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Comment by c1u | Hacker News Reader

Yep, partially due to technology but I also think in 30 years almost everyone will be a freelancer and "jobs" as we know them today will be very very rare.

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Firms exist to reduce transaction costs. In order to freelance everything, you'll need to bring the costs way, way down -- and that includes learning what you're working on and figuring out how to cooperate with other people much faster than we've ever seen that happen.

I suspect this is not ever going to match the efficiency of a good team with history.

Unless something happens to cause the cost of having full-time employees to rise higher than can be sustained. Examples can be government intervention in terms of taxes, wage controls, or mandates such as benefits.

In the US, that could mean a number of 1099 employees instead of the normal W2. Possibly long-term contracts would become the norm. Much of this would be the employer pushing the cost of employment onto the employee.

Also, I'd imagine that there are several examples where having a good team with a history is not much of a consideration. If you have access to enough people in the field in your area that have experience, it most likely would not be difficult to ramp up a good team that can suit your needs quickly. Professionals tend to be professionals.

I can't imagine the pain of having to assemble a team of freelancers every three-nine months for the next iteration on some product/project. Unless the freelancers are utterly interchangeable, which is a pretty awful vision (people think they are cogs now?). When you want to organize a team you'd spend 25% of your time just assembling a team. The freelancers themselves would also spend tons of time waiting for a team to be ready to go. Probably the norm would be for freelancers to have multiple projects going at a time, so any project would only get some percentage of each individual's time & attention, requiring larger teams or slower cycles, each of which requiring more overhead on communications and coordination.

The obvious alternative is to maintain a group of people that have developed a good working relationship together for a longer period of time. Of course people would come and go occasionally due to other opportunities & changing needs for skills. But wait - that sounds an awful lot like what we already have.

That sounds exactly like a movie production. I'm sure they have figured out how to bring teams back together for sequels.

Movies take years to produce. At least from what I've seen, people switch jobs every 3-6 years. So not much different really. I agree that the 25+ year tenure at a company is by and large gone for good.

All good critiques of freelancing today. "Freelancing" in 2043 will be very different.

Of course no one knows the future (maybe lifetime union jobs will be back in 30 years?) but I just feel this is the way the wind is blowing. But then again maybe it's just where I'm standing.

Not without some serious legislative and financial changes - the deck is stacked very much in favor of 'companies' (and generally larger ones at that) than smaller ones, and certainly not in favor of freelancers.

Big in number of employees or capital? I wonder if you could have a fully outsourced company, where a mesh of algorithms would allocate capital to hire freelances, adquire resources, etc. I suppose it'd be hard to create new products and services, but you could always automate the acquisition of startups ;)

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