Ask HN: Skills which are under supplied by freelance developers?

[pendragon]

Most freelancers seem to end up doing web development, database consultancy, or something in mobile to my (very anecdotal) knowledge.

I'm less interested in the web and mobile unless we start looking at the 10K Problem. What grabs me is data, systems analysis, software development, Linux, concurrency, and Python. My experience includes Python, web, Linux, deployment, and retail backend development(POS and ERP). The issue is that retail companies do not have money for IT. There is most definitely a ceiling.

How do you move into a niche which is not mobile/web? Which ones are typically under supplied from an employers perspective? I'm willing to investigate and put effort into becoming an expert in those fields. If anyone has experience attempting to do this, I'd be keen to hear about it.

EDIT: To elaborate, I'm very interested in medium level enterprises and solving problems for them. (I'm in New Zealand, if a company has a billion in revenue it's big ;-) ).

[sidmitra]

I think HN is a little self selective in that regard. Majority of the startups here are web startups, hence the concentration of "web developers".

Infact i would imaging there are an order of magnitude more people doing the same thing in the skillset you mention, except they prefer 'consultant'. Infact when i open the career section of the local newspaper here(India), that's pretty much all i see. i.e. pages after pages of acronyms that i've never heard, but are somehow related to ERP, SAP etc. Ofcourse they're more Java/.Net when it comes to enterprisey software.

[pendragon]

A very good point. Landing a non-web gig seems more daunting to me. In part, this may be because even small companies have websites whereas in the areas that I want to go into I would need to work with much larger clients.

[kls]

There is actually a silent demand for Clojure developers and a lot of it is not completely in the web space. A lot of people working with it are actually working on some cool problems. I recently researched the market because I had made a commitment a long time ago to learn a Lisp dialect and am just now getting around to actually doing it. I was surprised to see such a health and well paying market for it and the problem domain they where solving for where pretty interesting.