Changing skillset before market tanks.

[TheDude]

My primary skill for the last 10 years has been Scala sometimes coupled with Apache Spark.

For most of this period rates have been decent and demand has been high. I would regularly receive two or three calls a day from agents.

This has dropped to one or two calls a month usually for some of the large Scala adopters - Bank Of America, Morgan Stanley, Standard Chartered, Sky, ITV etc...

Obviously the market is not great at the moment but the feeling among some in the Scala community is that for many reasons maybe Scala has had its day.

I am sure there will be plenty of work over the next few years but this will be on mature platforms and I suspect rates will take a hit as well. I have mainly worked in the banking sector and also suspect that the permietractors days are coming to an end.


I am considering adding a few more strings to my bow and am looking at Rust, Go and some of the AI frameworks.

What is everyone else doing to future proof themselves? I would also be interested in any changes people have made in the past, what forced the decision and how it went.

[FIERCE TANK BATTLE]

That's a tough one, I suspect for many people they just stick with what they know if what they know is not deprecated. Like, I do .NET and it's not something that has come to an end yet, there's new versions all the time and it's still being used a lot. However the shift with it is very much to the cloud, so devops and various azure cloud things are the future, as is Blazor which in the last 6 months has shot up in use.

That said it can be hard to skill up as a contractor because generally you're hired for what you already know, so although I want to learn React nobody is going to hire a contractor for a React role if they don't know React.

I am lucky in that I got a contract after a few months of searching and hope that it pans out the full 6 months, but after that I will consider going perm for a role that will teach me React, hopefully, or something that at that time is in demand. And potentially also for a change of pace, it's a bit tiring just being a contractor bod, work comes in, you do it, work goes out vs a permie job where you can work with a team and relax a bit more, maybe even have a few trips into the office and a bit of socialising.

[edison]

I've seen some machine learning engineer roles at less than £500/day.

I'm not a techie so outside of my domain, but I hope for those looking to pivot into AI related roles that this isn't a sign of things to come.

[dsc]

I feel like for AI you need to know way more than some people think they need to know. It's a rather vast area with some fairly advanced maths etc. so I doubt you can just do a course on it and walk into a £1000pd contract (assuming those are even available, again I feel like most of these roles will be perm as companies will not want the knowledge to walk easily).

[edison]

I'm more or less sector agnostic but I think one thing to try and do is broaden the sectors you can work in. It might not be much but every little bit helps.

A lot of hiring managers are often adverse to taking on contractors without specific sector experience, but it's worth a try. I got gigs in banking and pharma a few years ago, two sectors which are generally very keen on people with domain experience.

The trouble is how confident can you be in picking new skillsets? You might pick one or two then find you've backed the wrong horse.

There seems to be numerous bootcamps churning out budding junior developers, BAs, PMs etc. I wonder how many are finding work in the current market? As the old saying goes, if you see a bandwagon, it's too late.

[JustKeepSwimming]

I feel like for AI you need to know way more than some people think they need to know. It's a rather vast area with some fairly advanced maths etc. so I doubt you can just do a course on it and walk into a £1000pd contract (assuming those are even available, again I feel like most of these roles will be perm as companies will not want the knowledge to walk easily).

Think I disagree. At the big players? Sure. I don't think we are at the stage of hysteria with AI yet, probably because of market conditions. When it comes every outfit will be scrambling over each other to hire and the condition for hiring is whether the candidate appears to know more than the hiring manager. It happens every time something new appears.

[rocktronAMP]

My primary skill for the last 10 years has been Scala sometimes coupled with Apache Spark.

For most of this period rates have been decent and demand has been high. I would regularly receive two or three calls a day from agents.

This has dropped to one or two calls a month usually for some of the large Scala adopters - Bank Of America, Morgan Stanley, Standard Chartered, Sky, ITV etc...

Obviously the market is not great at the moment but the feeling among some in the Scala community is that for many reasons maybe Scala has had its day.

I am sure there will be plenty of work over the next few years but this will be on mature platforms and I suspect rates will take a hit as well. I have mainly worked in the banking sector and also suspect that the permietractors days are coming to an end.


I am considering adding a few more strings to my bow and am looking at Rust, Go and some of the AI frameworks.

What is everyone else doing to future proof themselves? I would also be interested in any changes people have made in the past, what forced the decision and how it went.

John A De Goes
https://degoes.net/articles/splendid-scala-journey

The problem with Scala has mostly been by the early Scala enthusiasts pre 2010 who blocked many "newbee" developers getting involved with the technology. A problem with bad attitude, fears of a takeover, this was a people problem, cultural elitism in a small niche. "It's maa baw" (so have at it, matey)

More recently, it is backwards compatibility issue Scala v2.x vs Scala 3.x

Then there is the introduction of a better Java like Kotlin. I really like the design ethics of Scala that Professor Martin Odersky createds down there at ETH Zurich, it is still a very nice way to get into Functional Programming (FP) from Object Oriented Programming (OOP). I saw it as such in 2010, I met the inventor in London, I spoke with the Professor at length, because I took his programming course in Scala at Skillsmatter. I had such high hopes, but I think it was a uphill battle from working inside investment banks. I tried to get it onboarded many times until the great axe of restructuring finally came down on me (and 1000s of colleagues). There were small niches here and there: HSBC, The Guardian Newspaper, GOV.UK Home Office (earlydays) and HMRC. All that was a decade ago. The last place I heard where Scala is definitely used is ITV/ITVX.

In 2018/2019 Sainsbury's Grocery on Line were replacing old Java 6/7 application servers and/or wrapping them with latex with Golang and AWS Lambdas, but I don't know where else it (Scala) matters.

Java is now up to version 21 baby. Haha!

Anyhow John A De Goes is into Rust.

[DrewG]

That's a tough one, I suspect for many people they just stick with what they know if what they know is not deprecated. Like, I do .NET and it's not something that has come to an end yet, there's new versions all the time and it's still being used a lot. However the shift with it is very much to the cloud, so devops and various azure cloud things are the future, as is Blazor which in the last 6 months has shot up in use.

That said it can be hard to skill up as a contractor because generally you're hired for what you already know, so although I want to learn React nobody is going to hire a contractor for a React role if they don't know React.

I am lucky in that I got a contract after a few months of searching and hope that it pans out the full 6 months, but after that I will consider going perm for a role that will teach me React, hopefully, or something that at that time is in demand. And potentially also for a change of pace, it's a bit tiring just being a contractor bod, work comes in, you do it, work goes out vs a permie job where you can work with a team and relax a bit more, maybe even have a few trips into the office and a bit of socialising.

Sounds tulip.

Few months of looking....
Going to the office to socialise...

[cojak]

Sounds tulip.

Few months of looking....
Going to the office to socialise...

Anything to keep the money coming in.