I don't post much here, but I follow this thread a lot.
I had about 2 decades worth of contracting behind my belt (in london financial services, software dev and architecting) before I took the permie plunge back in 2020 when they offered me a deal I couldn't refuse....and I've been stuck there ever since.
Its been good in the sense that I have upskilled, taken on more responsibility and learned what life is like for decision makers on the other side of the fence.
but its also been utterly miserable in many ways. when you reach certain levels of seniority, permie work becomes almost exclusively about politics.
the bureaucracy is mind numbing and most of your time is navigating your way around various entrenched little empires run by sinecured jobsworths.
So, I've reached the end of my tether and am planning a jump back into the contracting market to glide my way to retirement....except it appears that market has disappeared...at least over the last several years. I've been trying to understand why.
Some would argue that much generic IT work is now being outsourced to foreign lands. That has been going on for decades though, but in recent years it has certainly accelerated. In my current job, I manage and work with loads of contractors (from big outsourcing companies) from eastern europe doing exactly the same stuff I used to do and still do. They are generally very good - far better than what you would get from the usual outsourcing suspects from India. But even then, they lack finance domain knowledge and that can cause problems. We have started to recruit again from the local market as a result.
But I dont think this is the main cause of the current slowdown. The offshorers are suffering too. TCS is laying off thousands, so is Accenture from their Indian operations.
So I think something more is going on.
Some say it is AI. I have been increasingly involved with this myself and am rapidly upgrading my skills in this direction. But the truth is, while massive spending is being made on the infrastructure around this, most big corporates (including where I am) have just been dipping their toes in this space. small scale experimental projects are happening, but given the speed with which the tech is developing, many are reluctant to go full throttle apart from rolling out co-pilots across their organizations.
Economic conditions (high interest rates, sluggish growth and higher taxes) are a huge part of this, but I also think we are in a kind of transition phase as we figure out exactly what this AI revolution actually means...so many firms have put big IT investments on ice while they try to figure things out.
I think the contract market will bounce back - but it will be very very different from what it was. If you have made your living as a kind of generic C#, or Java, or Javascript dev, I think you need to retrain very quickly if you want to take advantage of any bounce back. Those sorts of jobs have been offshored for now, and soon they will be automated - at least at the junior or mid level. Someone posted a thread the other day from 20 years ago which had some contractor moaning about their lot because no-one wanted to hire vb6 devs anymore and they didnt want to upskill to this new shiny .net thing that was about then. Well, we are at that place again.
Good contractors are paid well when they are able to exploit demand/supply discrepancies. When a new skill or technology emerges, there is always a gap between those who want it and those who know it. So in order to survive, you need to be constantly learning and adapting. Its very easy to become complacent, as I have, when the money keeps rolling in and your attention is focused mainly on family, life etc.
whats happening with generative AI is a massive opportunity - and will potentially revolutionize not only how software is delivered but the applications of it. So it would be wise to throw yourself in to the deep end here. It might well be a bubble - just like the .com era - but there will be a lot of incoming investment in the coming years. No-ones quite sure how it will all play out, and the kinds of jobs being offered in this field seem quite scattered and confused, so its difficult to know where to focus.
So, who knows....but if you're a dev, its probably worth your while spending time with coding agents....and python.
I had about 2 decades worth of contracting behind my belt (in london financial services, software dev and architecting) before I took the permie plunge back in 2020 when they offered me a deal I couldn't refuse....and I've been stuck there ever since.
Its been good in the sense that I have upskilled, taken on more responsibility and learned what life is like for decision makers on the other side of the fence.
but its also been utterly miserable in many ways. when you reach certain levels of seniority, permie work becomes almost exclusively about politics.
the bureaucracy is mind numbing and most of your time is navigating your way around various entrenched little empires run by sinecured jobsworths.
So, I've reached the end of my tether and am planning a jump back into the contracting market to glide my way to retirement....except it appears that market has disappeared...at least over the last several years. I've been trying to understand why.
Some would argue that much generic IT work is now being outsourced to foreign lands. That has been going on for decades though, but in recent years it has certainly accelerated. In my current job, I manage and work with loads of contractors (from big outsourcing companies) from eastern europe doing exactly the same stuff I used to do and still do. They are generally very good - far better than what you would get from the usual outsourcing suspects from India. But even then, they lack finance domain knowledge and that can cause problems. We have started to recruit again from the local market as a result.
But I dont think this is the main cause of the current slowdown. The offshorers are suffering too. TCS is laying off thousands, so is Accenture from their Indian operations.
So I think something more is going on.
Some say it is AI. I have been increasingly involved with this myself and am rapidly upgrading my skills in this direction. But the truth is, while massive spending is being made on the infrastructure around this, most big corporates (including where I am) have just been dipping their toes in this space. small scale experimental projects are happening, but given the speed with which the tech is developing, many are reluctant to go full throttle apart from rolling out co-pilots across their organizations.
Economic conditions (high interest rates, sluggish growth and higher taxes) are a huge part of this, but I also think we are in a kind of transition phase as we figure out exactly what this AI revolution actually means...so many firms have put big IT investments on ice while they try to figure things out.
I think the contract market will bounce back - but it will be very very different from what it was. If you have made your living as a kind of generic C#, or Java, or Javascript dev, I think you need to retrain very quickly if you want to take advantage of any bounce back. Those sorts of jobs have been offshored for now, and soon they will be automated - at least at the junior or mid level. Someone posted a thread the other day from 20 years ago which had some contractor moaning about their lot because no-one wanted to hire vb6 devs anymore and they didnt want to upskill to this new shiny .net thing that was about then. Well, we are at that place again.
Good contractors are paid well when they are able to exploit demand/supply discrepancies. When a new skill or technology emerges, there is always a gap between those who want it and those who know it. So in order to survive, you need to be constantly learning and adapting. Its very easy to become complacent, as I have, when the money keeps rolling in and your attention is focused mainly on family, life etc.
whats happening with generative AI is a massive opportunity - and will potentially revolutionize not only how software is delivered but the applications of it. So it would be wise to throw yourself in to the deep end here. It might well be a bubble - just like the .com era - but there will be a lot of incoming investment in the coming years. No-ones quite sure how it will all play out, and the kinds of jobs being offered in this field seem quite scattered and confused, so its difficult to know where to focus.
So, who knows....but if you're a dev, its probably worth your while spending time with coding agents....and python.
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