&gt; <i>On the stage, a very adept and confident speaker jokingly mentioned a web-related joke that feels decades old (which she was sarcastically referring to as being decades old) and the whole room fell about laughing; it was the first time they had heard this reference.</i><p>It&#x27;s really killing me to not know what the joke being referenced is. Never before have I so desperately wanted an author to &quot;Show, don&#x27;t tell.&quot;<p>&gt; <i>We used to have to sell the benefits of being online to our clients.</i><p>I remember when it was like this. In 1999 I was trying to drum up business for a web-development startup, going business-to-business offering cheap packages to get online. I got laughed out of a lot of shops and offices before I finally couldn&#x27;t take the rejection anymore.<p>&gt; <i>It didn’t seem to matter who I spoke to last year, similar stories of hiring internally rather than using external agencies&#x2F;freelancers, cropped up – and thus, a significant new breed of web designer was born. Companies who would have once used small studios or freelancers to complete their projects, no longer had a need to use them and work started to dry up for people who had relied on the abundant freelance lifestyle that was once afforded to them.</i><p>I think the author is making a mistake in focusing on this one reason for freelance web development work drying up. Large companies who need dedicated constantly-updated websites moved in-house, but the reality is that it doesn&#x27;t take as much skill to setup a robust website anymore. My sister is a graphics designer with zero technical skills, she makes her freelance money with one-click wordpress installs and lets the customers manage their own sites.<p>Then there&#x27;s the next generation of kids who are simply naturals at this stuff. They don&#x27;t know how to code, but there are so many WYSIWYG applications out there to build what they want, they don&#x27;t need to do any coding. Even my 75-year-old mother setup and administers a wordpress blog for her students.<p>Our skills made us special as innovators 10-20 years ago, but many of us are no longer cutting edge. Maybe some of these freelancers should look at becoming the in-house code-monkey for one of these larger companies if they are really hard-up for work.