Dec. 22, 2024 | Demir Antay

Navigating the New Gig Economy In 5 Levels

So I have been struggling with trying to find long-term employment for the past 1-2 years after the big layoffs of the tech industry.

Everybody is suffering, to be honest with you not just me.

I am just gonna write from my own perspective and current solutions to shed some light in a tunnel full of darkness and desperation.

The Collapse of 9-5

I mean when I first lost my job, I started looking around and got a good contractor job (remotely for our startup) and the pay was 2500$ a month.

Even though it sounds like a laughable amount of money for someone who has lived his life in a growing economy that amount of money was huge.

But after leaving that job too for the past 2 years I haven’t been able to find any employment whatsoever.

The only people/jobs that I encounter are either ghost jobs, an interview process that has at least 5 steps or they outright rejected me (which was the common case).

Even a senior-developer friend of mine who got a new 9-5 job got laid off later on as well.

It just feels like the old 9-5 salaried full-time roles are long gone. and the ones that are not gone are becoming obsolete one by one.

The problem is that in my opinion, this is not just a normal economic cycle that will be better in the future.

I think that the whole system is changing systemically and it is due to entering a new era.

When we (as human civilization) invented the compass and sailing ships in the 15th century the whole world turned from a feudal/warrior-centric era to a commerce-based one where skills, trade, and human organizations were essential.

Now we got 2 more new inventions, the internet, and AI.

Both of these inventions are literally doing the same thing for the commerce-industrial age.

Big human organizations like salary workers, unions, and everything that is based around human organization are becoming obsolete in real-time just like the old feudal kings and warrior class became obsolete.

They call this the “gig economy/digital economy” but there is no real roadmap for us to follow, no avenue to go … there is no order.

The only thing I have resorted to so far was trying to find gig work on freelance platforms like upwork, freelancer but it just feels like a race to the bottom.

You are just lowering your price, more and more … the clients think that they have delusional control over what you do for the comical price point they created.

And you have the top 10% of people who earn a living from those profiles (Which are like 100k) calling everybody they are skilless.

If they left those platforms they wouldn’t even know how to get clients for their work themselves.

The Gig Roadmap

So what I am going to do is I will try to create an ordered approach to this for myself and share my learning lessons along the way.

If I can earn and also create personal branding while trying to earn people can trust my word more.

The first thing that I want to do is, I want to create a roadmap with levels just like the older times where you had low-class work, middle-class work, rich-class …etc.

I just hate operating in the dark. So down below you can find a roadmap that I gathered together.

Level 1 - Entry Level Gigs

You don’t need any specialization or special skills for these, if you are down bad you would start with these to have some sort of cashflow for food-transportation-rent.

Use these instead of getting a job at a fast-food joint. They now have 5 step interview process as well ffs.

Level 2 - Semi-Skilled Gigs

These require some level of training but to be honest with you you can attain them with deliberate practice.

Level 3 - Skilled Gigs

These require a significant level of education/experience in order to deliver something production-ready for any client.

Level 4 - Highly Specialized Gigs

For these, you need niche expertise or advanced degrees. Otherwise, people won’t trust you.

Level 5 - Entrepreneurial Gigs

These are risky options if you want to follow, but you don’t need to, I think people are on YouTube trying to promote these and they are causing more harm than good.

Because you cannot just start at level 5, you cannot kill that boss that easily.

You need money to survive while trying this level. Influencers are just milking people's pain points by promoting dreams.

Anyway, this writing has already become longer than I expected, at the moment I am doing level 3 and level 5 at the same time but they are kinda connected.

App/Tech Startups (level 5) and Software Development (level 3) and this is the path that I have chosen. I will explain how I organize my work time and productivity in another post.

Use the information in whatever way you would please, and design your roadmap as well. Good luck with the gig economy!

P.S. I am documenting my journey with these kinds of writings, you can see it on my profile. I did not want to spam any links to not break any rules.

Thank you for reading and have a great day.

-Demir

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Demir Antay