I am thinking of doing freelance web development for money, but also at the same time I’m not really sure about it because, why would they hire me, a human in a high-cost (high cost of living but I don’t even think it looks like a 1st world country anymore and the conditions only seem to be getting worse) country rather than use AI to do most of the work for either cheaper or for free or hire someone in a low-wage/low-cost country like India or Pakistan?
I mean, I’ve even noticed that most of my “local” businesses are doing something similar - instead of hiring local people, they literally go out of their way to hire immigrants (to the point where the locals feel like they have no chance of getting a job, especially Gen Z), just simply because the government has made it cheaper for companies to hire these immigrants instead of the locals. I don’t think they even care about the fact that ever since they started doing this, their quality of service has gone down. Nothing against these immigrants themselves, but I’m just saying.
IMO out of all the areas of programming, web development is going to be the most impacted by AI coding agents. There’s a lot of reinventing the wheel in web dev. You’re basically doing what every other website in history has done, but with a different data model. As such, AI training data has plenty of web dev examples that it can lean on.
Bettridge’s law.
No
If we’re talking about freelance scale websites that don’t have that much complexity, as others have said I think AI is a real threat because it’s something that has been done a billion times already. If you really want to stick to this then you need to either be the one taking advantage of AI in order to decrease development time and increase the amount of customers, or you need to be really creative and good at it so that some customers will prefer to pay you to get a quality result instead of AI slop.
Overall I think you’d be better off being a developer in a company instead of freelance nowadays, but that’s my purely vibes based opinion having only worked for companies and never tried freelance
Well, “should you”? Only you can decide that. You only get the one life, you know. It would suck to spend it only doing things because they’re “prudent”.
It seems like you’re asking for market predictions here, based on the AI and outsourcing aspects. Nobody knows what the future holds. But we can look at the past and present.
Historically, companies — both individually, and the industry as a whole — tend to oscillate between:
- “oh my god, knowledgeable people are so expensive, I don’t need someone with deep understanding, I just need more output” and
- ”oh fuck, I am drowning in output that nobody understands, I desperately need knowledgeable people”
For all the AI corpos’ talk about a revolutionary change in the way we think about work and employment, it all looks very familiar right now.
Historically, these moments, where everyone seems to agree that they want more hands on keyboards rather than more brains on call… tend to be the worst time to freelance.
It’s a race to the bottom, and you’ll probably be so busy spinning plates that you won’t be able to make any long-term strategic decisions about what you wanna learn and do next.
If you can, I’d look for a stable corpo job that you can firewall to 9-5, and keep your options open. Watch the market, and — more importantly — find something that you like, so you don’t have to ask internet strangers what to do with your life again.
You don’t know until you try. What’s your current job that could get you clients?
if you don’t already have a portfolio, build one. express fundamentals and show off your creativity.
sell yourself as a premium option to overseas competitors. note that by premium i dont necessarily mean “higher quality”. if you show that you have some skin in the game and benefit from their success, rather than treating it as a one-and-done contract, you earn trust and repeat business.
network with those local businesses. people buy goods and services from people they trust. this molds into my second point.
none of this will be easy, but these are fundamentals you can use with any area of business.
No.
