[kls]

The reality is that most really good shops want employees because they know the value of long term engagements with Software dev talent.

My experience is most of my freelancing work has come from corporate systems, it's not glamorous work but it pays the bills and pays well. From time to time some interesting things come along, like working on an ancillary project to IBM's Watson but those are few and far between for the majority freelancing.

There are exceptions like if you know nich or less used technology like big data technologies or Ruby for example.