Is it the new age of the gig-developer?

Salient Points of our 3rd Roundtable Discussion

Published in

inblox.events

4 min readApr 19, 2020

The gig economy has been prevalent for a long time now. However, the office going personnel is still in vogue. We are all currently home-bound, some working, some not, some extra-cautious, most worried about job-losses, salary-cuts (if not already done). So here are some thoughts:

What would the post COVID19 world look like?
Will this new state of affairs lead to a new norm?
Will the organizations who work in the software industry finally move into smaller virtual workplaces?
Does the common developer see this as an opportunity?
What is the outcome of the Homebred engineer?
Will this lead to the advent of the Gig developer?

Also Read: Presenting — “Chainbusters”

Roundtable 3 delved into the mind of a developer — the mindset, the work from home culture, the discipline required for Gig based jobs, and finally — his/ her future in the post lockdown world.

The Roundtable Knights

We brought together CEOs, entrepreneurs, blockchain and technology practice leaders and thought leaders to brainstorm some of the problems that these developers might be facing in these times and find solutions to enable them better for the future. A big shoutout to the following for brainstorming the problems as well as their solutions.

Apoorv Shankar, CEO, inblox me
Om Malviya, Co-Founder-CPO, Tezsure | President, Tezos India Foundation
Gnana Lakshmi T C, Leader, Women Who Code
Ravi Chandrashekharan, Practice Partner — Blockchain at @Wipro Technologies
Jayavaradhan Sambedu, Co-Founder & CTO, Curl Analytics
Jaynti Kanani, Co-founder & CEO, Matic Network
Aniket Jindal, Founder, Biconomy

Also Read: #Lockdown — An Opportunity or Threat

Salient points of the Roundtable discussion

The 3rd Roundtable was a fruitful discussion between some of the brightest and experienced minds in blockchain and other technologies.

Here is what we learned from this discussion

For Home Bound Developers

They should take this lull period as an opportunity and work towards upskilling themselves. Learn new skills if the need arises or better what you are doing currently.
It is important to stay disciplined with a daily office-type regime.
If currently employed and have been assigned a development project to work on, fulfill all project tasks assigned to them,
These are tough times and it can get on the nerves quite often. Hence it is important to keep calm and keep building.

For the gig-developers

The roundtable came up with a different set of advise for the freelancers or the gig-workers as we may call them:

Keep hunting for jobs or part-time projects they can take up
Stay abreast with the community by continuing to network with fellow developers and also inform them to use their influence to spread the word of your expertise
Many current companies are offering bounty-based work e.g. bug-hunting on #githubs of various projects. They should keep looking out for such bounty-based and incentivized work.
This is the right time to develop more skills
This is also the right time to enhance your community presence by helping others in upskilling. This can be done by conducting webinars on the skills you own.
They can also contribute by building study material content for the subject they are in.

For the Companies

All companies must look for ways to save cash.
Project sourcing may be drying up from certain badly affected areas in the world. Hence use your network and research to hunt for new markets.
Though you may have had an office and only allowed your developers to work in an office on your projects, this is the time to explore remote working capabilities.
Even if work is adequate, spend some time to transform and train your team.
Your company might need some drastic steps like salary cuts or funds — be transparent with your teams about the troubles and challenges you are facing. They might just help and surely understand the predicament.

Roundtable #3 Details

We conducted this #Roundtable #Discussion: 8th April 2020, Wednesday on our Airmeet community meetup page, between 4:30 PM to 5:30 PM. We received an overwhelming response and had 100+ registrations and attendance at this event from all over the country as well as from overseas.

Also Read: #NeedForSpeed — Acceleration for Startups in India