Ask HN: Will AI push more of us into freelancing? AI tools are automating bigger pieces of software work every month. Do you think that will shift the market away from traditional full-time roles toward contract or freelance gigs? What’s your current setup (full-time, freelance, hybrid, student, between jobs, etc.)? How do you expect AI to change that balance over the next few years, and why? Curious to hear your experiences, predictions, or any data points you’ve come across. |
The market has been trending towards specialists for a long time. AI may help employees in the short term be more effective generalists, and so be able to compete with specialists. AI may help specialists be even more effective in their niche, while also serve wider needs, and so compete better with employees.
Something I do see happening is companies are doing a lot of low hanging fruit themselves in my space (I do revenue and business analytics). Today, they will get 80% of my specialty done themselves. That is enough for most companies. But that last 20% for those who want it, still requires a specialist like me who knows the domain entirely.
I've noticed, however, freelancers do quite well. A lot of this is personality driven. People build good personal brands and they do well, firms want those people and will pay good $$ for them.
I would say no, ML will not have impact on freelancing whatsoever. It will have impact on the bottom line in some companies, but that's like self serving kiosks in mcdonalds. It will have about as much impact as that.
A solo indie developer can have an AI team working on a project.
But so will every corporation. The competition for the remaining human-only roles will be intense.
I will bet a whole paycheck that if you took 10 “solo indie developers” and 10 employees, the employees would be both working less hours per week on average and making more money
Today's software crisis is not one of too little but too much. We are absolutely spoiled for computing power -- a smartphone having enough capacity to replace a mainframe that in the 1970s or 1980s would have handled a national bank's transactions, many times over. We are awash in software, most of it bad. We need less software and better software. Stochastic slop generators are going to make this problem worse, not better.
It may be a rough few years, but on the other side there will be a boom in demand for programmers to clean up the mess "AI" has made.
So entrepreneurial activities will be easier and more common. On the other hand, there will be relatively fewer opportunities for specialized consultants. Contractors and consultants should be able to solve bigger problems rather than working in narrow specialties.
Teams and companies should have fewer members, since fewer specialties are needed. So they will probably need more contractors to move things along when there is a lot of work to do.
So I still need an engineer to find out why the distributed system isn’t performing correctly, or to create a new component that is coherent with the rest of the existing UI. The difference is that any particular engineer will find more success tackling a wider range of goals.