State of the Market

[Dark Black]

Getting loads of calls at the moment and I'm not even looking (another 6 weeks before my current contract ends). Haven't floated a CV on the job boards for about 2 years.

So the software dev. market seems buoyant currently.

[suityou01]

Im starting to freak out Ive been out of the game for 4 weeks and after 80 applications no interview, wtf is going on I have a good CV and always got interviews easily before. (IT Infrastructure)

Is anyone else seeing this, is the market that bad right now?

A pimp was telling me the other day that the sheer volume of CVs out there being sent in for a role advertisement is currently very high. In my experience you can always tell when it's a buyer's market as the job specs are like mini novels and list such a long list of skills that even if you have version 1.4 of something and they want 1.5 you are binned.

This is the market I am seeing currently. Remember people are still coming back from holiday and it takes time for the market to ramp back up. Plus firms are probably being cautious until they get a clearer idea of the issues in Westminster and with Brexit.

Soon enough there will be lots of gigs out there to frantically save failing Brexit projects. Keep the faith, it's not you or your CV! Chin up.

Suity

[BlackCountryContractor]

A pimp was telling me the other day that the sheer volume of CVs out there being sent in for a role advertisement is currently very high. In my experience you can always tell when it's a buyer's market as the job specs are like mini novels and list such a long list of skills that even if you have version 1.4 of something and they want 1.5 you are binned.

This is the market I am seeing currently. Remember people are still coming back from holiday and it takes time for the market to ramp back up. Plus firms are probably being cautious until they get a clearer idea of the issues in Westminster and with Brexit.

Soon enough there will be lots of gigs out there to frantically save failing Brexit projects. Keep the faith, it's not you or your CV! Chin up.

Suity

You have hit the nail on the head atm, guess it is time for most contractors to raid the piggy bank and wait it out

[slogger]

Im starting to freak out Ive been out of the game for 4 weeks and after 80 applications no interview, wtf is going on I have a good CV and always got interviews easily before. (IT Infrastructure)

Is anyone else seeing this, is the market that bad right now?

i work on the infrastructure side of things - however moved more into devops/automation - the demand for pure infrastructure people/sys admins has been going down for years - however the demand for devops people has made up this gap remarkably. Try and emphasize automation work you've done. We've been trying to hire devops for months in central London - good rates 600-800 per day and its difficult to find good people - from start to finish took us about 4 months to get the people we needed - and its not niche devops skills but mainline (aws/puppet/ansible/linux/jenkins/git).

made difficult to recruit people as so many seriously over exaggerate/lie about skills - e.g. they literally haven't even logged on to an aws environment before or read a book on it - but add it to contracts. Big difficulty sifting the wheat from the chaff. And we don't insist on all skills - if we could find people with 70% of what we need we hire them.

[rocktronAMP]

i work on the infrastructure side of things - however moved more into devops/automation - the demand for pure infrastructure people/sys admins has been going down for years - however the demand for devops people has made up this gap remarkably. Try and emphasize automation work you've done. We've been trying to hire devops for months in central London - good rates 600-800 per day and its difficult to find good people - from start to finish took us about 4 months to get the people we needed - and its not niche devops skills but mainline (aws/puppet/ansible/linux/jenkins/git).

made difficult to recruit people as so many seriously over exaggerate/lie about skills - e.g. they literally haven't even logged on to an aws environment before or read a book on it - but add it to contracts. Big difficulty sifting the wheat from the chaff. And we don't insist on all skills - if we could find people with 70% of what we need we hire them.

I agree suddenly the DevOps side especially in cloud has suddenly taken off in central London / Canary Wharf.

I agree it is difficult to find people who good all of these things:

* AWS
* Terraform
* Docker
* Ansible
* Puppet
* Chef
* Linux
* Python
* Go
* Java
* Microservices
* Jenkins

etc


I think the reason is many of the people including contractor are stuck on legacy systems and just trying to get a nut so to speak. For instance many developers might be aware of AWS, but I are not permitted to touch it, because of administrator privileges or something. If a client only works with monolithic server in on-prem environment, they are hardly go to get a look in AWS let alone cloud. So you might have to revise your job adverts, be ready to pair-program develop with lesser contractors and also reduce the required skill set. For instance, some contractor might have a lot of skill writing scripting in Python or Bash and bad have little ability or awareness for AWS.

[rocktronAMP]

Im starting to freak out Ive been out of the game for 4 weeks and after 80 applications no interview, wtf is going on I have a good CV and always got interviews easily before. (IT Infrastructure)

Is anyone else seeing this, is the market that bad right now?

You don't say exactly what your infrastructure skills are, and whatever your strengths are, your unique selling points (USPs) are highly relevant.

Right now, Cloud and DevOps are big. Just search the popular bulletin job boards for "AWS DevOps"

If you haven't got these skills then I would recommend buying and studying online courses from Udemy, Coursera or PluralSight. I am assuming you don't have any AWS knowledge at all, so you are going to have to get your finger out ....

[Stevie Wonder Boy]

You don't say exactly what your infrastructure skills are, and whatever your strengths are, your unique selling points (USPs) are highly relevant.

Right now, Cloud and DevOps are big. Just search the popular bulletin job boards for "AWS DevOps"

If you haven't got these skills then I would recommend buying and studying online courses from Udemy, Coursera or PluralSight. I am assuming you don't have any AWS knowledge at all, so you are going to have to get your finger out ....

cloud.guru

[Contractor101101]

You don't say exactly what your infrastructure skills are, and whatever your strengths are, your unique selling points (USPs) are highly relevant.

Right now, Cloud and DevOps are big. Just search the popular bulletin job boards for "AWS DevOps"

If you haven't got these skills then I would recommend buying and studying online courses from Udemy, Coursera or PluralSight. I am assuming you don't have any AWS knowledge at all, so you are going to have to get your finger out ....

Agreed. I've passed both the AWS Architect and Dev exams this month, I took Udemy courses.

cloud.guru

Don't, please. Over-hyped and absolutely rubbish. Pick the highest rated one on Udemy. It's not cloud guru

[Contractor101101]

I think the reason is many of the people including contractor are stuck on legacy systems and just trying to get a nut so to speak. For instance many developers might be aware of AWS, but I are not permitted to touch it, because of administrator privileges or something. If a client only works with monolithic server in on-prem environment, they are hardly go to get a look in AWS let alone cloud. So you might have to revise your job adverts, be ready to pair-program develop with lesser contractors and also reduce the required skill set. For instance, some contractor might have a lot of skill writing scripting in Python or Bash and bad have little ability or awareness for AWS.

You can have a free tier account with AWS for up to a year (even after that runs out, you can keep cost under control). It's what I did and there was nothing I couldn't try out.

[BlackCountryContractor]

SC cleared market has now picked up again for October for me, 8 weeks on the bench and from this Monday on wards already got 2 interviews booked also one thing I noticed is that the government is trying to switch back to FTC contracts for some of their future roles with agencies doing the pimping for them.