Yeah I was going down this path for a side project I was getting going and spent a couple days of after-work time exploring how to get just some basic traces in OT and realized it was much more than I needed or cared about.
Strangely I'm more comfortable with this kind of market.
I was fed up to see entitled wannabees be paid a lot of money to slow me down by forcing me to do some parody of scrum that they learn at one bootcamp, feeling they were in any way important as they drank they in-house latte during multiple remote meetings a day.
I much prefer a market where people I work with are actually paid according to their skill and ship code rather than power point or worse, an update to the code of conduct to include some inclusive edge case.
I would prefer a balance of all worlds, that would be fairer. But you can never quite reach it, because you pass it on the way up or down quickly as the pendulum swing.
So if I have to choose, I prefer a hard market.
I understand that people need to eat and that it's not everybody's preference, though.
It's not just a matter of place, but what you can have if you work for Google instead. I can make $200k as a freelancer in France, but much more as a Google employee.
Today I'm giving a training to 3 people, each paying 2600 for this training. It means this week they get billed 7800 in total. If you do that for 30 weeks (not even a full year), you get to 234000.
15 years ago, my team leader was already doing $15K month as salary, and it was a startup in Sophia, not Google, and a long time ago.
So it's all possible, but indeed, not the average situation. The median dev is underpaid in France:
