Show HN: Survey of 10k freelancers, their salaries, locations and tools | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Survey of 10k freelancers, their salaries, locations and tools

contra.com

40 pointsgajus22 comments

It looks gorgeous, but it's totally inadequate to show the data. Plus the way the scrolling gets hijacked is frustrating.

It was very hard for me to read. On a large screen, there are several animations visible at once all competing for my attention. A lot of the big caption text is invisible after the first line or two so I had to open browser dev tools to work out what it was supposed to say. All the effects on the visuals mean it's difficult to read meaningful data from them either.

You're not supposed to "read meaningful data". You're supposed to be overwhelmed by the slick, professional, glamorous world and lifestyle of freelancing, and sign up for their service.

> It looks gorgeous

Is it a modern art installation?

I found the opening mildly annoying but on "slide 2" the counter-scrolling pink headlines were so distracting that was it, I stopped reading.

Life's short and I only have one pair of eyeballs.

Yea, I stopped trying to read and understand the data after I got annoyed by the scrolling.

Nevermind that when viewed on an even slightly underpowered device if almost turns into a slideshow.

Personally, I found it didn’t hijack my scrolling and ran very smoothly but my phone is only 2 years old. It’s the only site of its sort that didn’t run awfully, it’s the only 100% smooth one of these I’ve see. I was impressed with the programmer. Design/Presentation wise though, I didn’t know when I was looking at abstract art and when it was a chart. The height of the sections also made it hard know where to line up your view or to know what a caption referred to

I wonder why other devices ran it slower. iOS here. From the chat, it seems like desktop is borked and they never tested on Firefox?

Link to PDF: https://contra.com/freelance-industry-report-2021/State%20of...

Sadly the design is similar, luckily there aren't bar graphs jumping around all over the place.

I wonder how the "10k freelancers" surveyed were chosen. Presumably the selection process used can hugely influence the picture that emerges.

Looks like this is really just a promotional site for their product/service.

That is the most frustatingly slow and cludgy page to scroll through that I've seen in a long time. Absolutely unnecessary. My mac mini really struggled to render that.

Bit plain, could stand to have some more animation.

+1, Bit plain, could stand to have some more sarcasm.

No data on salaries aside from "do you charge per hour or per project?".

Site doesen't appear to work on firefox at all

while the three js in use is done very proficiently, i cant help but feel these UI phenomena arent useful for this purpose

Out of curiosity: what are the downsides to using a lot of three.js? Do you hit battery life issues often or get peoples fans spinning, or does the gpu just handle it easily for sites like this?

Well, everything you said is correct, threejs will get those fans spinning, battery draining, and numbers crunching. But I really like threejs myself.

My concern is that data should be presented as plain text. There isnt a need for rotating coins saying "look! data!" with neon color animations :)

While I appreciate the effort that went into the visual effects of the site, rendering it brings my phone and even on a desktop computer having a sentence take up the entirety of the display area makes it kind of cumbersome to read.

Needles to say it was an interesting read and I can tell the effort you put into making this. I'll take a look at the full report later today when I have more free time.

That site makes my older laptop ... roar in pain.

I enjoyed the "independents taking control of their education, never stopping the learning for success and profit" section.

Specifically for "product", apparently every independent product who is taking control of their lives learns agile, kanban, waterfall or scrum.

Did they survey people or word2vec?

This site is legit from 2041

Great visuals but terrible to get to the meat of it.

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