Reply to: State of the Market

[sreed]

I am surprised to read this, as I never found LinkedIn was good for contract work. I actually deleted my LinkedIn profile earlier this year, as I got fed up maintaining it when it gave me no benefit I could see. I think this may have been a mistake, although I can always create a new one and try and reconnect with some of my old contacts. In fact, that sounds like a good idea, since it will give me an excuse to catch up with some great folk I have not heard from in too long!

LinkedIn is now a better place to find contracts?

Irrespective of whether you use LinkedIn as a job board or not, I’d definitely maintain a LinkedIn profile as (imho) that’s the first place people go to to ‘check someone out’ professionally that they don’t know otherwise. At least that’s what I do when I’m involved in any kind of recruitment.

[OzzieExpat]

Read back a couple of pages. We've been going on about htis for awhile now. It's a nightmare.

Sh*t, just read a few back. Seems like it's a least as bad as you say. Rates seem to have rolled back 10 - 20 years in to the past. I've only been out for a month, but something this time feels very different.

[northernladuk]

Just started looking for a new contract. I've been working down under for a couple of years. I started looking for new work about a month ago. Is it just me or are things absolutely dead? Normally I'd expect to be getting calls and interviews at this point. Is something bad going on with the market?

Read back a couple of pages. We've been going on about htis for awhile now. It's a nightmare.

[OzzieExpat]

Just started looking for a new contract. I've been working down under for a couple of years. I started looking for new work about a month ago. Is it just me or are things absolutely dead? Normally I'd expect to be getting calls and interviews at this point. Is something bad going on with the market?

[TheDude]

I used to go out drinking with had a mate who was a C++ developer in London, Canary Wharf I think so he must have been one of the early ones down there. That guy's philosophy was 'dress like a professional and get paid like one'.

Sounds like the sort of life coaching idiot that dispenses advice on LinkedIn and spends their days cold calling people.

[willendure]

For those holding their breath for an interest rate cut... you really don't understand how this works. There won't be a cut until the economy cracks, possibly not even until we are in the midst of a full blown crash like 2008 or 2001. An interest rate rise takes maybe 18 months to bring the economy to its knees, and a cut takes maybe 18 months to bring it back again - its called the lag effect. So buckle in kittens!

On the other hand, if there is a stock market crash and interest rate cut, and you happen to have built a cash position to prepare there will be good pickings to be had at around that time.

Sorry to hear the hard luck stories of some on here. We are highly skilled and talented people working in a dynamic sector of the economy and don't deserve this kind of siutation. But we are also contractors and must expect it as its all part of the contracting game. I agree with others that if you are not getting anywhere, keep trying new approaches until you succeed - rewrite your CV, learn new skills, try and make new contacts, and so on. Each time I get work, I find that the contracting landscape has changed and it takes something different to find a way in.

[willendure]

Jobserve down to 16K vacancies now. The biggest surprise is that Jobserve still exists, given most recruiting has moved to LinkedIn.

I am surprised to read this, as I never found LinkedIn was good for contract work. I actually deleted my LinkedIn profile earlier this year, as I got fed up maintaining it when it gave me no benefit I could see. I think this may have been a mistake, although I can always create a new one and try and reconnect with some of my old contacts. In fact, that sounds like a good idea, since it will give me an excuse to catch up with some great folk I have not heard from in too long!

LinkedIn is now a better place to find contracts?

[Fraidycat]

I know the market has been tough for a long time but If you're making 500, 1000 or god forbid, 3000 job applications without success then surely you must question your whole approach as that many applications must be a huge waste of time if you're not getting a good number of interviews?

3000 sounds like a lot, but its only 12 per day. Could do that in just one hour a day or even less.

At the end of the day sending 1000s of applications costs zero out of pocket. Luckily we don't have to post CVs anymore, 3000 stamps aren't cheap. The last time i posted my CV by snail mail was in 1996

[sspt27]

I know the market has been tough for a long time but If you're making 500, 1000 or god forbid, 3000 job applications without success then surely you must question your whole approach as that many applications must be a huge waste of time if you're not getting a good number of interviews?

After being on the bench since autumn, I decided to start applying for perm roles and applied for a grand total of 11 since March. Got through to the next round of screening (i.e. by a human) once. And that was it. Decided to concentrate looking solely at contract roles.

I did this too: folded and applied for plenty of jobs on the Dark Side (meaning, of course, perm). Two interviews, out of c. 100 applications. Both of them just went dead - nothing happened, agent not taking or returning calls.

An additional problem with the perm side is that agents can get all hoity-toity about "why have you been out of work for months?" (Why d'you think??????? Idiot...). Given that they're offering salaries at 75% of what I was on in my last perm role four years ago, at that point it's tempting to just throw the phone across the room.

[sspt27]

In my experience none of this is really true. Maybe in a few companies but majority are still tulip shows.

Well, in my last contract, both were true. Systems were a total tulipshow: but management "solved" the problem by ignoring anyone who pointed this out. So that the previous poster's point - devs not fixing any design issues, any creative thinking verboten - was also true. Results was an endless death-march of firefighting. But it was agile, so everything was OK </sarcasm>

[edison]

I know the market has been tough for a long time but If you're making 500, 1000 or god forbid, 3000 job applications without success then surely you must question your whole approach as that many applications must be a huge waste of time if you're not getting a good number of interviews?

After being on the bench since autumn, I decided to start applying for perm roles and applied for a grand total of 11 since March. Got through to the next round of screening (i.e. by a human) once. And that was it. Decided to concentrate looking solely at contract roles.

[dsc]

Got a spam email from Glassdoor (Jobs In Tech forum) this morning, some very sobering stories. The IT sector in the US is going to be around five times bigger than the UK tech sector, so these stories of 800 and 3000 applications are probably true. If vacancies in the UK get 100s of applicants, i can only imagine how many they get in the US, (1000s?)

Project Manager
I just hit my 1 year anniversary of unemployment, I'm being strategic with my search and have submitted at least 800 applications to date with no interviews. I'm not just applying to apply. I meet the majority of requirements when I apply.Looking for recommendations for fully remote non-client facing Project Manager or Scrum Master roles.I've hit the character limit on this post so I'm unable to include all the steps I've taken in this search to appease any critics.

Senior Enterprise Implementation Manager
Month 10 of my tech layoff. No unemployment, I refuse to go on section 8. I dedicated my life to the tech game and now that I’m 3000 plus applications in I’m realizing maybe the game wasn’t made for me. 1099 are the only thing keeping the lights on..

Software Test Engineer
I have been searching for jobs for over 12 months and havent had a call back in the past 10 months.I have over 20 years of experience in my field.

Glassdoor seems to have loads of sob stories, although mostly from managers, then again it might just be who sits on that site that is causing this. I've also seen a fair bit coming from people who recently got into IT, mixed in with the occasional "I have over 20yrs of exp in testing / software dev".

[sreed]

Project Manager
I just hit my 1 year anniversary of unemployment, I'm being strategic with my search and have submitted at least 800 applications to date with no interviews. I'm not just applying to apply. I meet the majority of requirements when I apply.Looking for recommendations for fully remote non-client facing Project Manager or Scrum Master roles.I've hit the character limit on this post so I'm unable to include all the steps I've taken in this search

As a generalist PM myself who’s done 3 different contracts since Covid, I can’t imagine a scenario in which the above is not an extreme edge case OR this person has extremely specific requirements with respect to domain+industry+pay+location+benefits+++, at least in the UK.

I had a similar conversation with a colleague whose wife was a scrum master at TCS (left the job and became her husband’s dependent as TCS was sending her back to India and wouldn’t allow her to stay in the job on her husbands visa), with 10years experience and apparently couldn’t find a job in the UK over the past 6 months. Turns out she would only consider a perm role in a big bank at 100k+ (which apparently she calculated based on purchasing power parity of her TCS salary in India or some such nonsense).

[SchumiStars]

I worked with a cock who was on £100ph + overtime + vat. The guy lived in student digs.

Thats was in 2001. And he was tulip.

[Fraidycat]

I think his house would probably be worth a little more than that these days, don't you?

Yep, house price inflation (HPI) has been more than twice CPI.

Although 65 per hour in 1998 = 122 per hour today using CPI, using HPI its more like 65 per hour = 250 per hour.