State of the Market

[jamesbrown]

Also lets not forget those rates are not really for bums-on-seats kind of guys, it's often specialised / niche positions and people are hired as consultants, more for their knowledge on the subject rather than for being "implementators". If you take on someone to design some one-of-a-kind system and they are there for 3 months, on a 2yr long project, £1k per day isn't a lot if it guarantees the project will be a success. It's a totally different ball game imho and perhaps this is why some people here simply cannot grasp the idea of such rates.

Exactly - consultancy is totally different to BoS IT work (which is itself totally legitimate and much better paid than most jobs, but there's little point of comparison except that they involve contracts of some kind). A rate of £1k+ per day is a rounding error when the exposure is millions and above and these positions are not a rarity, they're just (increasingly) rare in bog-standard IT contracting.

[gables]

There is a tendency to assume everyone around here is a code monkey, even if there's a preponderance of such roles. Fees > £1k per day (or fixed price equivalent) are totally vanilla in a whole range of industries, like financial auditing, law (although they operate as LLPs), interims, many high-end engineering roles. The niche British attitude applies here too where being on a high rate or salary is considered something to hide or an "obvious" brag or lie. Bollocks. There will be 2-5% of people around here on those rates, I suspect... or at least were. Current market is more uniformly pants than it has been in recent years.

Indeed, I haven't coded since writing machine code for my ZX81 (you had to with 1K RAM) and Pascal on a DECsystem-20 back in 1985 when studying in Dundee. In fact it was here when working on project with my mate where I realised, through watching him program and getting an inkling into his thought processes, that I wasn't really cut out to be a programmer per se

[SchumiStars]

This should be pinned as the most ridiculous post on here, "it's impossible cause you'd need niche skills and everyone knows niche skills are impossible"

I am arguing that the poster claims to have been paid £1kpd by TCS. A company, from what I have gathered, supposedly hire contractors at low rates, if they ever do.

[oliverson]

Had a conversation earlier today with a very good contractor friend of mine.

Turns out his client was hiring for a front-end developer and received in excess of 1,100 applications, 99% of which weren't remotely qualified for the role!

How do you even think about tackling that situation?

[quackhandle]

2K per day you say...?



qh

[SussexSeagull]

Had a conversation earlier today with a very good contractor friend of mine.

Turns out his client was hiring for a front-end developer and received in excess of 1,100 applications, 99% of which weren't remotely qualified for the role!

How do you even think about tackling that situation?

This is a large part of the problem. When applications start getting into three figures it is a lottery.

[Yuri F]

...When applications start getting into three figures it is a lottery...

no need to bootstrap it, (especially with such low density of positives since 99% is junk), it's labor or capital
a) Outsource cheaper labor countries to China/India and department of 100 ppl will process it for you
(GDPR, plus probably mostly Chinese/Indian candidates passed screening as bias).

b) In a wake of AI hype - LLM for highest required buzzword hit score threshold (ETL to download and ditch docs in wrong format).
and voila - you get just 20 out of 1000 to work with.

Got a call from "Adam the recruiter" this weekend (!),
on a first 30 seconds I thought I was speaking to human, voice sounded human, intonations,
but systematically logical constructs and consistent pauses tipped me off towards generative TTS,
just last year only connection (waiting for response and then patch to operator) was automated, but now this.
unless it's extremely pedantic and articulate employee of course...

[SussexSeagull]

no need to bootstrap it, (especially with such low density of positives since 99% is junk), it's labor or capital
a) Outsource cheaper labor countries to China/India and department of 100 ppl will process it for you
(GDPR, plus probably mostly Chinese/Indian candidates passed screening as bias).

b) In a wake of AI hype - LLM for highest required buzzword hit score threshold (ETL to download and ditch docs in wrong format).
and voila - you get just 20 out of 1000 to work with.

Got a call from "Adam the recruiter" this weekend (!),
on a first 30 seconds I thought I was speaking to human, voice sounded human, intonations,
but systematically logical constructs and consistent pauses tipped me off towards generative TTS,
just last year only connection (waiting for response and then patch to operator) was automated, but now this.
unless it's extremely pedantic and articulate employee of course...

I don't know about all that but you kind of prove my point. To take my example of testing, I have yet to meet a bug tracking system that you couldn't be competent in within about an hour and pick up the advanced bit as needed as you go. If someone is using one of the more obscure systems then quite possibly a lot of very good candidates are going to be excluded in a key word search (or whatever someone is calling it when they badge it as AI and charge a small fortune for agents to use it). That's before you start getting into testing frameworks that seem to increase numbers by the month.

Further problem is when you start applying through LinkedIn jobs most of the time you go off to another site and you don't really know now what happens to your personal details after that so any e-mail you get out of the blue gets treated with suspicion.

It is almost to the point actually applying for contracts/jobs on line is pointless and you are better waiting for them to come to you.

[Dorkeaux]

It is almost to the point actually applying for contracts/jobs on line is pointless and you are better waiting for them to come to you.

I wouldn't go that far. But the dynamic continues to shift.
Probably like most people here, I relied solely on Jobserve for many years.
All the agencies just dumped their books of business there, and waited for the contractors to apply.

Over the last few years I'm getting an increasing number of approaches from agents on Linkedin.
Also, agents I've worked with in the past are more actively using their address books to call known quantities for roles.
Very rarely, a previous client will get in touch.

But I still use Jobserve, in spite of the fake roles and 1000+ applicants/role.

For me it's about getting my CV in as many hands as possible.

[BlueSharp]

2K per day you say...?



qh

I thought office holders had to be inside IR35?