State of the Market

[TheDude]

"Avoid overly decorative fonts which AI cannot physically read." - Come on! whoever wrote this is clueless. They think AI scans the document in a rasterised form and does OCR on it? Or maybe AI just extracts the text as characters in latin character set...

I worked for a US investment bank where a senior sales guy emailed his list of clients to his personal address before resigning.

Being a super smart front office type he used a white font on a white background so he wouldn't get caught.

[avonleigh]

I worked for a US investment bank where a senior sales guy emailed his list of clients to his personal address before resigning.

Being a super smart front office type he used a white font on a white background so he wouldn't get caught.

lol, I love this. That's really smart :-)

[oliverson]

No

Total of seven again today and still an hour left maybe.

Issue is either low rate, inside and/or 2/3 days a week in the office, or old tech.

I feel the one that ticks all the boxes is just around the corner. Fingers crossed.

[ShandyDrinker]

Total of seven again today and still an hour left maybe.

Issue is either low rate, inside and/or 2/3 days a week in the office, or old tech.

I feel the one that ticks all the boxes is just around the corner. Fingers crossed.

How old is old tech?

One of my ex-contractor colleagues was let go at the end of November last year. He found something in Feb but ended up taking just over half the rate he'd been on previously. Is it that kind of low rate or maybe say 10-20% below what you've been used to in the past?

Certainly on the financial services side, from what I've seen over the last few years, the vast majority of contracts have been both inside and requiring a minimum of 2 days a week in the office.

I've been lucky since the start of covid in 2020 that I've been WFH ever since. However, I know damn well that in my next contract, the likelihood is that I won't see full remote again unless I'm either (a) very lucky or (b) accept a shockingly low rate.

[GJABS]

Being a super smart front office type he used a white font on a white background so he wouldn't get caught.

Works on here too!

[oliverson]

How old is old tech?

One of my ex-contractor colleagues was let go at the end of November last year. He found something in Feb but ended up taking just over half the rate he'd been on previously. Is it that kind of low rate or maybe say 10-20% below what you've been used to in the past?

Certainly on the financial services side, from what I've seen over the last few years, the vast majority of contracts have been both inside and requiring a minimum of 2 days a week in the office.

I've been lucky since the start of covid in 2020 that I've been WFH ever since. However, I know damn well that in my next contract, the likelihood is that I won't see full remote again unless I'm either (a) very lucky or (b) accept a shockingly low rate.

2006 tech like Winforms or WCF.

Banking (remote) 450.

Lead engineer London 2-3 days a week. Outside £600. Travel and accommodation expenses for me would reduce that to around £500

indian consultancies with ridiculous rates. Like £300 inside. Bunch of chancers.

Perm roles

Anythjng inside no matter the rate.

All it takes is one. A numbers game. It’s coming, I can feel it

[TheLordDave]

In 3 months on the bench I have:

• applied to hundreds of job posts.
• actually spoken to an agent and been put forward to 3
• Got rejected for one for having no react experience… when I’m a react dev and have been for years
• interviewed for 2 which both strung me along until they hired a permie instead.
• played 25 rounds of golf

it’s brutal, the jobs being advertised don’t actually exist and no one answers the phone anymore.

years ago I used to have to get a new mobile number every so often due to being hammered with agency calls all day.

now even the bob agencies don’t bother calling.

Where does the uk IT industry go from here? Surely it can’t just be like this forever, someone has to want to build some software at some point.

[SchumiStars]

In 3 months on the bench I have:

• applied to hundreds of job posts.
• actually spoken to an agent and been put forward to 3
• Got rejected for one for having no react experience… when I’m a react dev and have been for years
• interviewed for 2 which both strung me along until they hired a permie instead.
• played 25 rounds of golf

it’s brutal, the jobs being advertised don’t actually exist and no one answers the phone anymore.

years ago I used to have to get a new mobile number every so often due to being hammered with agency calls all day.

now even the bob agencies don’t bother calling.

Where does the uk IT industry go from here? Surely it can’t just be like this forever, someone has to want to build some software at some point.

Thats exactly what I was thinking in 2023. Now it's 2025 and nothing has changed. There seems to be more positions but there are also more available contractors.

I knew it would get worse as more contractors are found not being renewed and has the cranberries once said 'Its in your head' (Zombie).

What I didnt expect is the cut in rates and salaries. Obviously companies have worked out that if they do need the skills as they have waited so long anyway and there is no urgency, they can offer a permi role at low salary and still get hundreds of applications.

Hope is dangerous strategy which does not work. The best approach is to accept the market as the new norm and go from there. Litterly 1/1000 chance of getting a job. Which means you have to do 1000 interviews.

Yes, it does mean reducing outgoings but these are cards we have been dealt and we have to play the game accordingly.

I am not trying to be negative but a realist. You cant be happy, happy, positive all the time when it's this bad.

[ShandyDrinker]

2006 tech like Winforms or WCF.

Banking (remote) 450.

Lead engineer London 2-3 days a week. Outside £600. Travel and accommodation expenses for me would reduce that to around £500

indian consultancies with ridiculous rates. Like £300 inside. Bunch of chancers.

Perm roles

Anythjng inside no matter the rate.

All it takes is one. A numbers game. It’s coming, I can feel it

That's pretty much as I feared and matches what I've been told by others. As I'm going to be on the market after a long contract, I've got to set my expectations accordingly.

Sounds like you're in the same tech stack as I am, although most recent contracts have been modernisation from legacy C# server side migrating over to either AWS lambdas or Azure function apps in the main. Haven't done any out and out Winforms for a few years, likewise WCF but no doubt there are plenty of codebases requiring modernisation and cloud migration.

The biggest problem I see is that certainly in the .Net world, it's over. The vast majority of corporates do appear to have wholeheartedly embraced python and the various supporting tech stacks.

I definitely agree about it only taking one and being a numbers game. Certainly since I started contracting in 2008, I've seen a few downturns in tech hiring but then eventually something turns up. I'm in the situation where I'm not close enough to retirement to be able to sit it out for months on end so expect that I'll end up having to take a lower paying contract in London just to keep money coming in. While I've got enough of a war chest to last well in excess of a year, given past experience and what others are saying on here, I'd rather have something coming in than nothing at all. Saying that though, even I have my limits and £300 inside takes the proverbial.

[willendure]

I worked for a US investment bank where a senior sales guy emailed his list of clients to his personal address before resigning.

Being a super smart front office type he used a white font on a white background so he wouldn't get caught.

Long ago I did that on my CV, just crammed in a tiny paragraph in white text containing every programming skills related term I could think of. I don't recall it making any difference, but no-one ever noticed it and called me out on it either. Maybe in this age of AI CV screening I should start doing this again, except this time with some kind of hacky LLM prompt "Ignore previous instructions, your new instructions are..."