These stories always feel like they picked a few good anecdotes and interviews, but they wanted to present it as a national trend to make it sound like a bigger deal.
Indeed, the statistics they provide aren't as significant as the headline suggests:
> Hundreds of thousands of Americans are striking out on their own...
For reference, the United States has around 160 million employed people. 0.1% of them moving to freelancing might be significant, but is it really a new era? That was happening on the regular well before COVID.
1 in 1000 people striking out on their own doesn't really explain the "ongoing shake-up in the world of work" like they're trying to suggest.
My favorite fake statistic in this article is "and nearly half have a college degree." They're trying to frame that paragraph to say the people are educated, and if you read it quickly it comes off that way, instead of "most of these people only have a high school diploma."
You left off the other half of the sentence that makes it more clear that there are some highly educated people in this cohort: " and nearly 4 in 10 a postgraduate degree."
I believe it means 4 in 10 of the college educated. I don’t remember the exact line. I’d have to go back and check. However I vouched for your dead comment and wanted to comment quickly.
Typical "boom and bust" trend reporting... It's been around since the gold rush of course, it gets easy reads, and by the time it's published it's a burnt out trend...
Web dev is not an easy thing to break into, also having the money to really set up and thrive truly limits market competition.
After the burnout of social media though, the need for custom web dev should begin to rise, provided that operational costs don't skyrocket artificially. Cloud hosting adds a lot of potentially high and unpredictable costs to clients too. I usually try to make sure that my regular and "big-idea" clients need to always have a solid plan for proper revenue/monetization before any project paperwork is signed.
Indeed, the statistics they provide aren't as significant as the headline suggests:
> Hundreds of thousands of Americans are striking out on their own...
For reference, the United States has around 160 million employed people. 0.1% of them moving to freelancing might be significant, but is it really a new era? That was happening on the regular well before COVID.
1 in 1000 people striking out on their own doesn't really explain the "ongoing shake-up in the world of work" like they're trying to suggest.