State of the Market

[Cookielove]

Agency saying I need an enhanced DBS that I’ve to pay for …I’ve told them to pay as they’ll be making £100 plus per day off me…they do zilch !

[SussexSeagull]

I think that's a reasonable observation of Indian v UK outsourcers.

I've worked with a variety of Indian ones from the giants like TCS to Tier 2/3 firms who are more in the turnover range up to around $1-2B. The medium size firms have often been good to very good IMHO, particularly the onshore resources.

I still can't understand the accent very well of many Indian staff (and I am of part Indian ancestry!) which makes life a bit more difficult LOL.

The UK firms I've dealt with over 20 years include Cap Gemini, Accenture, Fujitsu plus a few smaller firms. The quality has been very variable to say the least and often not great value for money.

But the medium to long term direction is clear - outsourcers and other consultancies or resource models will continue to eat away at contractor opportunities.

Also, there aren't many purely British companies of any size so it is only really an international company considering international providers for outsourcing.

[SussexSeagull]

Agency saying I need an enhanced DBS that I’ve to pay for …I’ve told them to pay as they’ll be making £100 plus per day off me…they do zilch !

Unless you have a few offers on the table I would be tempted to pay the £50 for an easy life.

[Cookielove]

My place is mad keen on offshoring (FS). To the extent you have as much chance of hiring in UK as hiring Jimi Hendrix to play live at the Christmas do. A team that was 80/20 Local/off is now 20/80.

The sad thing is the offshore people are as useful as sunglasses on a one eared man. They attach huge teams of them 20 - 30 to projects, majority do sweet FA other than joining a call (quite often late!). The internet signal is generally patchy, the combination of that, background noise and accent variations means the calls may as well be conducted in Klingon.

Anything tricky (i.e. something that requires more than 4 nanoseconds thought) is punted Jonny Wilkinson style to UK for a much smaller team to deal with.

Spot on!!

I had to deal with teams in Mumbai and Hyderabad and we gave up as no one could understand the accents and after saying can you repeat that 10 times we lost the will…it was a massive fail and got brought back to Europe/Uk.

[Cookielove]

Unless you have a few offers on the table I would be tempted to pay the £50 for an easy life.

They’ve come back and agreed to pay …it’s the fact they are such chancers and greedy that irks me!

[sadkingbilly]

The UK firms I've dealt with over 20 years include Cap Gemini, Accenture, Fujitsu plus a few smaller firms. The quality has been very variable to say the least and often not great value for money.

Uk firms?

[simes]

I do hate to catastrophize but I have been out since last June and am beginning to question if I will ever work in the IT industry again.

For me, a year last October (2023). I win. But I do echo your sentiments sir.

[andromedan]

I was out for 1.5y, and I was able to secure an outside contract with a rate when I first started. Definitely, this downtime wasn't the best for my mental health, and I was considering applying for permanent jobs.

I have no idea if the market is recovering, but I had only one interview for the last 11 months, and I secured the contract. Next time, I'm not going to wait that long, and frankly, not a lot of people can do what I did.

[Bluenose]

do you think the rain in spain affects the UK markets that much?

This is now also a group therapy thread. 'State of the Market & Group Help' should be the name of the thread now

[rocktronAMP]

I was out for 1.5y, and I was able to secure an outside contract with a rate when I first started. Definitely, this downtime wasn't the best for my mental health, and I was considering applying for permanent jobs.

I have no idea if the market is recovering, but I had only one interview for the last 11 months, and I secured the contract. Next time, I'm not going to wait that long, and frankly, not a lot of people can do what I did.

Crikey. It is really none of my business. How are you surviving?
Depleting warchest.
Universal credit.
Bank of (grand) mother / grand (dad) / inheritance.
Amazon delivery / warehouse working

It's just so sad and depressing. I have experienced restructuring twice in my career: 6 months between work and then 10 months, but at least back then, the investment bank gave compo. The first restructuring / redundancy episode led to me to the first contract gig way back when.