Easy question: I get a paycheck every other week from my employer, Red Hat, who pays me and thousands of other people to build, maintain, and support enterprise open source software.
A Python script is not the answer when I'm trying to do something quick and dirty at the shell.
The beauty of shell scripting is that it evolves seamlessly from trying to solve simple problems at my command prompt. I pipe a couple of things together, and then I realize I could use a loop and a few conditionals, and suddenly it makes sense to store this in file in case I want to do this again. Boom, program done.
It now works on every computer I own.
I love Python. I use it almost every day. But I'll be damned if I'm going to go rewrite every shell snippet I hack together into Python just because it exists.
Not intentionally picking on Listmonk (or you), but when I hear "alpha-quality code" and start thinking about the complexities of marketing emails with GDPR, CCPA, and the constant threat of blacklists and otherwise getting blocked by big G, I run for the hills.
> Arvind Krishna was "Jim Whitehurst's boss" until now
Not true. Jim (and Red Hat under him) reported directly to Ginni. Red Hat was under IBM cloud for revenue reporting, though, but the distinction is material.
I assume if the entire world is spending billions of dollars reworking culture, infrastructure, software, etc., that swapping to making weekly pay the norm is just a bit of noise in that transition.
Our system: I make more, and I pay for the biggest expenses (mortgage, and previously cars and student loans before we paid those off) and have healthcare and whatnot taken from my paycheck.
She makes less but still a decent amount and pay for the smaller bills.
Every once in a while, she'll pay for a big-ticket item (like a vacation or a large house repair) out of her savings, which accumulate faster than mine, to catch up.
It works because we started together with next to nothing, so we're both big savers: Our combined income our first year together after college a little over ten years ago was probably a quarter of what we'll make this year. We both max out (or come very close to maxing out) retirement now. She has more cash on hand because I'm paid proportionately more in various types of stock incentives, so when my incentives vest I tend to sell the company stock to diversify but keep the money in investments).
We live in a small house, no kids, reasonably cheap cars, vacations are often tacked on to work trips to save money, no expensive hobbies.
I doubt I'll "retire" early but our savings mean if I decide to leave tech in a decade and become a woodworker or park ranger, I can with no monetary consequences.
Totally freelance? Not sure. Small teams doing custom site development? Absolutely.
I've seen large companies pay six figures to stand up a microsite, the kind of thing that one person could easily put together in a few weeks.
The catch is that you don't necessarily have a few weeks, you have a few days to go from concept exploration to go-live. It really becomes more about project management than web development in these instances, having a network who you can turn to quickly when you need more hands on deck.
And though I hate the phrase "full-stack" because it means so many things that it sometimes seems like it means nothing, they do really expect a well-rounded technologist.
I'm working with a consultant right now on a web project for my employer. I talked to him yesterday about IE11 fallbacks for Flexbox, proxy setup, CDN configuration, logging and metrics, debugging a custom legacy spaghetti-coded marketing-tech JavaScript, modifying a Drupal PHP module to support project-specific requirements, configuring cron, and a handful of other things, and I fully expect when I talk to him today he's going to have all of those tasks finished.
Those people are invaluable. Someone who can write a little HTML and CSS and maybe stand up WordPress? I'm sure there are jobs for that, but I don't have any need to hire them as a freelancer because I expect everyone on our staff to have those abilities.
That said, doing freelance web dev is _exactly_ how I got my foot in the door with the job I have now. But it paid squat for the time I was doing it, and I hated it because my time ended up being 50%+ of the time running the business side of things instead of building website, which is the part I actually enjoyed.
We're still hiring, by the way.