Miners, shipbuilders, IT contractors?

[bobspud]

Finance is a big field. I think you're talking Merchant banking when others are talking retail banking.

Retail yuck! the bobs can have that work

[MyUserName]

Hi,
can someone please add some rep to this I just negged it by accident

Sorry! good post

Thanks .... I think

[eek]

Doesn't surprise me at all... What do you think the page would be like if there was not even a spec? Even a basic one That said receive this and pass this back...

It was worse than that as we pointed them at an existing page to crib from and they then implemented their own totally different (and invalid) version.

That entire team has however got serious past form which wouldn't be so funny if I wasn't currently handing everything over to them.

[sirja]

retrain and be flixeible

I think if you are prepared to retrain and renew your skills as new technologies come on stream and can be a bit flixeble in terms of location, then there should be some life yet in IT Contracting. Very true it's not easy with the massive push to offshore but there are still options for the Uk contractor.

[Stan.goodvibes]

OK admittedly I'm out in the Antipodes where things are still buzzing along, but it seems the IT contracting market still has life left in it. Yeah it is more difficult today than it was in say, the 90s, but then everything is. We may be on the bench a bit more, might have to work harder for a role, but in case you haven't noticed the average unemployment rate in the Eurozone is now over 10% and some countries are pushing 20%+.

When we are talking about the demise of IT contracting the following points should be remembered...

1. In boom times we think the good times will roll forever, and when it hits the fan we think that it will never get better. It’s just human nature.

2. This isn't a normal recession. This is the Great Depression Two. If you aren't lining up for a soup kitchen or lobbing concrete at riot police out of boredom you are doing well. If you are still getting paid hundreds of squids a day for naffing round in an office, you are doing very well.

3. The outsourcing to India is IMHO just a phase. New managers like to try and impress by doing something so they jump on the nearest bandwagon - currently outsourcing. We all know by now that it's a rubbish idea that saves no money - give a year or two and management will start to notice that as well. Then managers will be jumping on the new cost-saving bandwagon... bringing IT back in house where we have more control etc etc etc *yawn*

I've just had to apply for an Indian visa to visit Goa. Every manager who is considering outsourcing should have to go through that process, then they can see exactly how rubbish their IT systems will end up and the kind of hopelessly inefficient bureaucracy they will have to deal with.

Head down ride out the depression, it’ll all come around again…

[darrenb]

Some of the people who are loudest about the virtues of the Agile meth-ideology are project managers with no technical skills. "We love Agile here, we just don't like refactoring, unit tests, developers chatting with the client, or anything that might affect our fixed schedule." This makes it difficult to distinguish fact from fantasy. There are some good ideas in Agile, but the term has just been co-opted too much.

Not if this keeps traction Leaner Programmer Anarchy | Agile 2011

These manifestos are always light on how the financial side of things works. The problem is you can't really free the engineering process if it is dependent on traditional economic practices. So when you look behind marketing like that web page, what you generally find is the usual siphoning-based middleman-heavy business model with a thick layer of buzzwords to lure both developers and customers.

[MyUserName]

But surely project managers have always and will always do this kind of thing. They do not understand the technology and that makes them feel uncomfortable so they try to implement various processes to reduce the complexity (to them) all the way down to making 3x5" index cards that they can read or producing bloated specs with everything specified in such detail that any programmer will tell you it will change every 5 seconds.

A small percentage of project managers seem to be confident and mature enough to not try to understand the technical side and simply trust the engineers rather than trying to keep up by hamstringing the programmers with pointless beauraucracy. The trouble is that they are then hamstrung by their managers who are uncomfortable about not understanding the technical side of things and the cycle begins again.

[craig1]

I did some consultancy recently for a company looking to in-source after a disastrous outsourcing, in a nutshell, the in-sourcing was cancelled once the manglement realised that they'd sold every bit of datacentre infrastructure to Bobco in return for a few £ off the first year's bill, Bobco weren't interested in selling it back. I think there are more than a few companies out there looking sour faced at contracts they signed while on the high following a night's client entertainment from the Bobco sales people.

On the subject at hand though, if you do a job that requires little interaction with the wider business then you're probably going to be Bob'ed at one point in the next few years. If you can turn your role into one that even has some small business link or interaction then you increase your survivability immensely. I'm still safe as a project manager for now but that'll change once the Bobcos work out how to do it, my thoughts are that they'll give the PMs "free" as part of a package deal for projects as long as you pay for their techies.

[daogonza]

OK admittedly I'm out in the Antipodes where things are still buzzing along, but it seems the IT contracting market still has life left in it. Yeah it is more difficult today than it was in say, the 90s, but then everything is. We may be on the bench a bit more, might have to work harder for a role, but in case you haven't noticed the average unemployment rate in the Eurozone is now over 10% and some countries are pushing 20%+.

When we are talking about the demise of IT contracting the following points should be remembered...

1. In boom times we think the good times will roll forever, and when it hits the fan we think that it will never get better. It’s just human nature.

2. This isn't a normal recession. This is the Great Depression Two. If you aren't lining up for a soup kitchen or lobbing concrete at riot police out of boredom you are doing well. If you are still getting paid hundreds of squids a day for naffing round in an office, you are doing very well.

3. The outsourcing to India is IMHO just a phase. New managers like to try and impress by doing something so they jump on the nearest bandwagon - currently outsourcing. We all know by now that it's a rubbish idea that saves no money - give a year or two and management will start to notice that as well. Then managers will be jumping on the new cost-saving bandwagon... bringing IT back in house where we have more control etc etc etc *yawn*

I've just had to apply for an Indian visa to visit Goa. Every manager who is considering outsourcing should have to go through that process, then they can see exactly how rubbish their IT systems will end up and the kind of hopelessly inefficient bureaucracy they will have to deal with.

Head down ride out the depression, it’ll all come around again…

This is the most outstanding true. Offshoring seems a process for save money in the short period. To be honest with you the interesting roles can´t be offshored easily.

[Software]

Find a way to look like you were working for those 9 months and then update your CV on jobserve regularly, even if it's just deleting and reinserting a space to full their bots into thinking it's a new CV

He has mentioned that he never worked in the last 9 months and you are asking him to Fake that 9 months with some working experience. Is it something advisable, i dont think so....