Reply to: State of the Market

[oliverson]

Have a couple of years left on the mortgage. After that will try and find a local permit job to see me into retirement.

I'll be hanging up my contracting keyboard in the next 2-3 years too. It will be 20 years I've been doing this in February next year.

Rent the UK place out and move to the sun. Mortgage on that place will be coming to a close. Write my own software at my leisure. I have a few ideas.

I've had a good innings at this but I feel for those of you just starting out or in mid-stride.

[hungry_hog]

I have just left a contract where over half the team were from India (as opposed to British Indian) including the Test Manager. Nothing against those people as they are legally here but and the same time there are British born Testing Contractors out of work at the moment, including me.

From memory people didn't have much choice but to sit at home but I do agree the main problem at the moment is projects aren't getting started and when they are they are cut back at the first sign of difficulty.

I had a similar contract.
They had about 15 testers, all from India.
Every time they found something that "didn't work" they would raise a bug. No investigation, no root cause analysis, just raise a bug and assign to one of the BAs.
Just randomly bash in source data and hope for the best.
So we end up with about 80 bugs which are not actually bugs.

[SussexSeagull]

Have a couple of years left on the mortgage. After that will try and find a local permit job to see me into retirement.

[hildaoblivion]

Was chatting last night to an old friend in Silicon Valley who's originally from the UK. He's at the leading edge of thinking in AI and paints a worrying picture of national technology capabilities in the UK and Europe in the coming decade and the impact on wealth creation and jobs.

I tend to agree with him. I think we'll see the USA continue to dominate with China maybe not too far behind and Europe will be laggards.

Even today, I struggle to think of many notable successful UK tech companies that started within the last 10 years. A smaller pool of highly educated/capable people, lack of business investment, lack of investment in training and development, poor infrastructure, the list goes on.

Whilst the market may pick up in the next year or two, I think the long term potential for high paying jobs is going to be a lot worse in the 2030s.

https://www.ft.com/content/570d23b3-...9-b49cc4056f52

Article from FT (paywall) shows how shortchanged UK Grads are.
US has a shortage of grads while we have a shortage of grad jobs - and no wonder with that visa list.

Big Business has been hollowing out the UK skills base for years. It's now in terminal mode.

Things may improve a little - but there doesn't seem to be any politician even aware of these issues let alone planning to fix them.

[SussexSeagull]

You can bring an artist in for £8.41 an hour. Because famously there are next to no unemployed artists in this country.

[edison]

Oh Lord, I wasn’t aware of this.

That is insane. No wonder there are no decent jobs - why pay £100,000 for the top UK talent from your own pocket if you can probably settle for mediocre immigrant whose salary will be at the rock bottom. This is absolutely scandalous, I don’t really understand why is this not in the national news :O This is sabotage!

Was chatting last night to an old friend in Silicon Valley who's originally from the UK. He's at the leading edge of thinking in AI and paints a worrying picture of national technology capabilities in the UK and Europe in the coming decade and the impact on wealth creation and jobs.

I tend to agree with him. I think we'll see the USA continue to dominate with China maybe not too far behind and Europe will be laggards.

Even today, I struggle to think of many notable successful UK tech companies that started within the last 10 years. A smaller pool of highly educated/capable people, lack of business investment, lack of investment in training and development, poor infrastructure, the list goes on.

Whilst the market may pick up in the next year or two, I think the long term potential for high paying jobs is going to be a lot worse in the 2030s.

[mattster]

"Skills shortage" has always been shorthand for "Skills shortage at a certain price". For £250k pa I'd be perfectly happy to pick fruit as would most of the UK population.
The question then becomes, at what price does an occupation become considered for the skills shortage list. For business, the lower the better obviously but for anyone actually working in the field that's not so great. Unfortunately we have a government that listens almost exclusively to the interests of big business and so here we are, with UK citizens with decades of experience unable to find work whilst we continue to import labour at below cost of living salaries.

[oliverson]

https://www.gov.uk/government/public...ge-occupations

Think this sums up how poor we have become, and we are handing out visas like candy at 80% of those salaries. Special shout out to those which are actually below national minimum wage ahaha/

Plenty cheapness (nod, nod)

[edison]

https://www.gov.uk/government/public...ge-occupations

Think this sums up how poor we have become, and we are handing out visas like candy at 80% of those salaries. Special shout out to those which are actually below national minimum wage ahaha/

Where does the government get these salaries from? Some of them seem ludicrously low.

If I understand the table correctly, 80% of the 'going rate' for an IT Architect is £30,080, thus the going rate salary must be £37,600.

Similar for developers, cyber, BAs etc.

Handing out visas to those on less than national minimum wage seems to be rubbing our noses in it.

And can we really have a shortage of occupations such as graphic designers and arts officers?

No wonder UK companies don't want to invest in training and developing staff.

[dsc]

https://www.gov.uk/government/public...ge-occupations

Think this sums up how poor we have become, and we are handing out visas like candy at 80% of those salaries. Special shout out to those which are actually below national minimum wage ahaha/

Where the hell did they get those salary figures from? Absolutely mental...

Not to worry, just read in the FT that NHS is taking on loads of peeps from red list countries like there's no tomorrow

[northernladuk]

Oh Lord, I wasn’t aware of this.

That is insane. No wonder there are no decent jobs - why pay £100,000 for the top UK talent from your own pocket if you can probably settle for mediocre immigrant whose salary will be at the rock bottom. This is absolutely scandalous, I don’t really understand why is this not in the national news :O This is sabotage!

Because it's been going on for over 15 years and everyone that has ever walked in to the IT dept of a decent sized company can see it for their own eyes. The figures will make for some interesting reading but it's certainly not news. How can you work in IT and not be aware of this?

[wettowel]

Oh Lord, I wasn’t aware of this.

That is insane. No wonder there are no decent jobs - why pay £100,000 for the top UK talent from your own pocket if you can probably settle for mediocre immigrant whose salary will be at the rock bottom. This is absolutely scandalous, I don’t really understand why is this not in the national news :O This is sabotage!

[JustKeepSwimming]

https://www.gov.uk/government/public...ge-occupations

Think this sums up how poor we have become, and we are handing out visas like candy at 80% of those salaries. Special shout out to those which are actually below national minimum wage ahaha/

[hobnob]

They're not like power tools, you can't just have a spare battery.

So you have one on charge, and one to use.

This is going off-topic, but there's a new EV which does work like that: the Silence S04. (Fully Charged did a video about it recently.) The main selling point is that you can remove the batteries and then wheel them inside the house for charging, which solves the problem of "what do you do if you don't have a driveway?" However, you could also buy spare batteries and swap them over.

[SussexSeagull]

Age old blame the immigrants mantra...

Tech boom and bust post Covid and the draining of resources within UK Plc during Covid are the two major factors why we are here today.

Look at Wilco... £100 million + in cash reserves before Covid and then they went under because they lost it all during Covid and didn't have the money to reform.

I would blame all the guys happy to sit at home during Covid rather than the guy from Mumbai.

I have just left a contract where over half the team were from India (as opposed to British Indian) including the Test Manager. Nothing against those people as they are legally here but and the same time there are British born Testing Contractors out of work at the moment, including me.

From memory people didn't have much choice but to sit at home but I do agree the main problem at the moment is projects aren't getting started and when they are they are cut back at the first sign of difficulty.