That maybe true but those who have work won't be emailing asking for help. You are still only sampling a skewed group.
We use freelancers a lot to supliment our inhouse skillset which I think is the industry standard
We use freelancers a lot to supliment our inhouse skillset which I think is the industry standard
In other words, the technology cycle is coming around again. We went through the same thing in the early 2000s, as it became nearly impossible to get a non-maintenance job as a desktop software developer and the web freelance market took off (just on the heels of the dot-com bubble bursting). Also, just as the shift in web-development from well-funded dot-coms to individual freelancers and small startups led to the "Web 2.0" renaissance, we might see a "Mobile 2.0" renaissance with a new generation of technologies (Swift, MBaaS, Dagger, RxJava/RxCocoa) that changes how we do mobile development.
(I'm not sure we'll see a "Web 3.0" renaissance - "Desktop 1.0" was the PC, CP/M, MS-DOS, Apple Basic, etc., and "Desktop 2.0" was Macintosh and Win32 development, but what was supposed to be "Desktop 3.0" - OS X, desktop Linux, and .NET on the client - remained fairly niche specialties. I wonder if React/Polymer will go the same way.)
That is the definition of "anecdotal."
The second point backing this up was the reduced number of conferences. Assuming there were more people who have work then there should be more conferences - even if there were more people out of work.