There is no threshold where one becomes a professional designer, programmer etc. The neighbour's kid may be able to design your logo, install your shopping cart, etc. Some of them even do it well. Many do not.
A lot of the time the business owner hiring doesn't care too much about quality, isn't willing to pay for it or can't tell the difference. Making things worse is that a lot of the time the quality is not actually different or is equal to a lower tier of professionals making the price gap between medium & higher quality very high.
Look at it this way. Architects are largely shielded from this kind of mess. Legalities aside, people want pros & builders & engineers will probably refuse to work with amateurs. Interior designers may have the potential to add as much or more to a given project, but they will usually be excluded. You or your wife or boyfriend (or both) or your kid will have a crack at it. The guy at the furniture store will give you advice. Your accountant thinks that looks nice over there.
Now interior designers can lament the fact that you don't know the slightest thing about creating spaces, positioning, making use of light & all those things. You've made all the textbook errors. You're not utilising the building you paid so much to have designed. You made the most basic mistakes.
But this is the nature of the game when amateurs get to play. Graphic designers (& to a certain extent programmers) have moved from being architects (& lawyers & dentists) to being interior designers, caterers & piano teachers
That doesn't mean the profession disappers. But it means you have a certain market imbalance that follows. The bottom tier of service is no longer really needed.
1. The mechanic who used to get his card designed by the cheapest or closest guy gets his grandmother to do it free. He doesn't care what paper she uses. He may be wrong to do so, but tuff.
2. There are lots of people who are on the border of 'professional' that enter the market. Either in their skill or in their attitude. They can enter with this approach since entry barriers are pretty much $0. Usually they go by the title freelancer. Since you have this influx now competing with the previous cheap guys, for a market that is now smaller, prices drop.
Sprinkle in bidding sites & globalisation of labour, stir. Prices dropping, guys in slipknot tshirts bidding at under minimum wage & fighting for business. Not fun for the previously professional freelancer.
The answer of course is to go higher market. You may cater your own party yourself, but you're not expecting the queen of Belgium to. You know that $30 a martini bar got a professional interior designer in. Their prices are probably unaffected by any drop in the price of starting a business in their sector.
Then you're set.
Finding a decent client can be hard if you're going through sites like elancer or guru - but they're there. There are even ones with nice, interesting projects. Ones that are willing to pay you a much better rate once you've been in communication with them for a while.
It's an uphill battle, but if you produce quality work, and can explain the methods you use, you will be viewed as just as much of a "professional" as the "big boys". Once you have that bit of word-of-mouth and good reviews / feedback, you pretty much have your pick of work, although you may not be rolling in the dough.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_asymmetry
There are various solutions to those kinds of problems, including signaling (expensively demonstrating that you're worth it), some kind of screening service, that for a fee will aid buyers in choosing who is really worth it, things like guarantees, and so on.
Also, it's not a difficult problem. The term is "consultant".
He's arguing against the ugly baggage it's picked up.
Let me go back and reread it: The author hates the term freelancer because it's used by: 1) people who do work that isn't up to the author's standards (snobbery - it's obviously basically acceptable as people will pay for it, and there is no fixed line between "design" and "not") 2) People who charge little or nothing for their "work" (author doesn't want to identify with a group that has a low-cost low-quality image) 2) people who don't act like an expensive professional (whinge - they're not as good as the author, they are spoiling the image of "freelancers") 3) people who use software the author doesn't think much of use it (snobbery - what does it matter if they use a "common" publishing program?) 4) The above groups, doing low quality work for a low price in a messy fashion, are only wannabe's (unlike the author).
I get the same feeling and summary at a second and third rereading. Summary: people are spoiling things for the author by doing worse work than him at unbeatably cheap prices.
