Except, it’s still down. Oh yeah, there’s this:

Ad-agency staffing, for example, is 10% below its 2000 peak; employment at PR agencies is 11.5% off its 2000 high.

So, what’s going on? Well, part of it is that traditional agencies are bouncing developer talent as well. The bubble gave them confidence to scale their broken strategies, so their interactive departments grew to more than a solo coldfusion guy in the corner.

Clients saw through it, though. Traditional agencies are learning now that it takes more than a modified speech pattern and a few muffled coders to deploy successful web plays. So they’re laying off the talent they weren’t able to integrate / weren’t able to sell.

The result is a lot of unbundled, highly-skilled talent scrambling to figure out the business aspect of their craft while fending off arguments from significant others to plug back into something stable.

Meanwhile, the unstable types (development shops) are scrambling to find highly-skilled talent. More and more clients are looking for development partners that can deploy web plays / can bundle a proper team. And anyone demonstrating they get it seems to be in the middle of a denial of service attack from work requests.

These two scrambles need to meet up. Maybe it’s a contractor network. Maybe it’s everyone coming to work with Pulp. Whatever it is, it’s better than a 15-year low.

If you’re looking for more, Oberkirch already killed the topic this morning, once again proving why he makes it into the egos pile and I just make the updates.