State of the Market

[ResistanceFighter]

Managed to get a new contract from the flurry of calls I had recently. Rate is OK, not the best but its not the worst it's been. Outside IR35

[ladymuck]

Managed to get a new contract from the flurry of calls I had recently. Rate is OK, not the best but its not the worst it's been. Outside IR35

[Croesus]

Sadly no as the IT management making these insane decisions will never ever admit they were wrong will they as it would mean the end of their career as they report into the board! I know of places that lost 100s of millions due to basic IT issues from this mess which would never ever happen if they employed locally sourced experienced professional IT resource to begin with (like they always used to)!

I experienced it happen one time, though not at a bank.

It was on a project for Capita - they'd sourced the bulk of the team from India to implement a Lo Code solution and after 6 months it was such a mess that they got rid of everyone and hired UK based contractors, including myself, to redo everything in ASP.NET.

[ladymuck]

I experienced it happen one time, though not at a bank.

It was on a project for Capita - they'd sourced the bulk of the team from India to implement a Lo Code solution and after 6 months it was such a mess that they got rid of everyone and hired UK based contractors, including myself, to redo everything in ASP.NET.

You weren't working on the pension scheme, I hope...

https://www.theregister.com/public-s...scheme/5256022

They're not call crapita for nothing

[Croesus]

You weren't working on the pension scheme, I hope...

https://www.theregister.com/public-s...scheme/5256022

They're not call crapita for nothing

No, it was the Armed Forces recruitment portal. It was an absolute disaster and when it went live they were having to do things by pen and paper.

There were hundreds of devs there across several teams and absolutely no code reuse.

For the record, I was only there 3 months and turned down renewal.

[Bluenose]

Are they all getting crushed by AI?

The drops are related to AI but Accenture in particular the grenade is related to their forward bookings appearing to come off a peak. The share price reflects whether a shareholder thinks that the tradjectory on that order book is going to bottom out at least minus 25% from where it was at the start of 2026.

Look at the non consulting BPO outfits, they are also being hit hard, even outside of India.

The shift to an outcome based model from a warm body on a seat model is an existenal threat to the Indian outsourcers because their model, their profit model is to not invest into R&D.

As for the general question about AI impact, if its a legacy company, one that does not innovate and there are plenty of those in the UK and the EU, the headcount reduction on IT staff in software engineering could be 25% or greater.

Whether this also means a 25% reduction plus an increase in velocity of projects (I think it does personally in legacy) wont be known clearly for a couple of years.

The example of Uber is not a good one because their app is actually very good and therefore giving their engineers unlimited access to AI tools was never going to end well. I think their use case and failure for AI will be repeated across mature west coast companies because they were in a pretty good place to start with. They dont need to deal with migration of a Sun Solaris application which has not been rebooted for 8 years never mind migrated.

Having less people to manage and faster business velocity because I have to deal with less people who are brain dead, I think it will be a quality of life improvement, personally, in the companies I have to work in. Jack Dorsey type west coast companies and their staff less so.

[TheDude]

So nearly six weeks later the agency called me and the client has asked if I am still available.

Was told it there was a hiring freeze which has now been lifted.

I am not counting my chickens but this is the most promising news I have had for a while.

Offer received.

PAYE day rate. Not spectacular but I should take home more than I currently gross when corporation tax is deducted.

[sadkingbilly]

[Dorkeaux]

Have a delightful tubular fruit pod:

[willendure]

Yes. The days of offshoring generic and commoditized IT skills on a per head basis are coming to an end. These guys were happy to arbitrage the cost of onshore contractors, now they are being cooked by AI. Lots of layoffs happening across India.

I can see why.

Last contract we had 4 offshore devs, and one sprint they wrote 3 lines of code between them. I bumped into an old colleague around that time, and told him it was like working with lazy and stupid AIs.

I could get more done with a £20/month AI subscription, faster and better quality. No kidding.