Classical Economics says that in the long run, it's impossible to defy full-employment or saturate any market, Lassez Faire or free trade is quite the norm. Needless to say, the classical framework is based on some rational assumptions like no entry barriers to competition, free flow of information, rational actors who act in their own interest, etc. And yet, given these basic assumptions, the market indeed seemed to work that way for decades and centuries. And most global markets too, not just the freelance market.
The phenomenon of a "long term recession" or "long term saturation" is an unprecedented one and happening for the first time in history. From the news I read and watch, this seems to be happening in almost all sectors but freelancing is what affecting me directly. While short-term corrections of excesses and anomalies have indeed affected economic activity in the past (like world wars) but these aren't such exceptional times. The broader narrative is one of increasing prosperity, GDP output and stock market profitability all over, yet the middle class struggles more and more to find every morsel to feed their hunger.
Coming back to Upwork, a massive entry-barrier in the form of having to purchase connects is itself a problematic symptom. This indicates that supply/demand ratio is heavily tilted in favor of clients; again, this should self-correct itself in a rational market given the classical assumptions but it has carried on for several years now.
Another reason for an unhealthy supply/demand ratio is "brandification" of things which is a symptom of excessive consumerism. This isn't about just freelancing but the increasing cynicism and lack of trust of humans towards one another. Humans have lost empathy towards fellow human, they'd rather trust a Dominos or McDonalds than the little guy cooking French Fries or Samosas in the basement. They'd rather trust an Infosys or Tech Mahindra than the little freelancer who is struggling to make a living.
And from their perspective, they could be right. Apple can give them 24x7 support which I can't, the most I can do is respond to emails or messages within a specified time. There is also the human limitation of how much Coding, Testing, Deployment and Support a single individual freelancer could provide. Does it mean the age of individual freelancers is finally coming to an end, and only big businesses and agencies will eventually thrive?
The only way I can see real revival of freelancing as career option happening is if society at large wakes up from its usual cynical blue-pilled bubble, and starts having some faith in fellow homo sapiens like them, not just abstract entities like brands, gpts and platforms.
Have a nice day ahead, and may the Logos bless everyone!
gregjor2 months ago
Blaming macroeconomics, politics, "society," platforms, etc. will get you nowhere. Those things have nothing to do with your individual success (or failure) as a freelancer.
Since you mention Upwork, if you call that piecework auction site "freelancing" I think you misunderstand freelancing. That site caters to and represents the low-end, the race to the bottom in both price and quality. Few people can make a good living from Upwork and Fiverr, and even fewer who live in high cost of living countries.
I have not noticed any downturn in freelance jobs in the last few years. In fact anecdotally I see more freelance work available than a few years ago -- layoffs always create opportunities for freelancers. I also see a lot more people (some of them recently laid off) trying to get started as freelancers and flailing with that, which will appear to make the field look saturated and too competitive. That happened after the 2000 internet bubble popped, and after 2008 layoffs.
Successful freelancers bring more to the table than a list of tech skills or a "stack." They have experience and deep business domain expertise, sufficient marketing, sales, legal, and accounting knowledge to find, sell, and keep their clients. Probably most important they have good professional networks, because freelancing mainly comes down to reputation and word of mouth. No serious freelancer I know or have worked with uses site like Upwork.
I can't tell if you want to get freelance work or develop a complex theory to explain how the world doesn't work as it should. If you want to freelance I would focus on the necessary skills and connections rather than trying to make sense of the confusion of memes and factoids you included in your post.
anovikov2 months ago
Well, i have made $15M+ worth of business from Upwork and from people who i met there (over 15 years, but peaked at almost $3M last year). That certainly isn't/wasn't an insignificant thing. I am not sure i can agree with your statement that it only represents a race to the bottom kind of thing. Right now it appears to be true but wasn't at all true just a year ago.
And i can't think of a way i could do it in any different way.
nextts2 months ago
3M for a team I presume not for 1 individual?
anovikov2 months ago
Yes but this is offshore, hard outsource - team expenses are not that significant.
nextts2 months ago
Thanks! That make sense. I found it hard to imagine you land a 3M IC revenue on that site but leading a team it makes sense, and sounds like you are raking it in.
anovikova month ago
Well i kinda did. Not anymore. It ran dry.
nexttsa month ago
Not surprising. People find these arbitrage opportunities.
owebmastera month ago
So it was a race to the bottom
chistev2 months ago
How do you find clients?
NewUser76312a month ago
The real question right here. Actually getting work done is trivial compared to finding work in the first place, in my experience...
gregjora month ago
Not my experience. Plenty of work out there. I see a lot of freelancers with very narrow skills or specialization, a fragile strategy in the software field. I also see freelancers who only have commodity skills (React, Wordpress) to sell, making them another fish in a crowded pond. Competition always most fierce in the shallow part of the pool.
The main advantage one can get as a freelancer comes down to adding business value. That comes from listening to the customer, then identifying and solving their problems. It doesn’t come from telling customers what they should do or using them to practice with your own preferred languages and tools.
For example a majority of my customers came to me because other consultants refused to (or couldn’t) work with and debug an existing code base and infrastructure. They proposed an expensive and risky full rewrite, which rightly scares customers away. Once I can demonstrate some real value and understand the business I can propose replacing things, and by then I have no competitive bidders to worry about.
gregjora month ago
I know it sounds like boasting, but I don’t. Customers find me. Referrals, word of mouth, reputation work best and the successful freelancers I know get their customers the same way. I also cultivate long-term relationships so I’m not spending a lot of non-billable time looking for customers.
For the last ten years I have worked through an agency that connects me with customers. That particular agency represents people who already have a customer base and reputation.
anovikov2 months ago
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.
gregjor2 months 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.
anovikov2 months 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.
gregjor2 months 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.
someothherguyy2 months 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.
necovek2 months 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.
ggm2 months 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.
anovikov2 months 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.
anovikov2 months 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.]
rl19872 months 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.
gregjor2 months 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.
anovikov2 months 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.
rl19872 months 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?
gregjor2 months 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.
bigfatkitten2 months 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.
csomara month ago
Go lower in the stack and wait. Wait is the keyword here because some people can't hold on to tech for a couple more years without income.
There is a lot of stuff (packages/crate/repos) going unmaintained. It used to be hard to make an open source contribution in 2015-2021 as it was competitive and it brought resume value. That is no longer the case. Also lots of companies stopped their open source contributions/paid staff working on OSS. The only open source going on now is the one that monetizes the company bottom line.
In 1-2 year lots of stuff will start breaking and companies will need people to fix this stuff. Eventually they'll start hiring again whether full time, part time, freelance you name it.
markus_zhang2 months ago
Judging by what I read in the comments, this is probably not a good time to go contracting/consulting which I believe is the primary formats of freelancing.
And I have something back in my head telling me that this time is different from 2001/2008 because of major geopolitical challenges ahead.
I think the best way is to stick to full time jobs, hop every 2 years to prevent "layoff without a backup plan", reduce as much cost as possible and hopefully retire in ten years.
cookiemonsieura month ago
> The broader narrative is one of increasing prosperity, GDP output and stock market profitability all over, yet the middle class struggles more and more to find every morsel to feed their hunger.
This can only mean one of two things: Either the narrative is wrong, or the narrative is a well concocted lie.
MattGaiser2 months ago
I also wouldn't underestimate the impact of AI. Anecdotal, but the times I used Upwork it was to get tasks where quality wasn't too important off my plate. AI does all those now.
gregjor2 months ago
I haven't seen any affect of AI at the higher end of freelancing -- the polar opposite of Upwork et al. I do see demand for freelancers with skill/experience developing LLMs, and integrating them into business systems.
If someone wants a logo or a brochure-ware site they can probably put that together with LLM assistance today. If they want to do e-commerce or offer an actual service to paying users maybe they can stumble through prompting an LLM to get something to work. When they get hit with a PCI compliance audit, a hacked server, a huge hosting bill, a corrupt database, they can call me because Copilot and Claude probably won't help them, even if they understood the underlying problem in the first place.
I broadly agree that for people who think Upwork represents the freelancing market, they will have even more trouble competing with LLMs than they did with $4/day programmers in Bangladesh and Indonesia. Some people will leave the business, some will complain about it online until they learn the universe doesn't care about fairness, and a few will upgrade to skills they can apply and sell. As of today the so-called AIs can't do much that a serious business will trust. That might change but I think humans still have a long runway to stay ahead of them.
When spreadsheets came out early in my career we got lots of talk about how that technology would make entire occupations obsolete -- almost as much as we get today about AI. What actually happened: people who learned how make Excel jump through hoops and add business value became almost layoff-proof, and even today knowing how to work with Excel describes a very valuable job skill.
I have survived in the software business for almost five decades, seen the no-code/low-code apocalypse touted multiple times, from way back when "managers" would supposedly use COBOL and SQL to write their own code and query databases. Never happened, not because the tools don't work and add a lot of value, but because very few people can translate vague requirements into something resembling a spec, or a series of prompts, and then also evaluate the result. AI just creates opportunities for people like me, I can mop up the messes until I retire.
Roger-L2 months ago
Interesting posts
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