Comment by flowersjeff | Hacker News Reader

Comment by flowersjeff | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

This surprises...nobody? Except maybe bean counters/management types that need to show off perhaps.

With that said, I do have concerns. These issues center around a shift in benefits offered as a result of this new paradigm ( hate using that word but ) around the nature of work. I.e. the gig everything economy coming to your job...soon

Many folks in the US work a 9to5 not just for the pay, rather for healthcare and stability. However, it's only a matter of time that employees will become even more API'ified / made into independent contracts / etc. I know that many will welcome the flexibility - some though will not understand what this means.

I do wonder how the US will be able to handle this continued move away from 'trad' employment, given our rather odd situation of one's medical being tied at the hip to one's employer? Those that work in other jurisdictions need not fear the loss of a job as much as a US citizen. Literally, you could die ( just look at how many of those that were made unemployed during the pandemic lost access to medical. )

Just my musings...

2 thoughts.

First, "gig workers" can't work across the board. Companies working on products often need people to have deep understanding of the product. We all know how costly it can be to lose say a software engineer who has a few years tenure.

Second, if the gig-economy were to become very widespread, it may finally be a push to have a true, sensible market for health insurance in the US. If employers no longer pay insurance carriers/brokers to cover their employees, these carriers will need to come up with products people can afford.

If there is a large shift toward gig economy work, then the healthcare industry will shift as well. There's nothing preventing them from offering affordable healthcare to gig employees other than the status quo and their current profit models.

Something the size of the insurance industry is going to shift about 5-10 years after the general market. So if you're worried about short term gigification of your job, you might want to look into private insurance/benefit options now. Over the long term I think it will take care of itself.

I think it's dangerous when we look at gigification as a "who cares it will work out somehow".

Imagine how up-in-arms if they gigified programming. It has already happened in places, but what if they wholesale a price per line of code?

This will get a lot of replies but honestly, a codebase that is spaghetti from gigification may be cheaper than non-spaghetti codebase at 100k - 200k/year * number of developers and work just as well for the domain it is in.

If you can put the "it won't work" aside - imagine they figure out that it does. That rage right now - how is that not applicable to the people getting gigified right now?

> Imagine how up-in-arms if they gigified programming

Programmers would be up in arms in love with gig work and demand it everywhere if it turned out to actually work. The main problem with WFH is that you still have to work a set hours per week, gig work is the ideal. If you want to work 80 hours one week and 0 hours the next week you can do so. Gig work also means no deadlines, no manager, no long term worries, just write code and get instant money and feedback. The only reason you don't see developers clamoring for gig work right now is that they don't think gig work is possible for development.

People complain about "gigifiation" because of things that has been traditionally tied to employment (health insurance, 401k, etc) not the gig part of it. If someone figured out how to do it I'd assume most programmers would be all over it.

I would guess that the gig economy simply can't come for any jobs that require significant domain expertise or more than a few hour's worth of attention to any single project.

Comparable to how you don't see day laborers doing pipefitting.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com