I am thinking of doing freelance web development for money, but also at the same time I’m not really sure about it because, why would they hire me, a human in a high-cost (high cost of living but I don’t even think it looks like a 1st world country anymore and the conditions only seem to be getting worse) country rather than use AI to do most of the work for either cheaper or for free or hire someone in a low-wage/low-cost country like India or Pakistan?

I mean, I’ve even noticed that most of my “local” businesses are doing something similar - instead of hiring local people, they literally go out of their way to hire immigrants (to the point where the locals feel like they have no chance of getting a job, especially Gen Z), just simply because the government has made it cheaper for companies to hire these immigrants instead of the locals. I don’t think they even care about the fact that ever since they started doing this, their quality of service has gone down. Nothing against these immigrants themselves, but I’m just saying.

  • f3nyx@lemmy.ml
    1·
    6 minutes ago

    if you don’t already have a portfolio, build one. express fundamentals and show off your creativity.

    sell yourself as a premium option to overseas competitors. note that by premium i dont necessarily mean “higher quality”. if you show that you have some skin in the game and benefit from their success, rather than treating it as a one-and-done contract, you earn trust and repeat business.

    network with those local businesses. people buy goods and services from people they trust. this molds into my second point.

    none of this will be easy, but these are fundamentals you can use with any area of business.

  • Bobby Turkalino@sh.itjust.works
    4·
    53 minutes ago

    IMO out of all the areas of programming, web development is going to be the most impacted by AI coding agents. There’s a lot of reinventing the wheel in web dev. You’re basically doing what every other website in history has done, but with a different data model. As such, AI training data has plenty of web dev examples that it can lean on.