State of the Market

[Bluenose]

Either people on here aren't looking in the right places, or agents aren't connecting the right people with the right opportunity!

The market is much larger than a single niche area.

‘Looking’ in an area and being skilled and experienced in a niche area are different things.

Got emailed a role yesterday for Cloud migration Architect £350 pd inside IR35. Booming market etc.

[fool]

The market is much larger than a single niche area.

‘Looking’ in an area and being skilled and experienced in a niche area are different things.

Got emailed a role yesterday for Cloud migration Architect £350 pd inside IR35. Booming market etc.

Cloud migrations are booming, but you have to be technical, able to program a bit, and call yourself DevOps or SRE.

If you fancy a bit of this, read the book:

Google - Site Reliability Engineering

Then do a bit of terraform.

[Lance]

The market is much larger than a single niche area.

‘Looking’ in an area and being skilled and experienced in a niche area are different things.

Got emailed a role yesterday for Cloud migration Architect £350 pd inside IR35. Booming market etc.

hahahaha.
Good luck with that.

[Bluenose]

Cloud migrations are booming, but you have to be technical, able to program a bit, and call yourself DevOps or SRE.

If you fancy a bit of this, read the book:

Google - Site Reliability Engineering

Then do a bit of terraform.

I am not in engineering but it’s not worth the time, it will be bobbed within the next 18 months.

Anything to do with code or batch jobs which is not higher level software engineering gets consumed and commoditised, as it should be, given a bit of readjustment.

Nobody should be paid £500-700pd+ for a devops role because - the technical bar is too low.

[BR14]

I am not in engineering but it’s not worth the time, it will be bobbed within the next 18 months.


Nobody should be paid £500-700pd+ for a role because - the technical bar is too low.

heard that before, about 30 years ago :-)

[Bluenose]

heard that before, about 30 years ago :-)

hah yeah and you know there is some truth in that.

Generally speaking though if you asked high-end Oracle contractors, low to mid level Software Packagers, Altiris/Bladelogic Scripters and all these types of roles, may they rest in peace, along with every single other contract DBA looking to earn a crust these days i think i know the answer.

There’s no big money medium to long term to be earned in scripting or low to mid level ‘coding’.

Sure, there are always new and hot areas but ultimately you are going to get bobbed or nearshored in these roles sooner rather than later.

A gig is a gig, all i am saying is, if you are younger head don’t get suckered too deeply into the devops thing, have your escape plan ready.

It won’t be long before legacy server automation bob realises he can cross train for double the money by learning what is essentially, a bunch of script kiddie languages with fancy names.

[BR14]

hah yeah and you know there is some truth in that.

Generally speaking though if you asked high-end Oracle contractors, low to mid level Software Packagers, Altiris/Bladelogic Scripters and all these types of roles, may they rest in peace, along with every single other contract DBA looking to earn a crust these days i think i know the answer.

There’s no big money medium to long term to be earned in scripting or low to mid level ‘coding’.

Sure, there are always new and hot areas but ultimately you are going to get bobbed or nearshored in these roles sooner rather than later.

A gig is a gig, all i am saying is, if you are younger head don’t get suckered too deeply into the devops thing, have your escape plan ready.

It won’t be long before legacy server automation bob realises he can cross train for double the money by learning what is essentially, a bunch of script kiddie languages with fancy names.

i don't do coding

[fool]

hah yeah and you know there is some truth in that.

Generally speaking though if you asked high-end Oracle contractors, low to mid level Software Packagers, Altiris/Bladelogic Scripters and all these types of roles, may they rest in peace, along with every single other contract DBA looking to earn a crust these days i think i know the answer.

There’s no big money medium to long term to be earned in scripting or low to mid level ‘coding’.

Sure, there are always new and hot areas but ultimately you are going to get bobbed or nearshored in these roles sooner rather than later.

A gig is a gig, all i am saying is, if you are younger head don’t get suckered too deeply into the devops thing, have your escape plan ready.

It won’t be long before legacy server automation bob realises he can cross train for double the money by learning what is essentially, a bunch of script kiddie languages with fancy names.

I mean I'm 12 years in and earn double the day rate you mentioned, so each to their own, but I don't think you really fully understand the landscape.

The consultancies are trying to bob the hell of "DevOps", but the role* is complicated enough that it's not really possible on the high end. You have the big shops that do try, but they're either unable to deploy at a reasonble pace, having the a fear of cloud, and getting hacked on the regular.

They're also getting trounced by FAANG, the Unicorns and Amazon, so the very same consultancies are now selling onboarding your own people, which will keep everyone plodding along for 5-10 years now, but with that, they're losing the need to have enterprise architecture, because the highly skilled engineers can draw boxes and arrows too.

If you're at the end of the career, this might not matter to you, but I'm pretty sure I'll do alright.

* Okay, DevOps isn't a role and the market is finally catching up to that.

[Bluenose]

I could write a full response, i will keep it shorter and simply say contracting industry history has a way of consuming trends like this one, by all means ride them, that’s what we do but any basic structured code or scripting language has been and will be bobbed with the relevant effect on rates.

And big swinging elephant trunk responses such as ‘i earn double that’ is ignorant of the general trend of this board which is, generally speaking, the wider contracting market remains broken, outside of a few hotspots.

If the best we can come up with is as a group is ‘learn terraform’ then we are ****ed.

[fool]

I could write a full response, i will keep it shorter and simply say contracting industry history has a way of consuming trends like this one, by all means ride them, that’s what we do but any basic structured code or scripting language has been and will be bobbed with the relevant effect on rates.

And big swinging elephant trunk responses such as ‘i earn double that’ is ignorant of the general trend of this board which is, generally speaking, the wider contracting market remains broken, outside of a few hotspots.

If the best we can come up with is as a group is ‘learn terraform’ then we are ****ed.

Contracting will always be following fads, cheap resources, or skilled niches. I think there's value in knowing which will support you earning enough to get out of the game, and what the likely lateral movements are.

DevOps is a fad built on top of a skilled niche that'll continiously rebrand itself. "Learn Terraform" is an introduction into both, which combined with actual architectual knowledge allows you entry into the skilled niche.

Whats the orginsational risk that the fairly non-technical "cloud architect" has admin to my cloud and changes things directly from his EUD and how can DevOps protect against this? Where are the new risks?

But sure, if you turn it into what consultancies sell you, you get most of the risks without any of the gains. Much in the same way that architects can be skilled but are usually just doing brochue driven development.

The companies doing well today are those that fill the niches, resulting in the contracting market of fad followers.