State of the Market

[sadkingbilly]

They also had company credit cards and were more than happy to provide Pizza if working late and offered occasional free bars.

still crap though, and all with names like Hermione and Giles.

[SussexSeagull]

Good point to remember that there are regional variations in the market. Much of the discussion here often seems to be heavily orientated to FS and or London.

I got my first contract in Cambridge in the early 2010s and it seemed to be a thriving place. If you work in life sciences or the tech sector then it's an excellent place to be with lots of tech startups and established giants like Apple, Arm, Microsoft etc. Although after the current stock market rout and tech stocks falling sharply, who knows how long that will last.

Less glamorous, but there are a lot of logistics hubs round there as well.

[SussexSeagull]

still crap though, and all with names like Hermione and Giles.

I think they were probably quite intelligent people who had gone down the wrong career path. Certainly there seemed to be people who had started in the last few years and Senior Managers and very little in between, which suggests they tend to recruit senior positions from outside as the people who start on the bottom run burn out.

I remember one of them being pregnant and going off to have the baby and some of the Accenture people reported she was taking business calls while the waters were breaking. They were impressed while the rest of us found it absolutely monstrous.

[sadkingbilly]

'Managers'? i thought they called them 'partners' or some such septic rubbish.
All fur coat and nae knickers*.

*a triumph of form over substance.

[edison]

'Managers'? i thought they called them 'partners' or some such septic rubbish.
All fur coat and nae knickers*.

*a triumph of form over substance.

Managers are definitely not the same as partners at big consultancy firms.

For a start, Partners normally have to invest their own money to buy in to the partnership which can be anywhere up to £300k. Usually the firm will loan this to you.

I used to get on with most of the managers I worked with but some of the partners were such arseholes, the kind of 'swinging dicks' you get in IB and the like.

Depending on the Partnership model, partners take home pro rata a substantially bigger share of profits. At my old firm, About 100 Partners took 49% of the profit pool and all the other 2000 plus staff shared 51%.

Partners focus on selling big items of work, usually at C-suite level. Managers are responsible for managing assignments and selling smaller pieces of work.

No comparison really in my experience at least.

[SchumiStars]

Comapnies like ACN, Avanade, Deloitte the managers are usually very good TBF. As they have to work through the training and career progression ladders to get there. And they have to work hard to get there.

They also know that career progression is dependant on delivery and up-selling to customers, so again highly driven and motivated to do well for themselves and company.

I had/have no interest in career progression and more than happy to keep coding until I am retired.

Back to the state of the market, without being too negative, its dead. I can imagine at least another 9mths/12mths of this tulip.

[SussexSeagull]

The project I was involved in burnt through three or four years budget in about a year because Accenture didn’t realise the people working on it for the client got paid overtime.

I think the business model was to catch a cold on the initial implementation then charge an absolute fortune for any subsequent changes.

Funnily enough it was the last major thing I worked on as a permie before going contracting.

[hungry_hog]

Hmm. Mixed bag. Some good, some make Patrick Bateman look like a well adjusted compassionate young man

[ResistanceFighter]

I was on an "Accenture Lead" project many moons ago, and to his credit the CTO of the client got so sick of them they were all let go some random Tuesday morning, leaving just me and another guy on the project

[ladymuck]

...
Unfortunately by having to put in my degree date, it exposed my age as over 55 and despite having done the exact same role before multiple times as a contractor including in this sector, I got an automated rejection a few hours later.

That's a nice bit of age discrimination...