State of the Market

[jamesbrown]

Trigger warning, it's the Fail.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/art...ort-finds.html

[Fraidycat]

Trigger warning, it's the Fail.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/art...ort-finds.html

Why the trigger warning? it is a pretty obvious logical progression.

If you want everyone in the office, then you hire local people.

But when everyone is already remote, new hires don't need to be local any more.

Hybrid working models dont suffer from this. 2 or 3 days in the office and 2 or 3 days at home. Everyone still has to be local.

When the likes of Facebook want to offer full time remote working to employees, you can bet they are thinking about $$$$$ savings they can make and not doing it out of kindness.

[jamesbrown]

Why the trigger warning?

Faily Dail.

[BlasterBates]

Trigger warning, it's the Fail.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/art...ort-finds.html

There's a worldwide shortage of developers, there will be plenty of well paid remote jobs.

[SueEllen]

Trigger warning, it's the Fail.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/art...ort-finds.html

I'm in my nth role where they tried to outsource the work outside the UK but ended up using UK based technical people. It's been going on since broadband became wide spread in the UK.

Companies try to outsource entire project teams to cheaper countries. They find they can't get people to fill the team, so have to use resources from more expensive countries like the UK.

The only downside in working in such a team is that you may have to have meetings very early in the morning or late at night....

[BlasterBates]

I'm in my nth role where they tried to outsource the work outside the UK but ended up using UK based technical people. It's been going on since broadband became wide spread in the UK.

Companies try to outsource entire project teams to cheaper countries. They find they can't get people to fill the team, so have to use resources from more expensive countries like the UK.

The only downside in working in such a team is that you may have to have meetings very early in the morning or late at night....

A ex-colleague of mine in Germany works remotely for a UK company. I regularly get enquiries for remote positions. The last company I worked for expanded locally as they were also taking on offshore developers. Using offshoring developers simply means there's more money to pay the onshore developers.

[lecyclist]

There's a worldwide shortage of developers, there will be plenty of well paid remote jobs.

Totally agree.

To differentiate yourself at the interview stage for roles requiring generic interchangeable resources, and demanding top rate, is impossible. I would suggest though, even for these types of roles, the premium of being a native english speaker working in an international english-speaking working environment is still an edge in many cases. Even more so, IMO, for remote work where there are many opportunities for misunderstandings to occur. Especially where unclear business requirements, complex processes and multi-stage data integration is concerned.

Technology is becoming more complex, not simpler, and people are not getting any smarter.

IMO contracting will never become a purely transactional relationship when $$$x < $$$y, meaning the guy in Poland gets the role you were chasing because he wants €300 a day while you wanted £400. If he's better than you with more experience, that's a different story. And why shouldn't he get the role if he's more skilled and can communicate better than you in his non-native language?

There's more than enough work to go around, the challenge is to differentiate ourselves sufficiently to secure the better roles.

[PerfectStorm]

Galloping towards a likely extension now (this'll be my third - outside of IR35). Would quite like to quit and go on a decent holiday, but seeing as we can't go anywhere, I may just have to take the work.

[jamesbrown]

There's a worldwide shortage of developers, there will be plenty of well paid remote jobs.

It really depends on your skillset. If you have a niche, in demand, skillset, then nothing will change (for as long as your skillset is niche and in demand) because you've always worked remotely for clients from across the world (else you moved around as a permie). If you don't, then the "globalisation" of your market can obviously have pretty profound impacts, even if only from the churn of companies realising that outsourcing has downsides too (i.e., switching back and forth between outsourced and local teams). There is no single market, no single impact from outsourcing. "Globalisation" is fantastic for high-end contractors.

[BlueSharp]

Totally agree.

To differentiate yourself at the interview stage for roles requiring generic interchangeable resources, and demanding top rate, is impossible. I would suggest though, even for these types of roles, the premium of being a native english speaker working in an international english-speaking working environment is still an edge in many cases. Even more so, IMO, for remote work where there are many opportunities for misunderstandings to occur. Especially where unclear business requirements, complex processes and multi-stage data integration is concerned.

Technology is becoming more complex, not simpler, and people are not getting any smarter.

IMO contracting will never become a purely transactional relationship when $$$x < $$$y, meaning the guy in Poland gets the role you were chasing because he wants €300 a day while you wanted £400. If he's better than you with more experience, that's a different story. And why shouldn't he get the role if he's more skilled and can communicate better than you in his non-native language?

There's more than enough work to go around, the challenge is to differentiate ourselves sufficiently to secure the better roles.

There was often a requirement for London based roles that you had to be local to London let alone just in the UK. That requirement is long gone and the London premium for roles is diminishing as they accept more remote working is going to be a major factor for applicates.