what I think will happen
I think the concept of Employement is under stress, and by the people I would least expect it.. employees.
why this is happening
I notice a few thing nowadays:
- People want the flexibility to work from Home and even from abroad.
- People want a flexible schedule too, without fixed hours, where they manage the workload and deliverables autonomously.
- Many workers have side-gigs, fractional jobs, or moonshine to contribute to side projects where they are frequently remunerated in some form.
- Accounting wise, some people are going a step further and opting for having a personal firm where they can in take their “salary” as a “service fee”.
All of these modern trends make Employment look a lot like a Service contract.
No matter what we think employment should be, the general legal distinction in many countries is that Employment involves a direct managerial relationship where you can tell employees what do do (objective), how to do it (tools, process), and when/where to do it. Whereas Services are a contract to provide a service in broader terms.
what does it mean
I think it means that there’s an opportunity on both ends:
- For strong believers in Employment, make that a Plus. Some businessses like hardware will need office time, and so be proud about Work from Office policy and have great offices, and build around in-person face-to-face collaboration on the projects.
- For those who like the flexible road, there are lots of tools to be built around this to make it better. Bounties for code already exist, but the next step is to build a sytem where you can open up your goals and have people compete not only for direct compensation (bounty) but also flexible payments with commitments to the best contributors. The world will also need tools to manage remote work and presence by anonymous contributors, the validity of contributions.
It will only evolve further.