Worse Than The Pandemic

[The Green View]

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.

I feel there has been some kind of sea change & it could be one or more of several things. Firstly, I don't think the UI work was quite so offshorable as the bog standard .net stuff - as it involved more interaction with other parties. Thanks to the pandemic and WFH, I think this has shown that you can do all this stuff remotely wherever you are in the world and consequently the work is getting shipped overseas more than before. In fact, my last project was still fully active but they cited budget costs and replaced their UK based contractors with bods from a consultancy. The other thing is the economy but there are proportionately far more .net roles out there compared to JS roles so I don't think this is the prime driver for the dearth of contracts.

Of course, I'm now in the situation where I'm applying for fullstack .net roles but I haven't really touched it in anger for 5 years, even though it was my core skill for the previous 10 years and ,as a result, nobody is biting. So I this leaves me in a bit of a quandary - either get au fait with some back end technologies and blag my server side skills on my cv (because even in the pure FE roles there has been some back end awareness, be it Node, .Net Core or Ruby), wait for the JS market to pick up, go perm (which I would hate) or cash in and do something completely different before I've frittered away all my savings. I'm getting on a bit now and the last couple of years have kind of indicated that contracting isn't really supportable with all the downtime between roles and the volatility in the market.

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

[northernladuk]

Two years ago I hit my first long period of 4 and bit months on the bench at this period. Landed a role first week back in Jan and started 2nd week. The current period doesn't help one iota.

If you are worried about your skillset and availability of roles over all spend a bit of time on ITJobswatch. It scrapes all the roles and colates them so you can see how many adverts there have been for your skillset. It's a bit of sledgehammer as it will include all the fishing adverts and also count every advert if there are multiple agencies looking for new roles but because it will be the same for all types of roles you can still do some kind of rough comparison. If there is a marked dip in roles in your area you have something to think about.

Applying for roles you haven't touched for 5 years isn't the makings of a solid contracting career though. You are only as good as your last gig as they say. Dropping your current set and blagging a different set might pigeon hole you for further gigs as well so need to think carefully.

BTW I don't know anything about coding so that could be complete bollox and someone else that knows coding might help but I think the principle that you only get gigs off the back of a very similar last role isn't a bad rule of thumb.

[SussexSeagull]

Firstly I found that after the initial shock of lockdown where the contract market more or less stopped for a few weeks it adjusted and recovered quite well. Personally rates weren't top draw but there was work out there.

I am a tester so can't speak of you skillset but three or four times I have had to sit out the end of the year with nothing happening and gone on to get a contract early in the New Year. The only difference I have found is the wind down for Christmas is starting earlier and earlier. Can only speak from personal experience but I have the same CV in December and January and have yet to discover a silver bullet to finding a new contract over Christmas so I think I am fair to comment there is such a thing as a end of year shutdown.

As for sea changes that is going to very from skillset to skillset and industry to industry so difficult to draw general conclusions. However I have survived fairly well on clients who want an individual contractor who can offer a bespoke service without having to involve a consultancy or to work on the same project as a consultancy but sit slightly seperate to them. I don't see that changing.

[BigDataPro]

Yes it is worse. I moved from Development -> Testing -> Data & Cloud but once again I find that the market is very very quiet (as of now) even in Data domain as well. I guess it could be that the supply is higher as many companies such as Facebook, Amazon have laid off a large number of people. Decided to take time off and go away till March. If the situation remains the same upon returning, might accept a perm role and say good bye to contracting.

[The Green View]

Two years ago I hit my first long period of 4 and bit months on the bench at this period. Landed a role first week back in Jan and started 2nd week. The current period doesn't help one iota.

If you are worried about your skillset and availability of roles over all spend a bit of time on ITJobswatch. It scrapes all the roles and colates them so you can see how many adverts there have been for your skillset. It's a bit of sledgehammer as it will include all the fishing adverts and also count every advert if there are multiple agencies looking for new roles but because it will be the same for all types of roles you can still do some kind of rough comparison. If there is a marked dip in roles in your area you have something to think about.

Applying for roles you haven't touched for 5 years isn't the makings of a solid contracting career though. You are only as good as your last gig as they say. Dropping your current set and blagging a different set might pigeon hole you for further gigs as well so need to think carefully.

BTW I don't know anything about coding so that could be complete bollox and someone else that knows coding might help but I think the principle that you only get gigs off the back of a very similar last role isn't a bad rule of thumb.

Well, assuming I'm only as good as my last gig, I did a search for Vue.js on ITJobswatch and it tells me it ranks 220, down 87 places from the previous year.

Probably explains a lot of what I'm experiencing.

[TheGreenBastard]

Well, assuming I'm only as good as my last gig, I did a search for Vue.js on ITJobswatch and it tells me it ranks 220, down 87 places from the previous year.

Probably explains a lot of what I'm experiencing.

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.

[CheeseSlice]

Firstly I found that after the initial shock of lockdown where the contract market more or less stopped for a few weeks it adjusted and recovered quite well. Personally rates weren't top draw but there was work out there.

Sounds like an alternate universe to the one I was in.

[KentDogWalker]

I saw this coming; why I switched to a tech lead position three months ago, and most of the CSS and HTML work is done offshore, stuff I hate anyway as our designs keep changing

[GitMaster69]

There's new fancy trend : cloud. Go there and you will be working in no time. Rates are at premium as well.
Until the next trend anyway

[KentDogWalker]

if you make your rates "competitive" with India, you will have work in no time