State of the Market

[oliverson]

.Net is dead. Always had poor market share compared to Java. Although both markets have been dead for 2yrs now.

EPiServer CMS C# also dead ATM. Loads of companies using it and very specialized. Very difficult to learn without doing the courses or sponsor.

Node/Angular seems to be picking up but loads of candidates out there ATM.

Not seen any work for AI that I can do or want to do tbh. Not sure when this big AI boom will hit commercial applications and companies will be scrambling to find resources to help them but I am going to guess that it's not going to happen anytime soon, so I don't need to worry about it.

Which means one thing, more cycling and running

Steady on Forrest, I'm seeing a few .NET contracts of late, having just got off the phone for one, and in fact had an interview for one just last week. Shame they're still stuck in 20 years ago mentality, newing up ADO.NET command and connection objects to invoke stored procedures. Yuk! I pulled the plug on that interview after question number 3 of 10 when it was clear they had a luddite mentality.

[sadkingbilly]

Steady on Forrest, I'm seeing a few .NET contracts of late, having just got off the phone for one, and in fact had an interview for one just last week. Shame they're still stuck in 20 years ago mentality, newing up ADO.NET command and connection objects to invoke stored procedures. Yuk! I pulled the plug on that interview after question number 3 of 10 when it was clear they had a luddite mentality.

wow! - you're so wonderful.
I don't understand why you can't get a gig.
really, i don't.

[oliverson]

wow! - you're so wonderful.
I don't understand why you can't get a gig.
really, i don't.

Let's just say I'm a bit 'picky'.

[sadkingbilly]

aye, - right!

[fatJock]

Let's just say I'm a bit 'picky'.

Every time I read posts from you it's like two different people posting

You want a gig - you don't. There's no work - there's loads. You're retired - you're not. You love living abroad - you hate it.

[GJABS]

TBH, I'm not too interested in learning new stuff unless there is a business case. I'd much prefer to go to the gym.

But if "new stuff" is the only thing that might offer work, maybe you might have to do that?

Over the past 3 months I've been occupying (some) of my bench time doing said stock market analysis. I've written code that runs in an Azure function app to extract social media data from the web, storing it in an Azure SQL database. Separately I'm downloading real-time stock price data for 500 stocks from the Interactive Brokers API, and saving that to the same database. Marrying the two datasets together I've been writing Python code to analyze it (using the Keras Sequential software) to see whether it has any prediction capabilities. 100% a learning curve, as I didn't have any Python prior. No patterns found yet, but I'm starting off with artificial data where I know there are already patterns, and am verifying the correct functionality of the code to detect these (and they do to some degree with large datasets > 100,000 rows).

I don't expect to get rich from it, but if I can just make a few quid from any edge cases that have not already been exploited from the big banks then I'll derive a degree of satisfaction from that and not feel like a complete waste of space at the moment

[oliverson]

Every time I read posts from you it's like two different people posting

You want a gig - you don't. There's no work - there's loads. You're retired - you're not. You love living abroad - you hate it.

I decided to retire, discovered pretty soon that it was a bad move and now I'm looking for a gig, finding the market very 'changeable'. Sometimes there's a hot rush and other times absolutely nothing, tumbleweed blowing. I've seen a lot of activity today on JobServe and perhaps I need to narrow my search as it's picking up all kinds of rubbish. As for abroad, I do have a love/hate relationship with it. I mean, 20 years of ownership, you're bound to aren't you? I feel the same about the UK. But there is one constant, after 2.5 years of leasing this Tesla, I'm still as much in love with it as the day I took delivery.

[SussexSeagull]

Let's just say I'm a bit 'picky'.

Must confess that if I didn't need the money I probably would have left this whole sorry spectacle behind me a while back. It stopped being pleasurable or fulfilling about Christmas time.

[SussexSeagull]

The one thing that's keeping me going is that i'm pretty positive it's not me. If this forum was raging about about a boom in work, my other contractor friends were all in work, and other friends in other industries (and also in other countries) were all booming, and I wasn't, then there would be a problem.

What I don't understand is how much it's all just gone totally off a cliff. Forget inside/outside/perm, there is just nothing (or, there are a few things, but getting no responses which is not normal).

Usually in bad times in the past, there is a short quiet period depending on the time of year, but the work still needs doing so its available but just at a lower rate.

Have my skills suddenly become obsolete? it's possible, but I don't think so.

I've heard so many reasons as to why - AI, NI increases, etc - I'm leaning more into the post-covid rebalancing and the interest rates being way too high, which is in tern leading to cost cutting measures like outsourcing to India - but everybody will have had different experiences so can offer different insights.

And that all leads to my current day to day struggle - I just don't know what to do. Courses? Build something? Interview practice? Just chill and wait? Hit the gym like Schumi?

The longer it goes on, the longer the warchest and mental health dwindles

I think this is as good a summary as I have read of the current situation. Not to say there isn't things we can all do to make ourselves more desirable, I am picking up Cypress at the moment, but there are too many people in my specific skillset (testing), broader industry (software development) and broader white collar work saying the same thing to eliminate it being a problem with your network or CV (I have heard manual work is going better but don't have any evidence of that).

As I and others have said, it might very well be a perfect storm of all the things you have mentioned and more.

[SussexSeagull]

Do you know what, I think there has been a definite increase in my area of app development and cloud solutions.

As ever this is all little more than commentary until you are able to take a new role over the line and are sitting at your desk (real or virtual).