry got "computerized" back in the '60s and '70s. I do web app development now, have done that since the late '90s, but still keep on top of cloud infrastructure, networking, security, and my soft spot for logistics. Good luck to you waiting out the downturn.

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.

gregjor 2y ago
I work for US companies (don't live there anymore though). I don't know anything about your specialty so I can't comment on it or the apparently evaporated market for your skills. I specialize in small/medium-size businesses. My background centers around enterprise logistics, accounting, relational databases, and system administration. Almost every company needs one or more of those things. I see more compliance-related work now -- companies forced by changing laws and regulations, or international expansion, to improve infrastructure and processes. I see lots of cloud infrastructure work, that niche always seems to have a lot more demand than supply. In previous downturns (2000 and 2008/9) I fell back on logistics, because no matter how bad the economy and job market gets businesses still need to keep their supply chain moving and get products to customers. That work involves some of the least sexy tech imaginable: Oracle or DB/2, COBOL, BASIC, stuff like that. Every company with even moderate logistics needs uses a lot of software, that industry got "computerized" back in the '60s and '70s. I do web app development now, have done that since the late '90s, but still keep on top of cloud infrastructure, networking, security, and my soft spot for logistics. Good luck to you waiting out the downturn.