State of the Market

[nomadd]

I'm similar, 80% of my contracts have been found in July or December.

100% of my contracts have been found in the first 12 months of the year.

[Old Greg]

100% of my contracts have been found in the first 12 months of the year.

My contracts find me.

[tsmith]

Devops took over the hype train from agile about 4 years ago.

Contract market was hot for Devops as companies could see a way to automate away sys admin roles by switching to the cloud and using automation tools. Or they tried agile and failed and thought devops was a magic bullet to a high performance team

There were of course no 'dev ops engineers' at the start - hence high day rates. People just learnt AWS and chef, ansible, terraform etc. And rebadged themselves. I worked for a devops consultancy briefly - not in a dev role. And I would get dev ops engineers calls.

Now many have moved to the cloud - and the devops hype trains cools - demand for dev ops contract engineers will fall.

devops contract market = the jury is out.

One well known agency circulated a word document two weeks ago with a list of a dozen benched devops contract candidates.

And yeah, we all see the adverts on Jobslut but i am not sure how many of them are real.

On the other hand, Python with R skills and able to manipulate data subsets within a lake means you can get a lottery ticket to the front office bonus pool and don't need to post on here anymore with us peasants as £35k will be your monthly take-home.

[anonymouse]

Applied for a role advertised by 6 agencies

nobody called, 7th agency found my CV and have put me forward. Not the best rate, but 10 minutes from home.

[GhostofTarbera]

Interview today for permie £120K role

Walked into the room

Panel of 7 interviewers + agent

Billionaire owner sitting in the middle - I’m thinking I should have had that 3rd glass of wine beforehand rather than 2

Question 1 from billionaire owner

Why don’t contractors want to be permie


Because we don’t need to hang around a suck up to tulipty bosses with power complex that needs 7 people to interview (was reply in my head)

Gave a bland reply about IR35

Went downhill fast

Asking me bollocks questions about nothing to do with the role - where everyone in the room was terrified to ask anything the boss was not asking,

Got to a point where I thought the game was up, so might as well have some fun

Boss asked me if I had any questions

I asked how the **** could thus company afford to have 7 people interview for this role I could do standing on my head, and not ask 1 question about the role itself

Boss said it was the best question of the day

and showed me the door





Sent from my iPhone using Contractor UK Forum

[LetterBox]

Interview today for permie £120K role

Walked into the room

Panel of 7 interviewers + agent

Billionaire owner sitting in the middle - I’m thinking I should have had that 3rd glass of wine beforehand rather than 2

Question 1 from billionaire owner

Why don’t contractors want to be permie


Because we don’t need to hang around a suck up to tulipty bosses with power complex that needs 7 people to interview (was reply in my head)

Gave a bland reply about IR35

Went downhill fast

Asking me bollocks questions about nothing to do with the role - where everyone in the room was terrified to ask anything the boss was not asking,

Got to a point where I thought the game was up, so might as well have some fun

Boss asked me if I had any questions

I asked how the **** could thus company afford to have 7 people interview for this role I could do standing on my head, and not ask 1 question about the role itself

Boss said it was the best question of the day

and showed me the door





Sent from my iPhone using Contractor UK Forum

[PermieToContractorAndBack]

Interview today for permie £120K role

Walked into the room

Panel of 7 interviewers + agent

Billionaire owner sitting in the middle - I’m thinking I should have had that 3rd glass of wine beforehand rather than 2

Question 1 from billionaire owner

Why don’t contractors want to be permie


Because we don’t need to hang around a suck up to tulipty bosses with power complex that needs 7 people to interview (was reply in my head)

Gave a bland reply about IR35

Went downhill fast

Asking me bollocks questions about nothing to do with the role - where everyone in the room was terrified to ask anything the boss was not asking,

Got to a point where I thought the game was up, so might as well have some fun

Boss asked me if I had any questions

I asked how the **** could thus company afford to have 7 people interview for this role I could do standing on my head, and not ask 1 question about the role itself

Boss said it was the best question of the day

and showed me the door

So did you want the job or were you just wasting everyone's time including yours?

[PerfectStorm]

Like this!

But I think its fair to say that December and August are the months most of us tend to be lean pickings.

Having spent august and September depleting 2 months worth of war chest this year, I'm not going to disagree!

That was voluntary, too - I must've really hated that contract.

[CoolCat]

Interview today for permie £120K role

Walked into the room

Panel of 7 interviewers + agent

Billionaire owner sitting in the middle - I’m thinking I should have had that 3rd glass of wine beforehand rather than 2

Question 1 from billionaire owner

Why don’t contractors want to be permie


Because we don’t need to hang around a suck up to tulipty bosses with power complex that needs 7 people to interview (was reply in my head)

Gave a bland reply about IR35

Went downhill fast

Asking me bollocks questions about nothing to do with the role - where everyone in the room was terrified to ask anything the boss was not asking,

Got to a point where I thought the game was up, so might as well have some fun

Boss asked me if I had any questions

I asked how the **** could thus company afford to have 7 people interview for this role I could do standing on my head, and not ask 1 question about the role itself

Boss said it was the best question of the day

and showed me the door





Sent from my iPhone using Contractor UK Forum

I went to an interview with one of the big tech firms a few weeks ago, about 12 people there in the room "interviewing" me, for half a day. Complete and utter shambles of incoherent unstructured nonsense. It would be impossible for any one person to deal with the constant bombardment of mostly random irrelevant questions. I did start to gently take the mickey.

Anyways they will not be on the list of possible vendors next time I am writing up shortlists.

[eek]

I went to an interview with one of the big tech firms a few weeks ago, about 12 people there in the room "interviewing" me, for half a day. Complete and utter shambles of incoherent unstructured nonsense. It would be impossible for any one person to deal with the constant bombardment of mostly random irrelevant questions. I did start to gently take the mickey.

Anyways they will not be on the list of possible vendors next time I am writing up shortlists.

It's remarkable how few companies understand that today's employee / vendor / customer is tomorrow's vendor / customer / employee and how you treat them in one way impacts how they treat you in the future.