State of the Market

[vwdan]

Thought this was interesting - new jobs added to JobServe on Monday 30 June 1997: https://web.archive.org/web/19970131...t/jobserve.txt

Jeez, that's a bit depressing. £35 an hour for 2nd line, that's £480p/d adjusted for inflation!

Analyst Programmers on £400/pd (£744 adjusted)

Haha, look at this one from 2000:

"Java Developer required with a minimum of 2 years Java exp, client needs an interesting Java developer 2 work on an interesting Java contract on a high profile Java project with in a challenging Java environment, this is a great opportunity to extend your Java skills working on a large complex Java project/site. Funky client with who puts the funk on the Java. Java on dude!."

Uhm, yeah.

[Fraidycat]

Jeez, that's a bit depressing. £35 an hour for 2nd line, that's £480p/d adjusted for inflation!

Analyst Programmers on £400/pd (£744 adjusted)

Haha, look at this one from 2000:

"Java Developer required with a minimum of 2 years Java exp

Inflation adjusted it is depressing. But it is even more depressing than that!

I was on £675 a day in 2000 as java developer. Thats around £1200 a day in todays money.

As if that is not depressing enough. My current rate today is actually less than £675 a day, 20 years on!

[Paralytic]

Haha, look at this one from 2000:

"Java Developer required with a minimum of 2 years Java exp, client needs an interesting Java developer 2 work on an interesting Java contract on a high profile Java project with in a challenging Java environment, this is a great opportunity to extend your Java skills working on a large complex Java project/site. Funky client with who puts the funk on the Java. Java on dude!."

Uhm, yeah.

The client was obviously Java hoping that putting Java in the sentence a lot of times might Java mean that search engine might Java show it higher up the Java results list when contractors are searching for Java jobs.

Gone are those days now - software development is going down the same commoditisation path as system admins and manual testing. Java.

[Lance]

I was on £675 a day in 2000 as java developer. Thats around £1200 a day in todays money.

tosh....

In 2000 day rates were far higher than now. I was getting (well not me as I was a perm in those days) £1200 a day with 5 years experience.
You cannot compare 2000 rates with today based on inflation. It's not equivalent.

[uk contractor]

I was earning £110K PA in the 1990s & taking home about £90K PA try getting that today!!

Rates are going to continue to drop for most IT disciplines! Oversupply vs Under demand & once AI, Cloud & VM become mainstream watch them tumble again!

[Fraidycat]

Another way of looking at it as your rate to minimum wage ratio

In 2000: I was earning over 20 times the minimum wage for the day.
Today we are lucky to get 10 times the minimum wage. Outside of finance, forget it, going to below 10x

Even worse for perms, 40K a year is now around 2 times minimum wage. And many minimum wage jobs pay time and half for Saturday overtime and double rate for Sunday overtime. In IT you are lucky to get any overtime pay at all.

In future IT pay and the minimum wage are likely to get closer and closer together until they eventually merge

[SueEllen]

And many minimum wage jobs pay time and half for Saturday overtime and double rate for Sunday overtime. In IT you are lucky to get any overtime pay at all.

What jobs are these then?

People are deliberately employed in retail, hospitality, care homes, factories, etc so that their normal hours are times most people in offices don't want to work.

[DrGUID]

It's all or nothing in the IT jobs market. There's plenty going on at the moment. There will be even more jobs in the coming decade given I briefly taught programming at a high school last year and virtually nobody there could (or wanted to) code. Plus Gen X'ers like me are starting to leave the workforce.

However, despite the looming skills crisis, hiring is worse than ever. Indeed is full of companies who are looking for the perfect developer.

Tragedies I've endured this time:

• Two soy boy interviewers found my blog (equivalent of recruiter finding somebody's account here lol) where I bemoan my 20 year joke of a career (albeit a lucrative one). They tried to get me to change my mind on the state of the industry.
• Woke up early this morning for a Teams meeting - the interviewer never turned up.
• Given brutally tough technical questions for a role yesterday (i.e. the sort of SQL query that can only be solved by browsing StackOverflow). Working for god programmers is soul-destroying, so that was a bullet dodged.
• Asked by a law software company to build them an app for a first stage interview that would have been a good day's work. I asked them if their lawyer clients worked for free.
• Applied for role on Indeed but was rejected. Applied again and got through to second stage.
• I took time out of the industry and literally everyone is amazed I still know C#. I'm going to start asking them if they forgot how to speak English after coming back from their fortnight on the Algarve.

Oh and those timewaster agents (role going in a bank, I just need 2 references) are back off furlough.

As for Jobserve - I once knew a few guys who worked there. It sounded awful. I'll say no more...

[edison]

Things are gathering pace for me. Having almost daily calls with recruiters and my CV has gone to two clients for outside IR35 roles at up to £900/day plus an FTC role that's about £180-200k package. Many recruiters and headhunters are telling me the same thing though: it's a lot busier on the perm front than interim/contract.

[Destiny2]

Desktop Support -Worcester

Worcester
1 month +
Monday to Friday 9.00 am-5.30 pm
£13.00 per hour Umbrella

Well, that's very close to the minimum wage after IR35 deductions! Are these people for real?