Reply to: State of the Market

[sreed]

I applied to 100 jobs using a resume with the name, "Kismma D. Nhuhts" and I got 29 interviews.

https://twitter.com/JerryJHLee/statu...84920593055763

Takeaway - As long as you have big name companies on your CV nobody reads the rest - that or interviews are much easier to come by in San Francisco

Maybe Ill try and apply for a few stateside to test

That Twitter thread made my day, lol

[sreed]

Got a message from an agent in San Diego - they need a Workday UK payroll person (this is my niche) for an immediate start to do 50 hours a month. That'd be great if I was free but I have 3 month notice period and he didn't mention rates.

Meanwhile there's a gig on linkedin - 6 months 3 days a week in Brentford 2 days remote for £600. Looked great until I notice the £600 is a week, inside.

I don't know if there are suddenly a lot of cheap contractors around or clients are just being weird.

Care to share the listing? That has to be a mistake, I can’t recall ever having seen any inside contract that pays £120 a day!

Working backwards from net pay, that translates into a PAYE salary of around 21k or so which (even for a 35 hour week) is just above min wage!

[tsmith]

Agents / clients might be trying it on to see how low they can go, if there's a lot of people who are desperate for anything, someone will eventually bite. Besides that seems to be the case with perm positions in mainland Europe, they open up a perm position, post a job ad with a set of skills and have a budget in mind, then they ask you how much you'd want to earn, if you go outside the budget, they simply stick you on the list of "too expensive for now". If they can't get anyone, they increase the budget (assuming they can do so), if they get people with partial skill matches, they look at what is crucial and whether it's enough. If it is, they fill the position with a reasonable skills to pay ration and call it a day.

Im seeing 90% of roles with 'state salary requirements' - 10 years ago it was maybe 10%. Times have changed. How long before its 35k for a senior XYZ role in London?

I try and put 'market rates' if theres no integer only check

Woman actually called me about a role I applied for with this approach - 'you put market rates - the role is paying £55k 6 months FTC'

I said can you do £60k? - She said no

[dsc]

Got a message from an agent in San Diego - they need a Workday UK payroll person (this is my niche) for an immediate start to do 50 hours a month. That'd be great if I was free but I have 3 month notice period and he didn't mention rates.

Meanwhile there's a gig on linkedin - 6 months 3 days a week in Brentford 2 days remote for £600. Looked great until I notice the £600 is a week, inside.

I don't know if there are suddenly a lot of cheap contractors around or clients are just being weird.

Agents / clients might be trying it on to see how low they can go, if there's a lot of people who are desperate for anything, someone will eventually bite. Besides that seems to be the case with perm positions in mainland Europe, they open up a perm position, post a job ad with a set of skills and have a budget in mind, then they ask you how much you'd want to earn, if you go outside the budget, they simply stick you on the list of "too expensive for now". If they can't get anyone, they increase the budget (assuming they can do so), if they get people with partial skill matches, they look at what is crucial and whether it's enough. If it is, they fill the position with a reasonable skills to pay ration and call it a day.

[tsmith]

Got a message from an agent in San Diego - they need a Workday UK payroll person (this is my niche) for an immediate start to do 50 hours a month. That'd be great if I was free but I have 3 month notice period and he didn't mention rates.

Meanwhile there's a gig on linkedin - 6 months 3 days a week in Brentford 2 days remote for £600. Looked great until I notice the £600 is a week, inside.

I don't know if there are suddenly a lot of cheap contractors around or clients are just being weird.

with time difference can you do both at once?

people are accepting lower salaries no doubt

linkedin have got more aggressive with their paywall now it seems. one free message - a week or day or something - with a connection now - then subsequent i need to pay to message and connect withe people

SMH - this nonsense just gets more and more annoying.

[Peoplesoft bloke]

Got a message from an agent in San Diego - they need a Workday UK payroll person (this is my niche) for an immediate start to do 50 hours a month. That'd be great if I was free but I have 3 month notice period and he didn't mention rates.

Meanwhile there's a gig on linkedin - 6 months 3 days a week in Brentford 2 days remote for £600. Looked great until I notice the £600 is a week, inside.

I don't know if there are suddenly a lot of cheap contractors around or clients are just being weird.

[tsmith]

I applied to 100 jobs using a resume with the name, "Kismma D. Nhuhts" and I got 29 interviews.

https://twitter.com/JerryJHLee/statu...84920593055763

Takeaway - As long as you have big name companies on your CV nobody reads the rest - that or interviews are much easier to come by in San Francisco

Maybe Ill try and apply for a few stateside to test

[hungry_hog]

hungry_hog Just curious, are these London-hybrid contracts generally? If so, how many days pw in the office is expected at your client?

London. Current client is 2pw, quite a lot of people do 1pw (or even zero)
Worked at another client (FS, not banking), again was 2pw

[sreed]

The rates are actually good, even though market is slow, which I know seems anomalous.
I'm at an FS client and there are plenty of people on 1000+ Umbrella rate (not me I hasten to add). The posh coffee shops (coffee 4 to 15 quid!) are doing a roaring trade.

it depends hugely on previous experience specific to that client, if you have it they pay top dollar. Worth more than 20 years at the fabled "top tier" IBs

hungry_hog Just curious, are these London-hybrid contracts generally? If so, how many days pw in the office is expected at your client?

[hungry_hog]

The rates are actually good, even though market is slow, which I know seems anomalous.
I'm at an FS client and there are plenty of people on 1000+ Umbrella rate (not me I hasten to add). The posh coffee shops (coffee 4 to 15 quid!) are doing a roaring trade.

it depends hugely on previous experience specific to that client, if you have it they pay top dollar. Worth more than 20 years at the fabled "top tier" IBs

[Fraidycat]

Also the days of floors full of contractors delivering projects seems to have passed. They seem to be well and truly offshored.

My guess is the demand for contractors will return at some point. But inflation adjusted rates will not return to 2021 levels.

When the surge in demand returns is anyones guess.. A year ago i was confident the full recovery will be in 2025. Now i'm not as sure..

[BlueSharp]

6 weeks to the end of the contract for me, but I have a sizable holiday in July and a family property to renovate over the summer and plan to get some AI certs so won't be looking until the end of August.

I'm hoping things have picked up by September! From conversations with agents the market is awful still so may have no option but to plough on with plan B until the cash runs out (or it becomes a real business) then back to perm. I think there are a lot of projects on hold at the moment waiting for the next election and also for interest rates to start dropping.

Speaking to a commercial banker friend no one is borrowing cash at the moment to expand as it's too expensive and there are a lot of over-leveraged companies out there caught paying down debt due to the high rates. There seems to be more appetite for getting SaaS solutions in and integrated than building in-house/offshore development at the moment. A lot of macro factors are at play.

[edison]

funny and a little arrogant , recruiter asked my why I was out of work from Nov to Jan - 3 months, I said ill and market was pretty quite, I then asked him how many placements he did in the same period...........

The truth.

Only one recruiter I've spoken to out of maybe 25-30 in the last 5-6 months has said that business is really good. Many of these are big players in the contract and interim market.

[barely_pointless]

funny and a little arrogant , recruiter asked my why I was out of work from Nov to Jan - 3 months, I said ill and market was pretty quite, I then asked him how many placements he did in the same period...........

[sreed]

I think we are in the process of a fairly major adjustment in the IT contracting industry. Once the City decided that inside IR35 was the way to go then the argument for remaining a contractor was weakened, although there is seemingly still enough contractors willing to do it.

Also the days of floors full of contractors delivering projects seems to have passed. They seem to be well and truly offshored.

This is an observation based on who I have worked with over recent years and not a political or social one, but we have had a lot of IT talent come in from India. I suspect the change in immigration rules will reduce that but they are now able to stay permanently and are competing with the rest of us.

That all said the work I have got post Covid reminds me of what I got 15 years ago where you went into a small or medium setup either on your own or in a small group and used your expertise to help them over a few months before moving on.

I probably don’t have as much contracting experience as you, given that I’ve never been pure IT and moved from operations permie to consulting outside to now a generalist PM contractor (mostly inside post covid) over a 20 year period, but there is definitely a trend over the time I have been in the market that matches what you’ve said.

I don’t believe that there will be a significant let up in experienced IT people moving here from India, there continue to be too many low effort visa routes and an inexhaustible (compared to the UK job market) high volume of highly incentivised people looking to permanently immigrate.

IR35 and a move towards inside roles is here to stay. To me personally, it’s all a means to an end and since I’ve started sal sacrificing large proportions and the allowance has gone up to 60k, I’m increasingly fine with inside contracts as monetarily it works out about even compared to if I earned a similar day rate on an outside contract. Obviously that wouldn’t be the case for every single contractor out there but it will for a large number of one man bands and especially those who started contracting fairly recently so aren’t comparing it to the era that was.