Freelance worked before because companies needed smallish jobs done here and there. Now they need a full-time team. Shouldn't that be better for the web designers? They don't have to be on a treadmill looking for leads all the time. They can settle in and work at one company with a high level of job security. And probably they'd have much more clout in terms of how things are done in the companies, driving bigger changes and potentially earning a lot more.
Not necessarily. Depends on what your goals are. I'm a freelance IT consultant and I love it, especially the part about about finding leads and working for many different clients on new and interesting challenges.
If freelance work dried up in my segment, I'd look for other entrepreneurial opportunities, which could very well mean not working in software development or IT anymore, but I certainly wouldn't settle for working as an employee. It just isn't for me.
Besides, the high level of job security is a fallacy. As an employee you're working for only one client: Your employer. If that employer suddenly decides you're redundant you're out of a steady income at once with no other clients or leads to compensate for that.
You can't exactly always be on the lookout for another position while on a job because your current employer will get suspicious and ask you what you think you're doing. For an entrepreneur always to be looking for new leads is the default mode so losing a deal - while unfortunate - isn't an end-of-the-line scenario in most cases.
had the same thinking when consulting few years ago... but every scenario is different, everybody has different expectations and all this change as we age. You are right there is no job security in perm job, but there are some true benefits.
I have 25 fully paid MDs per year, another 9 public holiday ones, 2 weeks of fully paid sick days. I can have a month with few MDs of work done and still get full salary. While consulting, when thinking about vacation, by far the biggest costs were not of actual vacation, but time lost not consulting. Which made the price explode 4-5x and effectively prevented me to have much better life.
I might get back later, for a while, but realistically, it ain't worth it. This might be different in other locations, where consulting vs perm job difference is much bigger, but here, taken all into account is less than 10%.
In some places, e.g. the UK, full time employment gives you certain benefits - it's not as straight forward as contract where work where you can be let go at will. Also, I wouldn't expect looking for another job to have such harsh penalties as you seem to be suggesting.
It would seem that way, but high profile (or high ego) designers look down on working "in-house," as maintaining a single brand image over the course of years becomes incredibly tedious after even just a few months.
Creatives thrive on variety; imagine if you had to implement a JSON parser everyday and weren't allowed to fundamentally change your approach after the very first one you make.
An office job with steady hours isn't everyone's dream. There are plenty of people who like the flexibility of freelancing, and web design has been seen as an attractive option for those who want more control over when and where they work.
If freelancing is so appealing, there's always the alternative of dropping prices to match or beat what in-house teams cost. The article attributed the change to cost savings.
In addition to what learc83 said, you can't really feasibly do this. Freelancers end up needing to do more work for the amount of output they provide because they have to pay spin-up costs on every project. This means that they are already disadvantaged, and when you combine that with the fact that they are not guaranteed work, dropping prices becomes pretty unsustainable. It's a big part of the reason that freelancing barely exists in most industries.
I think it's probably the opposite of the author's hypothesis. Easy VC money has prompted companies to hire full time, in house designers to work that was normally done by short term contractors.
