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Can Full-Time Tech Workers Survive the Gig Economy? (dice.com)
Nerval's Lobster writes: By some measures, more than 40 percent of U.S. workers will be independent in 2020. Today, that number stands at 34 percent, according to the Freelancer's Union. By all accounts, the trend seems widespread enough to indicate that tech pros should prepare themselves for the dynamics of a world that depends more on contingent work. The question isn't whether the tech world will see an increasing prevalence of 'gigs,' rather than full-time positions; it's whether those in full-time positions can easily keep their jobs when there's pressure to farm it out cheaply and easily to freelancers. Or will the need for people who can see projects through the long term prevent the 'gig economy' from radically changing the tech industry?
On a site that frequently ridicules the short-sighted behavior of eliminating experienced employees to bring in fresh (cheap) college graduates, it seems out of place to have a positive outlook on pervasive outsourcing.
If everyone is a contract worker doing works-for-hire, then nobody has extensive institutional knowledge. You are constantly explaining and re-explaining how your business works, and bugs are repeatedly entering codebases because the developer hasn't spent years understanding the business and its workflows. It doesn't matter how well documented your business is, developers will make mistakes when they are unfamiliar with your processes. When they can't look at a workflow or data structure and go 'that's not right' because they have spent years at the company learning how things work.
Experience has value; not just experience coding, but experience with the company understanding how it works. Systems are rarely generic... they are embedded directly into the business logic unique to each company, and the less you need to learn and relearn the requirements of every system the more productive you can be.
"I will trust Google to 'do no evil' until the founders no longer run it." Hello Alphabet.
Having been on the permanent-staff team dealing with contract workers, I can't see permanent staff ever being replaced by "gig" developers. A lot of things depend on having not just skill in programming but familiarity with the business and prior decisions about the system's design and architecture. You can hire short-term people for specific tasks, but you need people who've been there long-term to work out how to fit new requirements into the system as it exists. Then there's maintenance. Bugs that make it into production tend to be obscure and hard to trace, and someone new who isn't intimately familiar with how things fit together's going to be completely lost trying to troubleshoot a bug that's not in any component but in the interaction between 3 different components (or worse, a bug caused by all 3 components being absolutely correct and bug-free but that particular account's so old it has a combination of settings on it that isn't currently legal and that the documentation doesn't mention).
The permanent staff won't be the cheapest in absolute terms, but they'll be the cheapest in terms of dollars spent for results produced. This isn't a guess, it's a prediction based on the outcome of the vast majority of attempts to replace permanent development teams with contract workers and consulting firms.
It's not just about security though. Outsourcing does not give you workers who care about your company. Their transients, a few bugs won't bother them. A security hole isn't worth patching. Billable hours is the only thing that will matter. Your company is trying to make something new and unique and the guy at the other end of the phone says "yes, sure, we can do that, we're the expert in that!" and then 24 months later they've vanished and you've got nothing to show for it.
Then the workers will want to start standardizing so that they can migrate their jobs more easily, requesting that certificates take the place of interviews and evaluations.