State of the Market

[avonleigh]

Its so true!

I have only really had one very positive experience working in a scrum team, versus about 8 or 10 mediocre or terrible ones. And that was all down to the particular scrum master that we had who would never have accepted an answer like "still working on X". If the team was so much as a single story point behind his burn down chart he would go into hyper-mode and chase down where his missing point was. We hit every sprint goal, adapted how we worked as we went along, kept the stakeholders in the loop with regular demos etc etc. It was a lot of work and I did not always enjoy the process due to the amount of meetings, but ultimately came away with a good deal of respect for our scrum master - who also was an ex-dev and still a competent engineer, I should add.

The rest of the time, scrum was done in a half-assed way, led by non-technicals, just played lip service to the ideas etc.

Went to an interesting talk by Martin Fowler around the dotcom era time - he talked about a study carried out by IBM on the "mythical man month" where they put together various teams to solve the same problem. Their conclusion? The biggest factor affecting team performance was how well the team members got on with each other! I definitely agree. If you get stuck with a bunch of free loaders, or narcisistic personalities, or off-shore workers that you will never meet or give a tulip about, its usually terrible. Good bunch of UK workers that enjoy working together and go out for a drink occasionally - much better.

Not my experience at all. Think Agile is a much better way of delivering projects than the old waterfall way. Agile projects are far more interesting and for testers you get much more involved with developers, so you get better technical skills. Only downside for Agile projects are Sprint Retrospectives, complete waste of an hour.

[oliverson]

Not my experience at all. Think Agile is a much better way of delivering projects than the old waterfall way. Agile projects are far more interesting and for testers you get much more involved with developers, so you get better technical skills. Only downside for Agile projects are Sprint Retrospectives, complete waste of an hour.

Last place I used scrum the retrospectives were schedule for 2.5 hours with people bringing in coloured crayons and boards, cut out symbols, sweets and cakes. What a tulip show.

In fact this is opening some old wounds for me. In the team close to the one I was helping, the scrum master had a rubber horn, no joke. If somebody was late for the standup he'd sound the horn when they arrived! Not only that but he took great delight in throwing a ball at the assembled circle of participants in a random fashion, to signal their turn. WTF?! Next up the kanban board, or should I say 'information radiator'.

Think I may need some counselling to get over all this!!

[quackhandle]

Is contracting essentially dead? Feels like it to me - I'm lucky enough to be in a fairly comfy permietractor role, inside IR35 so whatever, but whenever I have a moach about there just doesn't seem to be anything to find. Not that I put huge effort in at the mo, but I can't remember the last time I got a recruiter phone call - when I first started contracting I'd have several a day, most days.

She's clearing her throat.

qh

[avonleigh]

She's clearing her throat.

qh

For 3 years?

[willendure]

Not my experience at all. Think Agile is a much better way of delivering projects than the old waterfall way. Agile projects are far more interesting and for testers you get much more involved with developers, so you get better technical skills. Only downside for Agile projects are Sprint Retrospectives, complete waste of an hour.

I think agile can be a much better way, when done well. More often than not, it seems to be done badly.

Same with the retrospective. Usually it is a waste of time as it changes nothing. Often seen it used just as an outlet for letting people vent, they get their say, and nothing is done. If it is done well, it is done to feed back change into the working process and iteratively improve things. This is pretty rare in my experience.

My last job the client used what I call "fake agile". They do sprints, so they think they are agile, box ticked. In reality it was waterfall. The agile bit just meant that everything was constantly in a state of disorganization and people could easily avoid doing much work. In reality, we just needed the spec to be signed off so we could get on with it.

So I would rank them in this order:

Best: Agile done well
Next: Waterfall
Worst: Fake agile/Agile done badly

[sadkingbilly]

and meanwhile, back in the real world, the market is still in a state.

[Fraidycat]

Amazon laying off 30,000 corporate jobs. Not known yet how many of those will be in the UK.

There won't be a return to normal in IT jobs market until all these layoffs stop.

Why these companies carry so much fat around in the first place, some commentators are saying these firms did a lot DEI hiring and are now using AI as excuse to get rid.

[anonymouse]

Just been submitted for a role and this was at the bottom of the JD, don't know how much it's true.



Positions Available:
1000 (987 remaining)

Vacancy Type:
Contract

Location:
Dependant on client location

[WTFH]

Amazon laying off 30,000 corporate jobs. Not known yet how many of those will be in the UK.

There won't be a return to normal in IT jobs market until all these layoffs stop.

Why these companies carry so much fat around in the first place, some commentators are saying these firms did a lot DEI hiring and are now using AI as excuse to get rid.

Not sure what "commentators" you are listening to, but it's 14,000, not 30,000. But let's not quibble over numbers, and if the commentators say that it is because of gender, skin colour or disability, then that must be the reason.

https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/com...orce-reduction

[oliverson]

Amazon laying off 30,000 corporate jobs. Not known yet how many of those will be in the UK.

There won't be a return to normal in IT jobs market until all these layoffs stop.

Why these companies carry so much fat around in the first place, some commentators are saying these firms did a lot DEI hiring and are now using AI as excuse to get rid.

Terrible numbers indeed and it's quite a selfish thing to say but hey, we are contractors. It only matters if you're on the bench!

I've come to the conclusion that traditional means of sourcing work, such as JobServe and the like, and even work posted on LinkedIn are in 2025, completely pointless. I've been at this for several months now, others for several years, and the response I get through those channels is virtually nothing. NOTHING. There's a realisation that previous clients and/or my LinkedIn network are the only chances of getting off the bench, and they're looking pretty long really. Indeed some of my contacts are in my exact same position!

The sense of urgency is gathering pace. There's no more than maybe 4-5 weeks now until the market (whatever is left of it), shuts up shop again for the Xmas/New Year. I'm not fancying my chances of landing something in that timeframe, so I could be staring at a year out of contract.