State of the Market

[esse]

Well its been many years since I posted on here but I too am finding the market unlike anything I've seen before. In 18 years of working in software perm/contract roles the last time I was out of work for any length of time was 2008. In all those years I can only remember on two occasions not being offered a role after an interview and at one point I was being headhunted. In March my project was cancelled and I was laid off, since then I have applied for over 160 perm/contract roles and interviewed with 9 companies unsuccessfully, these days each role seems to have anything from 2-6 interview stages which wasn't the case two years ago when I was last looking. Yes, clearly I need to up my interviewing game :-)

There's an article on LinkedIn from yesterday discussing the 11,000 upcoming job cuts at Vodafone, plus the recent cuts at Meta, Google, Amazon, banks and even the civil service have been tasked with drastically reducing numbers so there is currently a lot of competition out there for less roles. It's left me feeling very depressed and struggling to get into a positive frame of mind for my next interview later today.

[rocktronAMP]

Well its been many years since I posted on here but I too am finding the market unlike anything I've seen before. In 18 years of working in software perm/contract roles the last time I was out of work for any length of time was 2008. In all those years I can only remember on two occasions not being offered a role after an interview and at one point I was being headhunted. In March my project was cancelled and I was laid off, since then I have applied for over 160 perm/contract roles and interviewed with 9 companies unsuccessfully, these days each role seems to have anything from 2-6 interview stages which wasn't the case two years ago when I was last looking. Yes, clearly I need to up my interviewing game :-)

There's an article on LinkedIn from yesterday discussing the 11,000 upcoming job cuts at Vodafone, plus the recent cuts at Meta, Google, Amazon, banks and even the civil service have been tasked with drastically reducing numbers so there is currently a lot of competition out there for less roles. It's left me feeling very depressed and struggling to get into a positive frame of mind for my next interview later today.

[esse] get the f*** out of the house / office right now if you are reading this and go for an intense 15-30 minute walk, clear your head. Visualise success. Imagine better days. Do it!

[NorthWestPerm2Contr]

Well its been many years since I posted on here but I too am finding the market unlike anything I've seen before. In 18 years of working in software perm/contract roles the last time I was out of work for any length of time was 2008. In all those years I can only remember on two occasions not being offered a role after an interview and at one point I was being headhunted. In March my project was cancelled and I was laid off, since then I have applied for over 160 perm/contract roles and interviewed with 9 companies unsuccessfully, these days each role seems to have anything from 2-6 interview stages which wasn't the case two years ago when I was last looking. Yes, clearly I need to up my interviewing game :-)

There's an article on LinkedIn from yesterday discussing the 11,000 upcoming job cuts at Vodafone, plus the recent cuts at Meta, Google, Amazon, banks and even the civil service have been tasked with drastically reducing numbers so there is currently a lot of competition out there for less roles. It's left me feeling very depressed and struggling to get into a positive frame of mind for my next interview later today.

Stop trolling. You should be celebrating the fact you got offered an interview you baffoon. I haven't had any calls for weeks. I'm still in contract but it's getting close to the end now.....

[Fraidycat]

Stop trolling. You should be celebrating the fact you got offered an interview you baffoon. I haven't had any calls for weeks. I'm still in contract but it's getting close to the end now.....

Yeah, obvious troll, if he had 20 odd interviews at 9 different companies in the last 2 months, then things cant be that bad for him.
It is when you hear nothing and have zero interviews left in your pipeline that you start thinking depressing thoughts.

[dsc]

Stop trolling. You should be celebrating the fact you got offered an interview you baffoon. I haven't had any calls for weeks. I'm still in contract but it's getting close to the end now.....

[sarcastic]You should be celebrating the fact you are still in contract you baffoon, others are out of contract with no calls...[/sarcastic]

Yeah, obvious troll, if he had 20 odd interviews at 9 different companies in the last 2 months, then things cant be that bad for him.
It is when you hear nothing and have zero interviews left in your pipeline that you start thinking depressing thoughts.

I think you start feeling depressed when you start feeling depressed not when you say so. What good is 10293871029830123 interviews if it amounts to nothing?

[Bluenose]

The burner has gone off once this week, at least I know the phone is still working.

bleak.

[SussexSeagull]

In my experience if you get enough interviews then you get a contract. Admittedly in the current climate roles are more likely to evaporate at any stage and I have seen this happen after giving a good interview.

I tend to find the ones where they want multiple interviews, a test or a protracted process never end in a positive result as they seem to keep going until someone thinks of a reason not to hire you, but that is nothing new.

[suityou01]

I had an interview last week. For a role paying not well, but ok. Front end developer.
They wanted to use NextJS and NestJS together, which intrigued me somewhat. I build a model stack using docker-compose, using all aspects listed on their job spec including azure functions, prisma, typescript.

It took me a couple of days to get this stack working, and demonstrate the 2 front end technologies working together. I had time to do this, and thought if I could grok the tech properly I would give a more confident interview.

This was last Thursday. I heard back finally yesterday.

I didn't get it. Apparent an answer I gave to a question about data modelling was not up to scratch.

This was a FRONT END developer role. Data modelling was not listed on the Job spec.

This was the only interview to come through for me in 3 months.

It's getting more and more random.

[SussexSeagull]

I had an interview last week. For a role paying not well, but ok. Front end developer.
They wanted to use NextJS and NestJS together, which intrigued me somewhat. I build a model stack using docker-compose, using all aspects listed on their job spec including azure functions, prisma, typescript.

It took me a couple of days to get this stack working, and demonstrate the 2 front end technologies working together. I had time to do this, and thought if I could grok the tech properly I would give a more confident interview.

This was last Thursday. I heard back finally yesterday.

I didn't get it. Apparent an answer I gave to a question about data modelling was not up to scratch.

This was a FRONT END developer role. Data modelling was not listed on the Job spec.

This was the only interview to come through for me in 3 months.

It's getting more and more random.

My theory is contracts like this with a client who doesn't really know what they want are actually not related to the buoyancy of the contract market but in better times they get diluted by the more straightforward opportunities. If the market was better you might not have indulged them so much and if you had you probably would have got something soon afterwards and not given it much thought.

[avonleigh]

And following on from Vodafone, BT shedding 55,000 jobs by the end of the decade. Not good.