Will outsourcing make freelancing the future for American developers?
A “Job” vs “A Job”
Driving home from my job on Friday, I was listening to Marketplace on NPR. They had been talking about the bad unemployment numbers that were just released that morning until they cut to a segment by Charles Handy about our perceptions of what constitutes a “job”. Here’s a clip of the transcript:
The other day, I was having lunch with an advertising executive. He was bemoaning the fact that he had lost his job while still at the height of his powers, as he saw it. Just at that moment, the electrician who was working in his house put his head around the door. “I won’t be back for a couple of days,” he said. “I’ve got another job to fit in.” In his world, a job meant a client; in my friend’s world, it meant an employer.
This got me thinking…
Yeah, the economy is bad and unemployment numbers are high at the moment, but for many of these employers they’ll likely start hiring again sometime in the future. From a software developer’s point of view, let’s take a step back and look at the trend of large corporations moving to outsource their development to countries where the cost of an engineer is much lower than in the states. These jobs aren’t likely to return in the foreseeable future.
Are we all becoming electricians?
Handy continued:
There’s no obvious limit to the number of electrician-type jobs that can exist. Or plumbers. Or accountants. The world is full of potential clients — for something. The problem is that you have to create the something yourself, and most of us are not born entrepreneurs. Particularly if we have grown up and even grown old in institutions, moving from school to college to organization, places where work was shoved at you, yours only to pick up your shovel or pen and deal with it.
I think he has a point in that there will always be people who need work done in discrete units (or “jobs” as the electrician put it).
As developers we’re lucky in that our line of work can fit nicely into the freelance model, especially for those of us that are into web development. My questions are these: will the majority of those of us in the US eventually be forced to become freelancers? If so: who do you think will be our clients? If not: why not?
Note: I originally posted this on stackoverflow.
