Real Offers

These days the well known online job board pages are often loading slowly because of the unusually high traffic. Among others LinkedIn is listing many office workers open to work, from junior graduates to senior engineers.

My unpopular opinion is that in the EU the recession is here to stay, and in the USA it will end after they manage to reshape the current salary expectations. As always, the bubbles burst and the companies surviving the hard times are going to offer new work opportunities.

In a rapidly changing economic environment innovation and experimentation are essential. Even the most established companies need to adopt the startup iteration approach for some of their projects, because we are facing new problems which cannot be resolved by adjusting the solutions elaborated for old problems.

It's very possible that the purchasing power and the nature of our income sources will change significantly in the near future, but the projects will always have at least three elements: a requirement list, a budget, and a timeframe. Who has a real offer for you will always tell you about these three elements, otherwise he or she is just enjoying a business trip meant to identify opportunities.

Of course there are countless tactics and strategies out there for finding out your "last price" or tricking you, but fair treatment is a nice to have, and the negative experiences are as necessary as the positive ones. One never get too old for growing as a person. 

Fake Offers

They are part of the reality surrounding us. It takes us many years of learning and experiences to make a difference between real and fake service offers, and there is no bulletproof method for identifying all the scammers. 

The fake job offers are even more complicated, because they can appear in multiple contexts. Two formulas I've read recently on LinkedIn are about keeping a list of vacancies in order to polish the company's image in front of the shareholders, and respectively to have a pool of candidates in case a specialist leaves the organization unexpectedly.

The games of the corporate world might affect the freelance job listings as well. Ultimately the companies backing those listings have a market share, a reputation, and more often than not they have a stock market quotation. In other words they have to demonstrate stability in their activity and income flows despite of the impacts of the technology, economics, and geopolitics on the job market.

The daily count of new offers on a concrete job listing is publicly obtainable, but the daily count of contracts actually concluded and their values are trade secrets. About 10-15 years ago the market of freelancer platforms was not yet saturated, and it was possible to grow such a business despite of committing errors in a row. 

At present specialized job marketplaces are concurring for a reduced number of buyers (project owners), and a suddenly increased number of sellers (workers hired during the epidemy and then fired). In my opinion some of these platforms will probably be sold, and until that we cannot expect major changes in their policies.

The fact is that a freelancer looking systematically for projects needs to get trained for filtering out a huge volume of suspicious offers and increasingly sophisticated fraud schemes. 

When being between two bigger projects I'm taking up smaller ones, and over the years I've learned to avoid several types of offers, but following carefully selected conversations on social media is priceless, it keeps me informed about the newest tricks exploiting the flaws of this or that platform.

Go Real!

Several months ago I revisited a couple of online job listings, and at first it's been funny to read a new  requirement: "we ignore applications created by generative AI". 

Then I've stumbled upon the flip side of the coin: the job descriptions copy pasted from chatbots. And it feels more like a tendency than a couple of isolated cases. 

Think about a company led by an owner willing to make money by riding the generative AI wave. He or she is hiring rapidly some assistants good at prompting, so to acquire projects and temporary workers meant to complete the projects. Obviously the temporary task force also needs to be great at prompting, because that's the core value of the business.

In such a company all the personnel is sucked into a bubble, where the lack of technical expertise is okay, and low quality is not a problem while there is sufficient market demand for their product or service. In my opinion the basic use case of chatbots will contribute to the retooling of the companies producing for the soho market.

Recently I've started to use an online service for checking the job offers, and to filter out those authored by a chatbot. It's risky to argue with a client eventually outsmarted by an assistant tasked to publish a project-based job, which looks a good fit to my expertise, but down the road it turns into an unexpected challenge for both of us.

The companies offering text analyzers for identifying contents authored by generative AI are serving the needs of the middle market. Stopping people from doing all kind of experimentations with chatbots is not a good idea, but preventing the improper usage of generated contents is a matter of common sense.

Everything Is For Sale

I'm living in a zone, that had experienced tough times during the WW2, from deportations, shelling, and hunger to hyperinflation. In 1944 in public places you could see people selling artwork, rare books, or even household objects, because there were no jobs.

Major natural disasters, civil unrests, or devastating wars are reshaping the local society. Depending on the cultural and educational backgrounds of the community members, the spontaneously emerging market-based relationships may degrade into command-and-control based relationships, or continuous warfare between rival groups.

Either way, the market continues to operate, and in zones with electricity and Internet coverage the online market will connect people. 

In the 90's the former COMECON countries went through major economic restructurings, and in certain former Soviet states the barter was the king, many factory workers received products instead of payment. In addition to supplying their friends and families with goods received as salaries, people were placing announcements into free advertising brochures - the predecessors of the online marketplaces.

The proliferation of the Internet has brought with him the more and more specialized marketplaces, complementing the web-shops, and local advertising websites. 

It's not a new thesis, that the structure of a given population's supply and demand is characteristic to the state of their local economy, but the job market looks to me even more interesting, because it says a lot about how people controlling significant resources are thinking about the future of their industries and/or geographic zones.

As a long term telecommuter I've seen the rise, consolidation and restructuring of various freelancer marketplaces. After 2015 the numerous junior and middle level programmer job offers have been replaced gradually by a reduced number of offers for senior level specialists in development, QA, and cloud infrastructure. 

Currently there is high demand for marketing wizards, sellers, and managers expected to run smaller companies or teams. It looks like business people aren't into investing in jobs, they are mostly after cash. Since less jobs does mean less purchasing power, the "everything is for sale" psychosis looks like a signal of upcoming changes in the macroeconomic landscape.

Domain Knowledge First

 Since the appearance of computer software there have been ongoing debates about software development approaches.

When I started to use MS Visual Studio, the product has already offered support both for  the "database first" and the "code first" approaches. 

The proliferation of websites, web applications, and then the mobile apps have created demand for rapid software development tools, and have contributed to the acceptance of the "UI first" software development approach.

While the "database first" approach is still relevant to industries with slowly changing technological and business processes, the "UI first" approach is the best bet for agile teams.

Interviewing users, keeping in touch with the aim of refining the user interfaces, and then getting the client's approval require both soft skills and specific domain knowledge. 

When I was collaborating with an agency specializing in bespoke software, I was encouraged to ask questions about the business logic, in order to uncover possible gaps in the UI drafts and flows.

Missing a task, a parameter, or a criterion from the user's processes leads to issues during software design and implementation. Catching and resolving those issues as early as possible is important, fixing them later in time requires more resources (waste), and produces frictions between developers and users.

"Domain knowledge first" is about preventing the mentioned waste and frictions. Whatever software a team is going to develop, at least one of the team members needs to take up the business analyst's role, to learn about the business processes, to stay in loop with users, and to review the UI drafts and flows.

10-15 years ago the high demand for websites and apps have produced high demand for front-end developers, and in short time a diversified market offer of education in the field of front-end development. Up to a point, the newly certified or graduate task force has been absorbed by the job market. 

Then the second generation cloud technologies have contributed to the proliferation of the SaaS products. Due to the competing offers of cloud-based office tools, visual designers, and other utilities, these products have become affordable to most companies. 

Consequently, these days a front-end developer needs to diversify his/her skills to stay employed, and learning more about the company's processes (domain knowledge) might be a perfect starting point.

Dream Big?

Most business, career, or personal development books are encouraging the reader to dream big, and the authors do exemplify their advice with presenting the histories of well-known people, who achieved their dreams against all odds.

Those presentations rarely depict the numerous failures interwoven with lessons learned and changes applied, and the years of "stand up and fight" exercises teaching us that success is a by-product, gathering and keeping nearby the right team is the biggest value we can be proud of. 

Last year, in a podcast a freelance reporter stated that in his opinion there are two types of community cultures: "mantis" (searching for resources, and using up everything found), and "cautious" (capping the consumption, so to assure the renewal of resources for future needs).

I think the same mentalities are driving one's actions when we are working on finding our way in life, transforming our dreams in projects, and shaping our human relationships.

Mantis individuals are easygoing when it comes to using, learning from, and stepping over their colleagues and partners. They aren't necessarily greedy or malicious, just all their trips are business trips, and you need to have a developed sense of humor to enjoy their company on the long run.

Cautious individuals are slow in building relationships, and the other party is usually feeling enriched by some useful know-how, an achievement, or a nice friendship resulting from their interactions.

The history is showing that both mantis and cautious people may become well-known professionals, influencers, company leaders, or even presidents. The difference is in how they've touched the lives of others.

The cautious versus mantis mentality may decide the fate of a relationship, a startup, a business, or even a country. Dreaming big is great, changing our own mindset, attitude, and priorities is hard.