State of the Market

[dsc]

To be rather boring it depends on the company, the role, the person and what you are working on at the time. With me it would have almost always have been useful to be around people more when I first started (although it was usually more the client not being in the office rather than me blocking it), before doing a lot of the actual work remotely.

I understand why permanent employees need to have agreements in place to come in x days a week to keep things consistent but if a client can't trust a contractor not to be the best judge of where they can best do work then they don't understand IR35 and need to be get in better contractors.

I agree, but just wanted to highlight, it's all about how you paint it. The truth is as always somewhere in the middle, hybrid might be the best option, personally I like flexibility and I believe that if you have a good team, you don't need much office time (though it helps for sure). If you have people doing feck all though, surely the mid mgmt is useless as they should be the ones keeping things in check. Besides if you can do feck all from home and not get sacked, you can do feck all from the office and no one will know.

[Fraidycat]

nothing to do with the state of the contracting market

My post about the AI sector on the verge of collapsing today after the release of super cheap Chinese model called DeepSeek has nothing to do with state of the contractor market?

It could either make the market even worse this year (most likely outcome), or perhaps return some sanity to the market, and the cash that was funnelled exclusively to AI now gets spread around to the rest of us.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/art...a-startup.html

[eek]

My post about the AI sector on the verge of collapsing today after the release of DeepSeek has nothing to do with state of the contractor market?

on one level it’s got an impact on the scale of a niche market (AI) and it would be hard to say if the impact is good or bad for the market.

Longer term a better and cheaper model to write code is bad for contractors but I’ve yet to see a decent AI for coding

[SchumiStars]

How many people on this site have had AI based contracts?

Probably less than 100. Which tells me exactly which way it's heading. People only get excited about making money with tech and I personally can not see how AI will generate anything sunsaintial.

Just done a 30min FTC (6mths) interview for 50k per year. Requires .net development experience with extensive Power apps. Working onsite, marble arch 3 days a week.

I had all the required skills and willing to work onsite for more than the required amount and I got a 'We gonna think about it's

FFS, this market is unbearable.

[SchumiStars]

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c0qw7z2v1pgo

....as I predicted, all that investment, now going nowhere. If the competition has already caught up with less resources, it now becomes a race to the bottom.

[willendure]

My post about the AI sector on the verge of collapsing today after the release of super cheap Chinese model called DeepSeek has nothing to do with state of the contractor market?

It could either make the market even worse this year (most likely outcome), or perhaps return some sanity to the market, and the cash that was funnelled exclusively to AI now gets spread around to the rest of us.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/art...a-startup.html

Its really not collapsing:


Oh no! The price has gone back to October levels!

DeepSeek even runs on nVidia!

[willendure]

How many people on this site have had AI based contracts?

Probably less than 100. Which tells me exactly which way it's heading. People only get excited about making money with tech and I personally can not see how AI will generate anything sunsaintial.

Thats a bit like in the early years of Intel saying who has had an x86 contract? Hardly any! They will never be as good as IBM. This whole microprocessor fad is just going to fade out!

Or as Warren Buffet put it, in the 1920s there was a booklet of all car manufacturers in the USA published, and just the first half of the letter M, Ma -> Mn, was pages long. Even if you knew all about cars your chances of investing in Mercedes-Benz when it was a start-up were very slim. But at the same time you could tell for sure the age of the motor car was alive.

We don't know for certain who the winners will be, but the age of AI is alive. The genie ain't getting back in his bottle.

As I said before, been monitoring it and there has been a marked increase in the number of AI contracts. 6 months ago I was seeing one or two a week, and now I see one or two a day. Its a hard skill, like Java and .Net used to be. I think the demand for it is going to increase - even if the AI money bubble collapses, although a crash will put the damper on things in the short term for sure, the overall trend will increase going out the next decade or more.

[SussexSeagull]

I agree. WFH for the last 3 years, and only actually met my co-workers 3 times in all of that! By the end I was finding the whole experience quite isolating and tiresome. I think maybe 2 days a fortnight would be a good amount for me. I like both, and do like a good office environment. The bad office environments I have been in are almost entirely counter productive, and I have been in more bad ones that good.

Must confess I do enjoy a little adventure to an office if it is in the right location and no one is clock watching on your behalf.

My last contract involved travelling to their East London office when I needed to see someone and leaving when I finished, more often than not via the subsidised cafe.

The one before that was in the middle of nowhere in Cambridgeshire where I received feedback that I needed to get in earlier than 0930 despite having to get up at 0430 in the morning to do so. Once left early and got a snotty e-mail despite the fact I had told the manager about it.

Got terminated about six weeks early. Probably for the best, in hindsight.

[SussexSeagull]

I agree, but just wanted to highlight, it's all about how you paint it. The truth is as always somewhere in the middle, hybrid might be the best option, personally I like flexibility and I believe that if you have a good team, you don't need much office time (though it helps for sure). If you have people doing feck all though, surely the mid mgmt is useless as they should be the ones keeping things in check. Besides if you can do feck all from home and not get sacked, you can do feck all from the office and no one will know.

I remember back in the days of predominantly outside contracts you used to have several threads arguing about working extra hours or not. WFH is kind of the new version of that, with the difference being IR35 considerations being less of a factor with more inside contracts.

My answer is the same, work it out with the client. You are not an employee and ultimately if you can’t come to an accommodation then consider walking.

On a wider point the WFH debate becoming part of the Culture Wars is just mind boggling.

[SussexSeagull]

Those of a similar vintage to me will remember the rise of the internet and the dot.com bubble about 25 years ago.

Everyone piled into tech stocks because the internet was about to be the only game in town and bricks and mortar were redundant. They were right but the adjustment is still happening now and having a website with a strange name wasn’t enough to change the world.

The same will happen with AI. It is beginning to have real world implications and that will continue but outside of a few outriders, business and industry is small c conservative and will take their sweet time adopting it, especially as the regulatory framework isn’t their yet.