Serious Question

[Shimano105]

Not worked in York, but thanks for the words partimer.

Agree totally with all you say and World doesn't owe me a living so it's up to me. Just getting a bit stumped as what to do next.

Anyhow, a few irons in the fire so beers and curry for me tonight and Monday is another week.

[expat]

No other trade or profession would have the last 16 years of their career rubbished in the way that we do. So I now have to face the prospect of going back to the start and effectively being a junior developer at the age of 40. Triffic.

Good point. Perhaps a strong argument for professional qualifications in IT: it might help the clients to look for skills as opposed to tools. As in, I can develop applications especially on MS platorms, as against I have x years experience in .net.

To take the old analogy, a plumber doesn't stop being an experienced plumber just becaus lead is replaced by copper, or cast iron by plastic. His 16 years' experience doesn't suddenly become equivalent to a school-leaver's training course in the new material.

Alas, what it shows is that IT development has no perceived value as a profession: only scarcity of "skills" (= dev. tools) gets you the pay.

[AtW]

Shim - sympathies from my side, but you should not despair: downturn of 2001/02 was sure much worse and you made it there easy perhaps through luck (I'd say I was lucky too to be in the right place at the time), keep looking and to avoid having lots of empty time just start your own project or two in .NET in spare time - this will give you good experience like SKA gave me - I actually got contract on the basis of SKA work, now signing up another license agreement and can see in the future that SKA will definately bring serious cash around. At the very least you will have some public work and who knows, maybe your app will be very successful and can make up plan B?

IT is sure a crap field where the only way to stay in good job long term is to have lots of clients of your own company, and by lots I mean hundreds of them who will buy your products - this may fail too, but at least it gives chance to actually earn good money while being 100% outside of IR35.

[t0bytoo]

Interesting to hear other folks in the same boat. Apart from a freaky interaction with an agent (on this board), one interview at a bank (waiting the results) and a dozen "the manager's reviewing your CV", not getting the sense that I'm properly marketing myself. (Okay, it's only been two weeks).

I come from a solid VB background too, but spent the last couple of years working in a corporate niche that doesn't seem to be much in demand. Have basic .net skills and plenty of other "broad" skill experience.

I waltzed into work in the 2002 downturn. I had less experience then, but my skillset must have been bang on the nail.

Plan now is to rewrite the CV to turn me into a straight programming bod - remove the analysis (meeting room waffle) / niche market stuff (ms product that is doomed to fail), and take my age (36) off it.

I remember looking at .net beta thinking "i really don't want to learn this stuff". Now - 6 years later, realise that I should have stayed on the case.

So. back to the case. It's obviously time to seriously re-skill if I want to reap the benefits of this game for the next ten years.

Other than the .net gray train... Any suggestions?

[VectraMan]

What worries me is that I've always worked on C++ Windows apps, mainly with Visual Studio and MFC, but these days everything's gone web front ends (which correct me if I'm wrong but that seems to be 99.9% of .NET jobs). If I search for C++ on the job sites it now matches all the ones that say C++/C# (i.e. .NET), and the agents also see Visual Studio on my c.v. and also assume .NET. I've no doubts about my ability with C++, and I'm sure C# wouldn't be a big adjustment, but suddenly all my years of knowledge and experience of GUI and Win32 API work doesn't count for anything.

[weemster]

Keep Plugging Away !!

Good Points - and my sympathy to one and all. I would still rather contract than risk being given the boot from a long term permy role in the later years of my career. Best of luck.

[mcquiggd]

I sympathise with the situation you are in... I am about the same age, and also had a background with VB6 for a good few years. I actually left a job that was reasonably safe, to take a contract where they were migrating from VB6 to C#... it was actually a pay cut but I saw it as key to medium term survival. Since then I have consistently taken roles that keep me working with the latest versions, even if at the time they didn't pay the best rates.

That was 4 years ago, so now I have 4 years C#, 18 months VB.Net, ASP.Net, now working with .Net 2, Team Foundation Server etc, but looking ahead to 'next years' technology.

I suppose my point is that sometimes you need to take a (much) lower rate to get involved with the early adoption of 'the next big thing', get the certifications (they do at least get you past agents filtering), and then look to step up the rate ladder as the technology is more widely adopted and you have more experience.

I am certain there are a lot of companies still using VB6, or still migrating legacy code. As someone said earlier, go permie, take a pay cut, be flexible about location. Even if it is just for 6 months to get yourself retrained and certified.

Good luck.

[TheMonkey]

Not wishing to sound cocky, but I just landed something new after 4 days on the bench. I have however not bothered relying on good old Microsoft tech to pay the bills. It's too risky, especially with the impending Vista release.

Anything driven by market share and capitalist values tends to have big dips. I use Linux/PHP/MySQL to ride them out, and for £45/day more than my last C# job!

[Denny]

Last year was a bad year for me with a serious gap developing in my CV. However, this was largely due to my attitude being wrong, being lazy and uncreative with how to generate work and relying on regular sources of income too much which were becoming less regular - help!

My strategy was to develop my own clients and drumming up work from existing ones, no matter how short the job or how low the money. That gave me some 'reference' and CV gap filling capital. This is invaluable and worth it's weight in gold far above the money you generate in these jobs. Therefore, it turns into a business goldmine not a loser's last hope for survival. This year alone, I've generated two great new potential referees and kept another old faithful warm, should I lose my current contract which is due to end fairly soon.

Before I started this role, I also re-worked by CV and turned it into a marketing brochure and turned what looked like a pseudo employee contract I was offered, which took weeks of hell to get in the first place, into a B2B contract - a combo of luck and sheer negotiating tenacity which could have ended in disaster and a missed opportunity if the client decided they wouldn't play ball after a month or so on the job and wanted me to be de-facto employee instead. It was high risk approach in a corporation that is HR process obsessed, bureacratically heavyweight and tended to view contractors as 'all the same.' However, I figured that I didn't have a lot to lose if it turned out to be a miss.

My longer term approach now to contracting is to think B2B - ALWAYS even if future roles are in fact inside IR35 which is always a possibility if EBs are involved with their crummy standard contracts and lack of transparency over back-to-back negotiations with clients.

That means carving up my skills into marketing commodities in their own right rather than trying to lump them altogether into some sort of 'status criteria' as a freelancer careerist that must utilise all my skills all of the time in suitably high level positions paying ever higher rates, which are hard to come by. That way, if I ever get offered a tulip role with low daily rates again that draws upon some but not all of my skills then I won't be too proud to turn it down, if continuity of fee generation is important. I'll just ensure that the contract is only for 3 months and get the hell out of there as soon as possible and as gracefully as I can if nothing turns up in the meantime or else dump it ruthlessly for something better if something better does come up. Afer all if you get out even after a month then you don't need to put it on your CV anyway, there's probably a trial period in place, and IR35 jobs normally allow set hours for 5 day weeks leaving you with free weekends to squeeze that extra bit of short term work for a regular client in (or if it's longer - take a week's leave).

Successful contracting is as much to do with personal perception about what is on offer and approach to your work as it is to do with the role and rates offered. Now I think more like an interior designer. I may have big jobs - re-designing the grand hallway at Buck House some times that pay heaps over a long period, but at other times I might be called to some crumbling semi in Bromley to do a two day consultation on what curtains they should buy to match a carpet.

By thinking that way, you don't have the psychological barrier of 'being on the way out' or worse still widening the gap in your CV further by turning away work that in permie thinking mode I would consider 'beneath me.'

Be creative and tenacious, not proud and stubborn. You'll do better in the long run.

[Lucifer Box]

Any suggestions?

Offer a cash bonus to the agents that you speak to.

Offer the first week at a dramatically reduced rate.