Comment by apercu
10 days ago
> Now the employee must market themselves as often, if not more often, than actually doing the work.
Maybe only tangentially related to your post, but this has been on my mind a lot lately. After many years of doing all kinds of tech and business consulting gigs, I decided to somewhat specialize over the last 3 years and have been spending some time on LinkedIn this year.
What I can't figure out is how (arbitrary percentage) 30% of the people I follow do any work when they are on LinkedIn posting/commenting on posts _all_ day.
The layers of work arbitrage are incredibly deep. It's all about connections, I do a lot of Shopify freelancing and I'm typically the 3rd or 4th layer away from the actual business. It's typically something like the business hires a marketing agency, the agency hires a development company. The development company then hires a freelancer. Now I actually do the work myself, but it seems like a ton of those freelancers simply rehire another freelancer in a cheaper country. Then it seems in many cases that foreign freelancer isn't even a developer but just someone who speaks English well enough and then hires the actual non-english speaking coders locally.
It's not much different in other industries though, so many layers of subcontracting to finally get to a potentially illegal immigrant that does the actual work.