Why are people shifting from office jobs to freelancing?

Office jobs have long become the running joke of the internet, especially in 21st-century American pop culture. Take The Office, for example, a show which revolves around the everyday lives of the employees working at Dunder Mifflin Paper Company. It quickly became one of the most popular sitcoms ever produced, winning both a Golden Globe and a Primetime Emmy Award.

Sitcoms are universally appreciated because it’s easy relating to them. In December 2018, 130 million people worked full-time jobs in America, quite the potential audience who can relate to the show (Statista). Even though the Office is a dramatization of office occurrences, to some extent, it’s the reality many people are living every day. Since office jobs have become sources of inspiration for situational comedies, we thought of offering an alternative.

Is freelancing the new Vogue?

Maybe, maybe not. We know that between 2000 and 2014, the freelancer workforce has grown by 500%. In addition, freelancers were on track to make up 50% of the full-time workforce by 2020, so around 65 million people. (Paychex)

While freelancing has also become a running joke on the internet, it’s becoming increasingly popular by the day, especially so for generations born after the ’80s.

Freelancing numbers are off the charts

The main reasons people cite for turning towards freelancing are schedule flexibility and increased wages. Freelancers collaborate with companies worldwide, so the payment is more likely to be based on quality or reviews instead of geography or age.

As a result, freelance coders can earn up to $1000/hour, copywriters up to 250$/hour, and designers up to $85/hour. While working 12 hours less every week on average, all this, compared to their traditional counterparts, office employees.

Freelancing also excels in letting people maintain a sense of agency. There’s a higher chance of finding a company that’s a good fit for you when the search pool is more considerable. Conversely, if someone finds work they find worthwhile, they will not dread doing it and, in turn, become more productive. Thus we have added value for both the employee and the company.

On the other hand, traditional employees are stressed, work long hours, and deal with office politics. After 10–20 years of doing this, it becomes a real issue because it spirals down as every day goes by. The less motivated you are to work, the more likely you will not do your job well, thus resulting in more stress and less willingness to even show up to work. The issue has become so severe that there are factories and office buildings worldwide where the windows are reinforced and locked to prevent people from literally jumping out the window. The same can be applied in the opposite direction, however. If you enjoy your job, then at some point it stops being work or at least feeling as such, it becomes an expression of who you are, and freelance is gunning in that direction with nothing to stop it.

This is why some companies are already turning towards 100% remote teams. To prove this works, here’s a list of companies that are killing it: InVision, Trello, Basecamp, Zapier, Toptal, Buffer, Hubstaff, Colony, and Toggl.

Even if we take a step back and look past the success of the products these companies built, and instead only consider the company culture, we still find out that 80% of employees enjoy working at these companies and wouldn’t see themselves leaving any time soon. Imagine working from home, a coffee shop, a co-working space or even becoming a digital nomad to travel the world, and all that while having a job you find meaningful. Whether meaningful for you means creating the newest space rockets or making candies out of memes, it doesn’t matter. As long as everyone is working on something they at least remotely enjoy doing, then humanity as a whole will usher into a new era of productivity.

Such an era might be filled with lots of uninteresting or unusual shenanigans of a product, but we’ll at least have a wider pool of selection. There’ll be a candy meme for everyone out there; you have to search for it hard enough.

The Problems

As is natural, freelancing comes with a couple of problems. The good news, or the bad news, is that most of these problems, if not all, come from the platforms where freelancing takes place. There are a few essential aspects that have been overlooked by freelance platforms, among them:

• Judging reports/disputes in a centralized and subjective manner. It’s human nature to have conflicts, so it is to be expected, which is precisely why a decentralized dispute resolution layer is an excellent fix for this issue.
• Payments coming through late or not at all, and if that wasn’t enough, the fees platforms charge are 10% or upwards, on top of the existing state taxes you pay on income.
• Every platform has a niche with its community and usually reputation system. The result? If you are known on Upwork and want to do a gig on Fiverr, chances are it’s not going to be so easy. That is unless you’re willing to spend another couple of months rebuilding your reputation on Fiverr, and that will only work until the next niche freelance platform comes out.

The Solution: A Decentralized Autonomous Task Marketplace

We’ve talked about the current situation and the problems people have to deal with daily if they’re freelancers. Now let’s talk about the future of freelance and how all these problems can be easily resolved through blockchain technology.

HYVE is a decentralized autonomous ecosystem that serves the multi-billion workforce industry. The platform serves two main purposes: creating a global task directory and offering infrastructure for decentralized platforms. The platform is designed to cut intermediaries out of the freelance and workforce industry. HYVE's mission is to reduce fees to 0% and create a community-governed ecosystem, bringing the power of Blockchain into a trillion-dollar industry.

At the center of the ecosystem lies the HYVE token, which fuels the governance and staking functionalities of the ecosystem. The token has built-in utility ranging from being able to use it to lower fees, pay people, participate in platform governance, and even staking the token to help sustain the ecosystem.

HYVE enables global collaboration between people and machines and is an open infrastructure for any platform that aspires to become a blockchain-first business. The provided infrastructure includes things such as contract confidentiality, instant settlement, P2P agreements, a generalistic collaboration module, and self-verifiable tasks powered by the HYVE Protocol.

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