Leaping into self-employment is scary.
Some highly capable marketers are ready to make the jump but want to get market verification first. They want to know they’ll be able to make a living *before* they leave their jobs and disrupt their lives.
This is a completely reasonable desire, but it isn’t very practical in today’s job climate. Right now, very few companies are fine with their employees taking on other work, which makes it nerve wracking to look for “side gigs”.
The last thing that someone wants is constant worry they might get called into their boss’ office and find out a fellow employee came across their freelance profile online. It’s like having inappropriate Facebook photos shared in the office, but it can actually affect the legal status of your job.
Many employment contracts stipulate what can and can’t be done by employees during their duration of the work arrangement. It is often said that employees are not permitted to do competing work or even have other sources of income.
While these rules may have made sense decades ago when the Internet wasn’t around and competition was therefore much more localized, they don’t really make sense in today’s economy. If you’re working for an American ad agency that specializes in big banks, nothing you do to help an Australian food services SaaS could ever reasonably be considered “competition”.
The world is a big place and there’s no reason that one job should prevent you from taking on other work.
In our view, second jobs are more than fair. Traditional employment creates a power imbalance that makes it difficult for employees to get ahead, and having a second job or doing freelance work helps to reduce that anxiety.
There are 2 parts to our position on second jobs:
Moral standpoint
Ethical practice
Morals is how you feel about it. If you look at the arrangement and know you are delivering your best work and fulfilling your end of the employment agreement, then there’s no reason to feel bad about having a second job.
From an ethical standpoint, this would technically be a breach of the employment contract. While we are not encouraging this, it’s our belief that we’re all mature people who can make our own decisions.
Moonlighting is your privilege (and problem) depending on how you handle it. If the work is done on your own time and using your own resources, there’s no reason your company should ever be negatively impacted.
What’s more, Tides is solving the worry of your employer discovering the side-work you’re doing by making it optional to have an anonymous profile.
This sounds like a superfluous feature, and we don’t expect many people to need it, but anonymity allows for meritocratic hiring, which will benefit everyone.
Face-doxxed or not, meritocracy is key to the success of any platform.
It’s not for us to get involved in anyone’s employment arrangement, but it is our job to provide an amazing experience for clients and freelancers alike. And to do this, we need to make it as easy as possible to filter through freelancers and find someone who is the best fit for them.
With some of the incumbent platforms, the system is “gameable”. By keeping the platform tight and having everything designed in a way that isn’t easily hacked by hiring yourself or having one or two friends give you a 5-star rating after completing a tiny contract, everyone wins.
Taking this even further, we want it to be more network-based so it’s easier to check references. The larger a platform grows, the easier it is for bad actors to float through and capture a massive amount of value without actually doing that much.
Another problem we’ve observed is that profile pictures create a bias (positive or negative). Although we will 100% demand a profile picture from all participants in the Tides network, we will only show that the party has verified their photo, and not actually show the photo until the hiring process is complete.
A meritocracy means that everyone is competing on the same level and a perfect market emerges that isn’t as easily manipulated. There will still be ways to outsell or present yourself better, but these loopholes will be closed so as to allow the best freelancers, not just the best salespeople, to thrive.
As we try and bring power back to the disenfranchised - in all markets - it will help to have anonymity in the hiring process. It will also be useful to have clear measures of “quality of work”, and one way of demonstrating this is the amount of Tides tokens a freelancer holds. It’s one thing to have been paid by a client, another entirely to have been accepted by your peers and included in a network.
The power of the network is derived from the quality of the creators. It’s a Web3 principle we see everywhere else, and in the Tides universe, that means quality enforcement (the stick) and equity tips (the carrot) for freelancers who are participating.
One thing we’ve become extremely aware of during the development of the Tides model is that a lot of different biases are present in the freelancer market. Some will err towards hiring only from Western parts of the world because of what they expect in the quality of English. Others will look for cheap labour and go to the cheapest parts of the world, not willing to pay people in those countries more even if their skills would demand it. There is a whole list of ways that the hiring process can become perverted.
Which is an opportunity to create a “perfect market”.
That’s what a Rising Tide Carries All Ships truly means. People in all different markets can benefit from this new model. It isn’t something that only works for people from one part of the world. Tides is blind in that sense and actually has the power to fix a lot of issues in freelancing that aren’t being addressed anywhere else because they are actually profitable for the market makers.