Valid point! But don't you think there could be instances where this could be useful for both ends, the freelancer and the customer?
There are instances where the customer already know what he wants, could be typical maintenance, bug fixing, etc... those things can be added to a task queue, details are agreed and work is performed, without preparing quotes every time for each task
For example, I would only use something like this if I can automate as much as possible using CI/CD, etc
It's a joke obviously, but the deeper point is context is extremely important. In the pre-AI days, we'd budget 3 months for someone to get the context of the codebase and the product. These days, it's still 2-4 weeks. You can have someone extremely skilled spread out on multiple projects and they'd do a terrible job. Whatever low hanging fruit is all taken up by AI.
The exception I've seen so far is something like devops or infra. Where the person has done their job whenever nothing goes wrong. People are happy to pay monthly for nothing going wrong.
Not really, it's more of the way I would charge my customer as a freelancer. When I mention development-as-a-service, I don't mean to create a platform, its just a way to describe the way I see this (charging a monthly fee in exchange for queued work)
I don't see why doing DaaS would limit the customer in choosing developers. I mean, I'm not talking about having a SaaS-style platform where the customer registers an account and submits work. I'm talking about freelancer-customer relationships and how the freelancer charges for its services; instead of a fixed, per-project price, the customer pays the freelancer's monthly fee (which could also be seen as a monthly retainer?) and submits any work he'd like.
Yes, and senior is supposed to be the highest rank of IC. But at some point, people gave this advice to call yourself a consultant instead of a freelancer... and it worked. So we have to live with this new term, and so do actual consultants.
I prefer contractor because it doesn't have the same stigma as freelancer, and is still accurate about their relationship.
My wife is from civil/construction engineering and she thinks terms like developer, engineer, and architect are all BS when software people use them. But idk, eventually we need terms for what we do.
Well, if we aren’t developing (creating and bringing to life new software solutions), engineering (designing and building software systems), or architecting (planning and structuring the overall framework of software), what are we doing then?
Now that you mention it, I prefer the term consultant over freelancer
There are instances where the customer already know what he wants, could be typical maintenance, bug fixing, etc... those things can be added to a task queue, details are agreed and work is performed, without preparing quotes every time for each task
For example, I would only use something like this if I can automate as much as possible using CI/CD, etc