I read about a study over the weekend that suggests the number of competitors can impact our motivation to compete. The researchers found that with a small number of competitors, people had increased motivation to compete, but even with equal chances of success, our motivation can drop when we are faced with large numbers of competitors.
“The simple act of comparing yourself against someone else can stoke the fires of competition. When there are just a few competitors around, making such comparisons is easy but they become more difficult when challengers are plentiful. As a result, the presence of extra contenders, far from spurring us on by adding extra challenge, can actually have the opposite effect. Garcia and Avishalom call this the “N-effect” and they demonstrated it through a number of experiments.” – Ed Yong
Read the rest of this entry »
In my WebWorkerDaily post yesterday, I discussed an article in The Daily Beast in which Tina Brown talks about the gig economy and their research on the changing nature of freelancer jobs and the people found in them. The Daily Beast says that “as the recession worsens, more high-income workers are freelancing their way to wealth through multiple part-time gigs, changing the way we define a successful career.”
Brown herself puts it this way:
“Just as startling, these new alternative workers are not overwhelmingly low-income. They’re college-educated Americans who earn more than $75,000 a year.
Welcome to the age of Gigonomics.”
Read the rest of this entry »
Photo by _e.t.
I left my corporate job in June to strike out on my own as a freelance consultant working out of my home office and coffee shops. I had been preparing to make the move for a while, and it was something that I knew I wanted to try. The technology industry was growing and there were plenty of job openings in my field of expertise: online communities and social media. I left confident that I had plenty of time to test the waters as a freelance web worker knowing that I could always go back to the corporate world if freelance consulting didn’t work out for me.
I’m happy to say that consulting is working well for me right now, because I’m no longer confident that I could find a new corporate job as quickly or easily as I might have been able to get one a year ago.
The job market is getting tougher each month as unemployment continues to rise. At this point, I should emphasize that I am not an economist, employment guru or other expert qualified to analyze this data, so consider this just one web worker’s summary of the current economic conditions.
Let’s start with the recent employment data. Grim and depressing are the best ways I could come up with to describe the employment data that was released on Friday by the U.S. Department of Labor. Here are a few “highlights” from the report:
- Unemployment rose from 6.8 percent in November to 7.2 percent in December.
- The number of unemployed people in the U.S. is now 11.1 million up by 632,000 in December
- From the beginning of the recession in December 2007, unemployment has increased by 2.3 percent with 3.6 million additional people becoming unemployed.
However, this may not tell the whole story for those of us in various web working professions. Read the rest of this entry »
I’ve run across yet another survey that claims to demonstrate “small businesses are rapidly cutting overhead costs to adjust to the new reality of a slowing economy.” Among other findings in this survey:
- 75% of small businesses negatively impacted by the current economy
- 72% are reducing overhead costs
- 50% are cutting back on business services
- 23% getting rid of physical office space
Overall it paints a picture of small businesses heading for the lifeboats – but how much can we tell about the reliability of this picture?
Read the rest of this entry »
In today’s turbulent economic times, it’s important to have lower expenses and increased income – especially for teleworkers. While many independent contractors are getting more business, it’s still wise to make deliberate efforts to thrive. Here are some ways we will be able to do that:
Hold on to your clients. There will be the occasional client who will be slower in paying out invoices, or even clients who give up and stop requesting your services altogether. Take the time to identify which of your clients might do these things.
Read the rest of this entry »
As the larger economic picture continues to look dismal, the reverberations are being felt within the tech sector. As our parent blog GigaOM reports, the venture capital firms are starting to get antsy about whether Silicon Valley can continue business as usual. Apple and other tech stocks are way down, and layoffs are showing up in the industry as well (though there are layoffs in good times too, depending on who you work for).
And yet, when we asked how the economy was treating you web workers personally, the majority of respondents didn’t report a slowdown. I’m seeing the same pattern in other communities I’m a part of – Rails developers, for example, still seem upbeat on the prospect of more work.
Read the rest of this entry »
If you’ve been paying the slightest bit of attention to the news recently, you know that the US economy is, by some accounts, in dire shape. With the failure of high-profile firms, the rescue of others, and a $700 billion bailout wending its way through Congress, it’s understandable that many are feeling jittery about the future. An era of contracting credit and a tighter job market don’t seem like much fun.
At WWD, though, we’re focused on our own little niche of the economy: the web worker. Here, the picture may be slightly brighter. But there are several forces that affect us directly when things get tight:
- Web workers can end up being viewed as easily-trimmed jobs, especially if they’re not in the office to exercise political clout.
- But contractors may be in a good position, because contracting work out is often cheaper than hiring more full-time employees.
- Tighter budgets may get more companies to consider telecommuting, as a way to save money on office space.
Read the rest of this entry »
Web Work 101: How To Escape The Cubicle
