Worse Than The Pandemic

[TheGreenBastard]

I don't agree with this 'adapt' and 'agile' attitude. What do you do ... lie about your past contracts or be economical with the truth? I have interviewed many contractors before and obviously been interviewed many times too and every single time there is an acceptance that the contractor must have proper working experience of the subject matter. I am database person and could instantly tell if they had proper workplace knowledge of the subject matter anyway.

If you're a DB person, did you expand into cloud offerings, RDS, CockroachDB, Cassandra etc?

[mogga71]

If you're a DB person, did you expand into cloud offerings, RDS, CockroachDB, Cassandra etc?

I don't see any point unless I do so within a works project. CockroachDB and Cassandra are both niche markets anyway IMHO. Postgres seems to be taking over the world ... mainly because its Open Source, available on all cloud platforms and its great JSON capabilities. I am at a big IB in London and they are migrating their SQL Server and Oracle databases over to Postgres. Not bad for a 40 year old DBMS.

[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.

I don't see any point unless I do so within a works project. CockroachDB and Cassandra are both niche markets anyway IMHO. Postgres seems to be taking over the world ... mainly because its Open Source, available on all cloud platforms and its great JSON capabilities. I am at a big IB in London and they are migrating their SQL Server and Oracle databases over to Postgres. Not bad for a 40 year old DBMS.

It was always drummed into me over my career that you shouldn't ever put any complicated logic into a stored procedure (or even use SPs at all) because it won't be portable to a different back end provider should they switch to a different RDBMS. I was always thought this was a load of nonsense because I'd never heard of anyone swapping out, say, SQL Server for something else. Looks like it's happening now though

[agentzero]

I don't agree with this 'adapt' and 'agile' attitude. What do you do ... lie about your past contracts or be economical with the truth? I have interviewed many contractors before and obviously been interviewed many times too and every single time there is an acceptance that the contractor must have proper working experience of the subject matter. I am database person and could instantly tell if they had proper workplace knowledge of the subject matter anyway.

It depends on the type of projects you have worked on. For example if I've worked on a project that involved cloud and on prem, then I would lessen the on prem part of that project on my CV if the role I was applying for was exclusively cloud. I would put most of the effort in to detailing the cloud work. If I was a developer and had used a couple of languages in my last role, I would be mentioning mostly the applicable tech that the role I'm applying for wants. I'm not advocating lying or just making up experience that didn't exist.

It isn't lying, just valuing characters in a CV and using words wisely. If you've worked on something in a fact paced project and you know they won't care about it because the project doesn't use that tech, why mention it? Keep it to one or two lines and use the majority for the role you're actually applying for. I've never personally worked on one specific thing in one specific niche area within a project, but I'm not a bum on seat contractor and never have been.

Your mistake is concentrating on being one thing. These days, the higher paying roles expect you to blur across disciplines. The exception to this is Principal Architects who must know everything about one narrow subject. Most roles paying £800 to £1250 per day are going to be cross discipline or very senior. The £1650 to £4000 per day roles are for senior bods and genuine experts from Accenture, PA Consulting, Mckinsey and other such expensive consultancies and it's not worth competing for those roles.