Show me the money

[sasguru]

I'm thinking of going back to COBOL. Can't be many of us left standing.

Not a bad strategy if you're on the older side. They'll need COBOL for some time yet and there are no young whippersnappers who know it.

[Fungus]

Perhaps it's my impression but I think there is a lot of work in IT going around those days. Perhaps close to what it was before the 2000 boom (according to jobstats very close actually). However, by looking at the salaries advertised, companies are failing to recognise that when the market is strong they have to pay more. How long until they will start realising this?

I've worked for several of the largest Telecoms test companies and both are stuffed to the gills with overseas contractors. There are laws on who can be employed - something like they can only do so if there's no UK staff - but in practice they circumvent the law with ease. I contacted a well known IT journalist about this as he was compiling info from round the UK.

So it's obvious why rates are modest. My current client has no trouble getting contractors. Recently they took on a friend/ex-colleague who is now direct (no parasite) but had numerous good people apply and accept an interview.

[Francko]

I've worked for several of the largest Telecoms test companies and both are stuffed to the gills with overseas contractors. There are laws on who can be employed - something like they can only do so if there's no UK staff - but in practice they circumvent the law with ease. I contacted a well known IT journalist about this as he was compiling info from round the UK.

So it's obvious why rates are modest. My current client has no trouble getting contractors. Recently they took on a friend/ex-colleague who is now direct (no parasite) but had numerous good people apply and accept an interview.

Again the same excuse of immigrants. How many of them should there be to really influence the price significantly? There are probably 1 million IT working people (I am wildly guessing). How many immigrants willing to work for peanuts there are in IT? (and why? you can get a decent salary in India too nowadays). Think how much it would take to let the price drop significantly.

[Fungus]

Again the same excuse of immigrants. How many of them should there be to really influence the price significantly? There are probably 1 million IT working people (I am wildly guessing). How many immigrants willing to work for peanuts there are in IT? (and why? you can get a decent salary in India too nowadays). Think how much it would take to let the price drop significantly.

The group I sit next to is mostly Indian staff. The next group is maybe half Indian staff with some Chinese and some UK. The Java people are mainly non-outsourced permies (though mostly from overseas). I don't think India can supply Java trained personnel. I might be wrong. The other large group that does protocol work seems to be mainly Indians.

At my previous client the entire test team was Indian. Several of our team were Indian. Many projects were gradually outsourced to India, or to contractors from India. Maybe half the work was outsourced.

One ex-colleague who came from Nokia said that they had outsourced all protocol stack development to India. Samsung have significant outsourcing. Maybe others do but those are the companies I know about.

In Telecoms outsourcing is HUGE and has devastated demand for UK staff.

I also heard that a financial software company I used to work for has outsourced a significant amount of development work.

The mouldy one.

[expat]

Quote:
Originally Posted by expat
I'm thinking of going back to COBOL. Can't be many of us left standing.

Not a bad strategy if you're on the older side. They'll need COBOL for some time yet and there are no young whippersnappers who know it.

I used to say that as a joke, after I put so much effort into getting out of COBOL (in the mid-90s I did my only dishonest CV, when I wiped out 15 years of COBOL because experienced COBOListas didn't get C work but inexperienced C programmers did).

But COBOL is not going away, and jobserve/cwjobs etc show plenty still around: jobserve 129 contracts, cwjobs 40. Jobstats says 32/h, 37k permie. Not as good as the skills that I moved into, but not to be sneezed at as a fall-back position.

Just think: no more worries about keeping your skills up to date.....

[TinTin]

All that glitters ...

There are indeed plenty of jobs on paper (or Jobswerve etc to be precise), however if one scratches the surface it isn't quite like that. The market is flooded with Indians, mostly code monkeys that have been sent here to help with outsourcing and managed to stay by turning into contracting and undercutting rates by as much as 100% . Agents have cottoned on to this and and put them forward at our expense knowing what huge profit margins can be made. 80% of them can't speak proper English, let alone write a decent piece of code, but who cares?

[Francko]

There are indeed plenty of jobs on paper (or Jobswerve etc to be precise), however if one scratches the surface it isn't quite like that. The market is flooded with Indians, mostly code monkeys that have been sent here to help with outsourcing and managed to stay by turning into contracting and undercutting rates by as much as 100% . Agents have cottoned on to this and and put them forward at our expense knowing what huge profit margins can be made. 80% of them can't speak proper English, let alone write a decent piece of code, but who cares?

There's a bit of a contraddiction here. If agents make huge margins and they cut the rate of 100% this can mean that real cut is very low. How can the market be affect if only the money is switched from people to agencies? Not really a huge save for someone who cannot speak english. I think there are real reasons apart from those xenophobic fears. Besides, most of those people they only want to stay here for 6 months -1 year and then leave to find a decent job in India. No one is a fool anywhere and the ones who are good they will demand 3-4 times their salary after 6 months. The ones who are cheap, well, they are just as cheap as bad english IT people.

[mcquiggd]

Thats the rate the cheapie overseas worker charges is 100% lower (presumably meaning half price...?).. the agency has a fixed budget so creams the rest as profit. The cheaper smiley happy person he put in front ofthe increasingly non-technical recruiters, the better.

Highway Emergency Services employed several indians who told HR they had work permits. The first week they joined, they wandered down to HR asking a secretary to sign their application for a work permit...


Look at what people are willing to do to get in to the UK, and apply the same thinking to them getting a compartively rich lifestyle here .. of course they buslltulip everyone they can.

[TinTin]

No contradiction at all...

I thought the point was clearly made. Are you prepared to contract for £ 100 p/d ? Expect not. There are clearly some that are and this is considered a small fortune where they come from. We had someone here (ex-US FTV) asking how he would get Security Clearance ffs, some cheek that is. Decent jobs in India, don't make me laugh ! Best rate for IT staff is £ 300 p/m, don't you know that ?

[Francko]

Best rate for IT staff is £ 300 p/m, don't you know that ?

No, and I think you have been highly misinformed as I have two indian people in my office working for 70k plus benefits and they are thinking of going back to Bangalore as salary per cost of living they are better off there nowadays (and the visa was always quite easy to get, even in the year 2000 and yet the rates were different at that time). You are probably thinking of an average indian salary, not the ones for highly skilled and educated IT people, which are rather different from the standard ones.