State of the Market

[edison]

Back in role next month.

Actually been looking for 11 months (9m whilst in not nice role, 2m post). All that time only four interviews. I suspect I was making up the numbers in at least two of those.

Agents are desperate, trying to drum up leads from anywhere. The old two reference trick has been used a couple times.
Ghosted more often than Bill Murray.

A couple of old colleagues have given up on IT and are training to be tradesmen. Better demand and in this day and age, better money too.

I know a few IT guys who trained to be electricians about 20 years ago so as to always have something to fall back on, but still work in IT. A couple are in fairly senior roles now.

My teenage son is exceptionally academic and for a couple of years now we've thought he would want to do Computer Science or similar at one of the top universities. But recently I wonder if he would be better off doing Maths instead. I'm not convinced a CS degree will be that valuable in 5-6 years time, career wise.

[hungry_hog]

Back in role next month.

Actually been looking for 11 months (9m whilst in not nice role, 2m post). All that time only four interviews. I suspect I was making up the numbers in at least two of those.

Agents are desperate, trying to drum up leads from anywhere. The old two reference trick has been used a couple times.
Ghosted more often than Bill Murray.

A couple of old colleagues have given up on IT and are training to be tradesmen. Better demand and in this day and age, better money too.

[sreed]

I've managed large scale local gov recruitment and assume central gov is broadly similar. They tried hard to attract non-traditional candidates especially women, neuro-diverse, non-graduates etc. The application process is usually tedious and you are asked to write a supporting statement of typically one to two pages.

This is a deal breaker for many candidates and based on the supporting statements I've seen, the majority are quite poor.

So if you apply for one of these roles, you've got a decent chance. I joined a call this week for potential candidates to learn more about a senior perm central gov role at Assistant Director level. Just 6 people joined. I'd be surprised if they get more than 20 applications.

I don’t have as much experience as Edison in PS hiring but from the little that I do I’ll second what they’ve said above.

It is a pain to apply for a PS permie job properly but that probably does reduce the candidate pool significantly. And based on how the recruitment process is designed, there’s a much higher chance of selecting candidates that have the required qualifications/experience for the role irrespective of being the ‘wrong age’, ‘overqualified’, perceived to be taking too big of a salary cut, etc.

[edison]

That's the same level of job that is being offered at £750 a day inside..

True but at that civil service grade, you'd get around 27% of salary pension contribution and 25/26 days holiday which rises by a day a year.

Not to be sniffed at in the absence of anything else.

I've managed large scale local gov recruitment and assume central gov is broadly similar. They tried hard to attract non-traditional candidates especially women, neuro-diverse, non-graduates etc. The application process is usually tedious and you are asked to write a supporting statement of typically one to two pages.

This is a deal breaker for many candidates and based on the supporting statements I've seen, the majority are quite poor.

So if you apply for one of these roles, you've got a decent chance. I joined a call this week for potential candidates to learn more about a senior perm central gov role at Assistant Director level. Just 6 people joined. I'd be surprised if they get more than 20 applications.

[sreed]

That's the same level of job that is being offered at £750 a day inside..

True, but with different gatekeepers, a different hiring process and the usual contract vs permie pros & cons in Schumistar’s context.

[eek]

I don’t think it’s you. It’s probably a combination of trends that you’ve identified in your post, constant offshoring and oversupply fuelled by mass immigration.

If you are open to permanent positions, it might be worth looking for appropriate roles in the PS - civil service departments or the NHS.

Having been involved in one PS recruitment process (from the hiring end) during a contract recently, their process is remarkably blind (no personal identifying info like name, age, uni, etc.) until late in the process so you’ve a better chance of not being labelled ‘overqualified’, ‘too old’, ‘poor culture fit’ etc. at the outset, which a lot of recruiters will informally use to set aside CVs in times of plenty. There’s also a lot of checks and balances throughout the process to discourage lazy hiring processes.

Don’t give up on yourself, it might just be a matter or resetting expectations and looking at it from a different angle. All the best!

That's the same level of job that is being offered at £750 a day inside..

[sreed]

Coding, development has significantly changed in the last 5/10yrs. The quality of code is excellent now.

The old systems where we had massive amounts of code and services that needed debugging, understanding and enhancing seem to be getting few and far between.

The last time I was asked to debug and fix an existing application was in 2019 for BNP Paribas.

Now days with such good management, testing and deployment systems, it is unusal for a bugs or defects to be released in the live environment, unless you are bet365.

But essentially as the quality of code and systems has improved, the reliance on a super-developer is less so, companies by in large can now mange it software projects amicable well. Developers are effective brick layers, who can be hired globally, without massive business knowledge as we are all now working, building small cohesive Microservices of systems which are tested to the nth level.

I could be wrong, but it does seem like the good old days of developers being paid £100ph (2001), are long over.

I have a mulitide of skills, I can. program in C#, Java, EpiServer, Node.JS. Either on Java or Mac or windows platforms.

I have previously been security cleared working for the government and have a number of banks on my CV. I live and work in London and would be happy to go to an office 5 days a week.

I have a degree in Computer Science and a Masters in Software Engineering from Oxford Uni.

I have a clean credit file, clean driving license and a clean CRB check.

So what the **** is wrong with me?!

My mental and physical health is usually good but this is starting to wear me down a little.

I don’t think it’s you. It’s probably a combination of trends that you’ve identified in your post, constant offshoring and oversupply fuelled by mass immigration.

If you are open to permanent positions, it might be worth looking for appropriate roles in the PS - civil service departments or the NHS.

Having been involved in one PS recruitment process (from the hiring end) during a contract recently, their process is remarkably blind (no personal identifying info like name, age, uni, etc.) until late in the process so you’ve a better chance of not being labelled ‘overqualified’, ‘too old’, ‘poor culture fit’ etc. at the outset, which a lot of recruiters will informally use to set aside CVs in times of plenty. There’s also a lot of checks and balances throughout the process to discourage lazy hiring processes.

Don’t give up on yourself, it might just be a matter or resetting expectations and looking at it from a different angle. All the best!

[dsc]

Coding, development has significantly changed in the last 5/10yrs. The quality of code is excellent now.

The old systems where we had massive amounts of code and services that needed debugging, understanding and enhancing seem to be getting few and far between.

The last time I was asked to debug and fix an existing application was in 2019 for BNP Paribas.

Now days with such good management, testing and deployment systems, it is unusal for a bugs or defects to be released in the live environment, unless you are bet365.

But essentially as the quality of code and systems has improved, the reliance on a super-developer is less so, companies by in large can now mange it software projects amicable well. Developers are effective brick layers, who can be hired globally, without massive business knowledge as we are all now working, building small cohesive Microservices of systems which are tested to the nth level.

I could be wrong, but it does seem like the good old days of developers being paid £100ph (2001), are long over.

I have a mulitide of skills, I can. program in C#, Java, EpiServer, Node.JS. Either on Java or Mac or windows platforms.

I have previously been security cleared working for the government and have a number of banks on my CV. I live and work in London and would be happy to go to an office 5 days a week.

I have a degree in Computer Science and a Masters in Software Engineering from Oxford Uni.

I have a clean credit file, clean driving license and a clean CRB check.

So what the **** is wrong with me?!

My mental and physical health is usually good but this is starting to wear me down a little.

Are you getting call backs for interviews, or not even that? It might be the Oxford degree that scares some people off thinking you'll want £10923811872639812 per hour / year, it might be industry specific (ie. banks being less busy?), might just be the market flooded with loads of fairly skills or low skilled devs who are ok with £35k a year just to get experience. You might also be in this odd place where you are overskilled for fairly simple jobs, underskilled for CTOs etc. not have enough niche skills for speciality jobs, but have enough generic ones which other, cheaper, younger people have.

As for code quality, come work in the wind industry, you won't believe the tulip there

[Fraidycat]

So what the **** is wrong with me?!

I think you said it yourself a few weeks ago, you are not that great at technical interviews. In this market the few employers and clients that are looking for developers are being extra picky just because they can be.

If you are not getting called for interviews, that is just a market that is swamped with candidates and CVs, it is not you, your best hope in that situation is to use your existing network of agents and previous clients and coworkers etc

[SchumiStars]

This is crazy
Not being funny but seems like you are being paid an offshore rate for an onshore job.

Have you looked at companies like Detica / BAE systems? They are chock full of technical people from top unis.

Sorry bore off non-developer folk with the Java ecological system. In other words, please skip this post ...0


There was truth in that.... The git repo monorepo was huge and the code was flipping complicated.
There were so many Java interfaces `LocalBenefitPaymentCalculationService.java` and then
the implementations `LocalBenefitPaymentCalculationServiceImpl.java`, litterally 1000's of the buggers spread across different projects. They follow some Domain-Driven Design pattern from the 2012/2013/2014 ... some Googler or some ThoughtWorker bod who they felt were tops 10 years ago. Massive Git repo with every single piece of stuff, so the release process for these microservices. ZOMG!

There was no Spring Framework or Spring Boot in their microservices, this was J2EE code and JAX RS. You couldn't build it all and test it all on your machine. Local unit tests might be ok, but End-2-End forget about it. I think they just about to get into Kubernetes when I was there. I didn't last long: 4 months. Like I said, DWP, universal credit never again... Eww!

Coding, development has significantly changed in the last 5/10yrs. The quality of code is excellent now.

The old systems where we had massive amounts of code and services that needed debugging, understanding and enhancing seem to be getting few and far between.

The last time I was asked to debug and fix an existing application was in 2019 for BNP Paribas.

Now days with such good management, testing and deployment systems, it is unusal for a bugs or defects to be released in the live environment, unless you are bet365.

But essentially as the quality of code and systems has improved, the reliance on a super-developer is less so, companies by in large can now mange it software projects amicable well. Developers are effective brick layers, who can be hired globally, without massive business knowledge as we are all now working, building small cohesive Microservices of systems which are tested to the nth level.

I could be wrong, but it does seem like the good old days of developers being paid £100ph (2001), are long over.

I have a mulitide of skills, I can. program in C#, Java, EpiServer, Node.JS. Either on Java or Mac or windows platforms.

I have previously been security cleared working for the government and have a number of banks on my CV. I live and work in London and would be happy to go to an office 5 days a week.

I have a degree in Computer Science and a Masters in Software Engineering from Oxford Uni.

I have a clean credit file, clean driving license and a clean CRB check.

So what the **** is wrong with me?!

My mental and physical health is usually good but this is starting to wear me down a little.