State of the Market

[Disguised Contractor]

The move to infrastructure-as-code has been happening for years; but it's not about being able to remodel at the drop of a hat, it's about assurance.

If you have code that defines your stack you can:

• "Shift-left" and run "compliance-as-code", which basically means a good security team can automate god awful approvals process. You then get higher levels of trust, because instead of having a couple of guys slow the org down doing the same scratch the surface checks, they can actually write a ruleset they continuously improve on.
• You get a lot of trust in your tests. Add in CI/CD and you curtail human-error, misconfiguration, and "works on dev". You're basically building trust in automated OAT and that things will actually work when deployed. It also plays a large part in modern DR.

Architects that don't really understand the why of it all aren't particularly useful.

For the record though, I think the market sucks for pretty much everyone.

I heartily agree with absolutely everything you say - it's nice to read from somebody who truly understands it. In fact, on those two specific technical aspects, I know of specific products that can handle that compliance aspect for you, secure it by automation, tie it down according to need by its own ruleset.

Which is why the current demand is for Architecture Developers, and which I'm attempting to fulfil.

[perplexed]

Saw a nice ad today, "Business Solutions developer", "East of England".

Seems to be health related, Crystal report, Java, SQL Server etc.

Inside IR35, helpfully gives different rates for PAYE, Umbrella and Ltd.

£15.13, £16.96 and £18.69 per hour respectively...

I'm sensing they may not get many or indeed any candidates.

[ContractorHardman]

Saw a nice ad today, "Business Solutions developer", "East of England".

Seems to be health related, Crystal report, Java, SQL Server etc.

Inside IR35, helpfully gives different rates for PAYE, Umbrella and Ltd.

£15.13, £16.96 and £18.69 per hour respectively...

I'm sensing they may not get many or indeed any candidates.

Everyone is looking for World Class Employees on the cheap just now but deary me.... That is awful!

[eek]

Everyone is looking for World Class Employees on the cheap just now but deary me.... That is awful!

Just saw a job in my field for £350 a day rather than the £500 or so I would expect - got to love a trier (and note the name so that I know who to watch out for in the future).

[perplexed]

Everyone is looking for World Class Employees on the cheap just now but deary me.... That is awful!

Looks like a return to the bad old days of "advertise at such a pathetically low rate we get no interest so can get visas for foreign staff" adverts...

[perplexed]

Just saw a job in my field for £350 a day rather than the £500 or so I would expect - got to love a trier (and note the name so that I know who to watch out for in the future).

Agents / clients want to lower rates, contractors want to raise them. All part of the game.

It's also situation dependent I guess, £350 can still add to warchest to get through this period if required... depends on outgoings.

EDIT: For something local, I'd be flexible with regards to rate at this point in time. Below my usual rate expectation? Sure. Above zero company income? Absolutely.

[Bluenose]

and I'm getting annoyed that they are increasingly being included as mandatory skills, ostensibly simply as differentiators / filters for screening purposes.

You are not alone bud, it is just the state of the market.

the reason why the market demand is flooded with devops/devops-architect roles is that the startup market is still quite hot and there is a on-going bun fight over engineers with bigger employers and many higher end engineers can't get decent perm roles so this part of the market is pretty much contract only and will continue to be as companies still don't value engineers.

I have seen spec sheets where roles demand a degree in advanced mathematics, five programming languages and a load of other stuff.

Don't lose faith, keep applying for when roles, if you cant stand the chest burn, exit via a perm role for a few years for a nice 40% pay cut, there are plenty of roles in the 95-115k basic range.

[eek]

Agents / clients want to lower rates, contractors want to raise them. All part of the game.

It's also situation dependent I guess, £350 can still add to warchest to get through this period if required... depends on outgoings.

EDIT: For something local, I'd be flexible with regards to rate at this point in time. Below my usual rate expectation? Sure. Above zero company income? Absolutely.

This is a direct advert - not an agency - an agency I could understand trying to cut costs - this is more trying to get a contractor on permie wages.

[FIERCE TANK BATTLE]

Saw a nice ad today, "Business Solutions developer", "East of England".

Seems to be health related, Crystal report, Java, SQL Server etc.

Inside IR35, helpfully gives different rates for PAYE, Umbrella and Ltd.

£15.13, £16.96 and £18.69 per hour respectively...

I'm sensing they may not get many or indeed any candidates.

Oh don't worry, they'll get someone. Just like another place I worked where a contractor was on about 50% of market rate.

His code was the worst I've ever seen in my life. Supposed to be ASP.NET MVC but he didn't know what MVC actually was so he just ignored that and wrote it like something from 15 years ago.

He then managed to trash the customer facing live site (including the entire CMS database) upgrading it, and didn't make a backup.

He was fired.

I hate to think how much he cost them, in lost data, lost man hours, and lost productivity when his code was so bad it took 30-60 seconds to submit a page.

He'll probably apply the job above and do the same. And someone will be like "Bloody contractors, what a bunch of cowboys!".

[eek]

Oh don't worry, they'll get someone. Just like another place I worked where a contractor was on about 50% of market rate.

His code was the worst I've ever seen in my life. Supposed to be ASP.NET MVC but he didn't know what MVC actually was so he just ignored that and wrote it like something from 15 years ago.

He then managed to trash the customer facing live site (including the entire CMS database) upgrading it, and didn't make a backup.

He was fired.

I hate to think how much he cost them, in lost data, lost man hours, and lost productivity when his code was so bad it took 30-60 seconds to submit a page.

He'll probably apply the job above and do the same. And someone will be like "Bloody contractors, what a bunch of cowboys!".

I avoid cheapstake companies - their only purpose is a source of repair work when things fall apart.