Worse Than The Pandemic

[agentzero]

I don't much time for contractors with lengthy exposure to contracting complaining that their market is dead. Being a contractor means being agile and having skills up your sleeve.

Someone has mentioned looking at IT Jobs Watch, but you could also just go on Job Serve, sort by day rate or look at volume of jobs and start to move towards those specialisations. In software this is easy, as it is for infrastructure. Someone has already mentioned cloud.

Become agile. If you can't cope with that, which is perfectly normal and reasonable, then look at permanent roles instead where you can coast a bit more. There is no shame in it and I am not being rude. If your market is consistently near dead then you should add more skills or change and morph into what clients want. It's not easy but can be rewarding.

[The Green View]

I really have no sympathy if you're fixating on a library. Absolutely zero business sense, this is a forum for contractors isn't it? Even though I rarely touch the frontend, the writing has been on the wall for Vue.js/Angular, in favour of React for some time. I assume you're doing TypeScript, why not expand to the backend/node.js to try and pivot, versus something you've not done for half a decade.

I'm not fixated on any library, but that was the gig and it lasted 12 months & it happens to be the last one on my CV.

I don't much time for contractors with lengthy exposure to contracting complaining that their market is dead. Being a contractor means being agile and having skills up your sleeve.

Someone has mentioned looking at IT Jobs Watch, but you could also just go on Job Serve, sort by day rate or look at volume of jobs and start to move towards those specialisations. In software this is easy, as it is for infrastructure. Someone has already mentioned cloud.

Become agile. If you can't cope with that, which is perfectly normal and reasonable, then look at permanent roles instead where you can coast a bit more. There is no shame in it and I am not being rude. If your market is consistently near dead then you should add more skills or change and morph into what clients want. It's not easy but can be rewarding.

I've been contracting for almost 20 years & if you read my OP it was through being "agile" that I got myself away from bog standard .net stuff and into FE JS roles which paid dividends for a while. Difference is, I engineered myself into these new skills in the context of a current role - it's all well and good saying check out what is currently hot and learn these skills but without commercial experience it's not going to fly is it? Unless you're suggesting I should just wing it.

[SueEllen]

I've been contracting for almost 20 years & if you read my OP it was through being "agile" that I got myself away from bog standard .net stuff and into FE JS roles which paid dividends for a while. Difference is, I engineered myself into these new skills in the context of a current role - it's all well and good saying check out what is currently hot and learn these skills but without commercial experience it's not going to fly is it? Unless you're suggesting I should just wing it.

If I had never winged I wouldn't have got half the interesting contracts I've gotten. You know JS so you should be able to teach yourself any library quickly.

[The Green View]

I don't much time for contractors with lengthy exposure to contracting complaining that their market is dead. Being a contractor means being agile and having skills up your sleeve.

Someone has mentioned looking at IT Jobs Watch, but you could also just go on Job Serve, sort by day rate or look at volume of jobs and start to move towards those specialisations. In software this is easy, as it is for infrastructure. Someone has already mentioned cloud.

Become agile. If you can't cope with that, which is perfectly normal and reasonable, then look at permanent roles instead where you can coast a bit more. There is no shame in it and I am not being rude. If your market is consistently near dead then you should add more skills or change and morph into what clients want. It's not easy but can be rewarding.

If I had never winged I wouldn't have got half the interesting contracts I've gotten. You know JS so you should be able to teach yourself any library quickly.

...and lie about it on my CV?

[eek]

...and lie about it on my CV?

Be economic with the truth - after all you may as well spend some time learning it - and as your last client didn’t want to be stuck on a legacy platform you investigated options for them.

[Sub]

...and lie about it on my CV?

Why should you lie? If you want to be fair, take a JS, see what they asking for, say it is new language you never heard about - google it and read couple of articles. Install compiler or interpreter and write Hello World type programme. Should take you an hour or so. Then put it into your CV as experience you have (that's not a lie anymore, you really do) without any more details. That help you get past recruiter and get interview.

But above advice is for a new starter really, after 20+ years in industry you generally need to delete some experience from you CV to not distract agents with irrelevant experience.

That's called targeted marketing and is one of most important skills in the contractor's tool set.

[hobnob]

...and lie about it on my CV?

There was an interesting suggestion I heard recently. Basically, if I list a role for a particular client and say "I upgraded their Exchange servers", that might be revealing information that they'd prefer to keep confidential. By contrast, I could just say "I upgraded their mail servers" and then put "Microsoft Exchange" in a different section of my CV. In practical terms, it won't make much difference if I only list one technology, but it's more significant with a longer list.

In your case, that might be a way to imply something without outright lying. I.e. you can say that you did web development for clients X, Y, and Z, then list the frameworks that you're familiar with.

[The Green View]

I don't much time for contractors with lengthy exposure to contracting complaining that their market is dead. Being a contractor means being agile and having skills up your sleeve.

Someone has mentioned looking at IT Jobs Watch, but you could also just go on Job Serve, sort by day rate or look at volume of jobs and start to move towards those specialisations. In software this is easy, as it is for infrastructure. Someone has already mentioned cloud.

Become agile. If you can't cope with that, which is perfectly normal and reasonable, then look at permanent roles instead where you can coast a bit more. There is no shame in it and I am not being rude. If your market is consistently near dead then you should add more skills or change and morph into what clients want. It's not easy but can be rewarding.

There was an interesting suggestion I heard recently. Basically, if I list a role for a particular client and say "I upgraded their Exchange servers", that might be revealing information that they'd prefer to keep confidential. By contrast, I could just say "I upgraded their mail servers" and then put "Microsoft Exchange" in a different section of my CV. In practical terms, it won't make much difference if I only list one technology, but it's more significant with a longer list.

In your case, that might be a way to imply something without outright lying. I.e. you can say that you did web development for clients X, Y, and Z, then list the frameworks that you're familiar with.

I can certainly flesh out some of the more ancilliary roles I did in my last gig e.g. docker, drone, kubernetes etc seem to be in good demand though I'm never going to sell myself as a dev ops engineer as it's clear that my CV tells a different story over the last 10 years or so and I'd have no problem swapping out vueJS with React for my last gig as I've already done a fair bit in the past.

[oliverson]

3 Months on the bench and I've never seen it so quiet in terms of active roles to apply for. I don't think I buy this quiet period running up to Christmas thing, I've often landed roles in December, ditto August & I think I need to look at my skillset.

A few years ago I was what you would call a full stack .Net developer - rates weren't great, work was boring (endless config files etc) & I felt I was 2 a penny so engineered my way into being purely front end - JS frameworks like Vue & Angular. And it paid dividends for a while because there was a shortage of people who were wholly conversant with front end technology. A lot of people whose roles involved say 10% of their time on the front end but few that really knew their onions & I never really found myself short of work and rates were good too. Even during the worst of the pandemic I managed to land a couple of roles.

......

Just wondering if anyone else is at a similar juncture....

I think the mistake you made here, and a close friend of mine made a similar one and is now paying for it, was to jettison some of your core skills, in the pursuit of shiny new ones. I almost made the same mistake but considered that if I were to reinvent myself as a JS front-end speciality, I'd be throwing away over 15 years of .NET experience. I'd have gone from near the top of the .NET ladder to the bottom of the JS ladder. I'd have been pitching myself against a sea of JS front-end developers who have done absolutely nothing but front-end work in Angular, Vue or React. All these kids out there, willing to work for far less rates than I'd been accustomed to in London investment banking. So, I hedged my bets and delivered a project in Angular + .NET Core. After that I joined a previous client on a pure node.js + AWS role. No .NET. Well, I just didn't enjoy it. The rate was good but I didn't feel like a senior dev in that environment. When the pandemic / IR35 / brexit came along I took a significant break and waited for the dust to settle and was approached by a firm who saw I had a mix of both .NET, Angular and some React. This has now morphed into a microservices, DevOps, Kubernetes, Cloud role and I'm really enjoying it. Suppose what I'm trying to say is that it's correct that you have to reinvent yourself from time to time as a contractor, but don't throw your core skills in the bin for the next shiny thing. Except for WPF that is !!

[SueEllen]

Be economic with the truth - after all you may as well spend some time learning it - and as your last client didn’t want to be stuck on a legacy platform you investigated options for them.

Oddly I do lots of investigation for my clients for that reason.