how low can I go?

[SuperZ]

Can I ask you, in all sincerity, did you think you would be in this position 20 - 30 years ago?

The reason why I ask is that I always, naively, believe that in 2 years time I will be set for life. I am 36 just now but for the last 20 years I always think that I will have reached the top of the hill in a couple of years and it will be easy street from there on in. In school it was get to uni an it will be OK, then it was get a degree, then get a job, then make senior developer, then make architect, then go contract. No matter what level I get to easy street is never there.

It`s because our parents never spent(wasted) so much money as we do. It is our faults but we are also encouraged to spend spend spend today - good for economy. Oh and of course marketing is so much better today and there are so many things to buy, and people want to keep up with everyone else (new car? 50inch LED TV)

Not a nice thing to say but I think people spend more today to be happy. After the world wars people were happy to be alive, they didn`t have to go out and blow money on stuff .

And as per what expat touched on, divorce is ripe these days - that a big money loser for many

[Cyberman]

Can I ask you, in all sincerity, did you think you would be in this position 20 - 30 years ago?

The reason why I ask is that I always, naively, believe that in 2 years time I will be set for life. I am 36 just now but for the last 20 years I always think that I will have reached the top of the hill in a couple of years and it will be easy street from there on in. In school it was get to uni an it will be OK, then it was get a degree, then get a job, then make senior developer, then make architect, then go contract. No matter what level I get to easy street is never there.

If you put money away instead of spending it, easy street will arrive. The problem is that the more people earn, the more they waste.

[expat]

...No good being jack of all trades etc, cos you end up with no skills at all and even more competition when your looking for a job. When push comes to shove, think we'd all take wotever role we could to pay bills etc, regardless of type, even those that spout nonsense on here with all the bravado I read.

I'm not a jack of all trades. I am a specialist in large-scale Siebel/Oracle data migration with advanced performance tuning. There are few of those roles at the moment, and actually most of those as advertised now seem to demand other unrelated skills.

I think that's the result of the agency model: give an agent a list of 5 skills needed, what does he do when he gets 200 CVs? Since he sees a skill as a keyword to "have", and has no conception of a skill as something to be good/better/best at, he will want help to shorten the list. He can't do that by looking for the best programmers because he wouldn't recognise them if they came up and bit him; so he asks the client for more "skills" for his keywords filter. So the client thinks they're getting something extra, and starts doing a wish list, in the process losing sight of the fact that what they actually need is someone who is as good as possible at the original job.


I can do loads of other things, and I will happily, but the more you move off your highest-level expertise, the lower you land on the list. In my own mind, and on here among peers, I'm most proud of the fact that I can pick up anything in computing. But on the CV it's targeted: "I am the solution to your expensive problem".

So for example all those years of mainframe experience is reduced to 2 lines at the end and a "details on request". That's because I did try once going for mainframe COBOL roles only to be told in all seriousness by all the agents that it wasn't even worth sending in my CV because the experience wasn't recent.

[Fred Bloggs]

Mine has been roughly finance>cad>engineering>os internals>finance>web

and I'm hoping to get into robotics at some stage, but it's still quite niche and small scale.

There's a bit of that stuff (robotics) starting now in nuclear clean up. Could be a good time to start looking in that direction. A lot of the work involves remote handling equipment because everything being cleaned up is really nasty, hence, robotics.

[Fred Bloggs]

I hope things pick up for expat, "there but for the grace of god go I" etc...

But in all seriousness, do you think this is the start of the second serious phase of the UK's descent to 3rd world status? The first phase being from the 70's to the mid 90's with the loss of all the manufacturing, ship building, steel, coal etc... etc....

When I look around the UK, nothing has been built of any substance for the last 25 years. When was the last time we had an entirely new motorway? An entirely new airport? An entirely new mainline railway? Oil Refinery, Sea Port, Nuclear Power Plant, Coal Fired Power plant etc....

And now compare that to Europe and then with Asia and we're being left further and further behind as a country. I despair for my kids, I really do.

[Cyberman]

I hope things pick up for expat, "there but for the grace of god go I" etc...

But in all seriousness, do you think this is the start of the second serious phase of the UK's descent to 3rd world status? The first phase being from the 70's to the mid 90's with the loss of all the manufacturing, ship building, steel, coal etc... etc....

When I look around the UK, nothing has been built of any substance for the last 25 years. When was the last time we had an entirely new motorway? An entirely new airport? An entirely new mainline railway? Oil Refinery, Sea Port, Nuclear Power Plant, Coal Fired Power plant etc....

And now compare that to Europe and then with Asia and we're being left further and further behind as a country. I despair for my kids, I really do.

... and even the french company that is building our nuclear facilities has already stated that they will not be hiring Brits, but Poles. I see civil war !!

[expat]

I hope things pick up for expat, "there but for the grace of god go I" etc...

But in all seriousness, do you think this is the start of the second serious phase of the UK's descent to 3rd world status? The first phase being from the 70's to the mid 90's with the loss of all the manufacturing, ship building, steel, coal etc... etc....

When I look around the UK, nothing has been built of any substance for the last 25 years. When was the last time we had an entirely new motorway? An entirely new airport? An entirely new mainline railway? Oil Refinery, Sea Port, Nuclear Power Plant, Coal Fired Power plant etc....

And now compare that to Europe and then with Asia and we're being left further and further behind as a country. I despair for my kids, I really do.

I'll make it but thanks. I'm just musing about how much I'll have to react in order to survive; and trying not to leave it too late to realise how bad it is, and jump too late.

I do think this is a significant step on Britain's journey to the Third World, and indeed the previous phase was from the 70s to the 90s. The early 70s, nothing to do with Thatcher.

The Guardian's political columnist in the 70s, Peter Jenkins, was a prescient chronicler of this. To be pedantic that was the 3rd phase already: it began with phase 1, as soon as Victoria died. Having reached our peak, we started coasting downhill right away, typically not even seeing that it was happening. Phase 2 was after WWII, when, having exhausted our resources, the investments of several generations, we had had enough, and failed to re-invest for the future. Who am I to blame them? But the Germans did not stop yet, and built anew rather than rebuilt.

Phase 3 was the decline of industry and the decline of competitiveness, from the 70s. Jenkins remarked even then that the British still thought that our economy was OK, except for itinerant business men, who could see how poor we were becoming compared to the rest of Western Europe.

I started seeing the continent then, and it opened my eyes. I have closed them a few times since then, but no more. We have already been overtaken by the USA, the old Dominions, Western Europe, the new Asian economies, and IMHO even what I would call the forgotten 2nd World: Brazil, Chile......

[HeadOfTesting]

For what it's worth I think the UK IT sector can offer a decent opportunity in the next economic cycle but to rely on it for one's income beyond that would be somewhat less than sensible as it does appear to be in structural decline.

[Sysman]

It`s because our parents never spent(wasted) so much money as we do. It is our faults but we are also encouraged to spend spend spend today - good for economy. Oh and of course marketing is so much better today and there are so many things to buy, and people want to keep up with everyone else (new car? 50inch LED TV)

Not a nice thing to say but I think people spend more today to be happy. After the world wars people were happy to be alive, they didn`t have to go out and blow money on stuff.

Another major difference was that our parents generally didn't need to move house every few years for work reasons, so avoided wallop loads of expenses and upheavals there.

And as per what expat touched on, divorce is ripe these days - that a big money loser for many

With money problems being cited as a reason for many (the majority of?) divorces, I see a connection there,

[expat]

For what it's worth I think the UK IT sector can offer a decent opportunity in the next economic cycle but to rely on it for one's income beyond that would be somewhat less than sensible as it does appear to be in structural decline.

That's my feeling too. IMHO it will be smaller and more selective in the next cycle, which doesn't bother me much because I come from long before the dot-com boom so I'm not looking for "boom" again. Not all of us are going to do well in the next cycle but I'm optimistic, my problem is holding on until then

And as you say, after that (say after 2015?), forget it.