Reply to: State of the Market

[tsmith]

Is it just me or is permie life just constant reorganisations, worries about redundancy, applying for your own job etc? I’m not sure having a permanent role is any more secure than contracting for
many, just minus the war chest we get to build up.

Unless the company is a unicorn with hockey stick revenue growth then high probability = yes

My first perm job - small start up head count was just flat for 3 years. Should have left after a year. Working in an industry in decline - but no layoffs

2nd perm - Lost count of rounds of redundancy + restructures. Large bricks and mortar type biz. Another industry massively disrupted by digital and struggling to cope

At least 5 redundancy rounds - reorgs were are yearly occurrence at least. Again should have left years before. But was doing my own startup behind scenes so suited me - as my boss was fired and wasnt replaced.

If you apply for perm check the glassdoor reviews. Its amazing how many are hiring but then recent reviews. "Constant layoffs/reorgs"

Heres a real example

"There is no business strategy or direction (or if there is, it changes every week, as the CEO pleases).

Most decisions are made at the top, so don't expect to be respected as an expert in your field - if the CEO says it needs to be done completely the opposite way, there is no way anyone will disagree or voice their concerns.

Expect your skills to worsen while you're at xxx - there isn't much opportunity to show them off or apply them

The turnover is so high. It is shocking. Most people I met during my first week during intros have told me they are leaving"

[dsc]

Is it just me or is permie life just constant reorganisations, worries about redundancy, applying for your own job etc? I’m not sure having a permanent role is any more secure than contracting for
many, just minus the war chest we get to build up.

It seems that if the upper mgmt is clueless about what the company actually does, they often go for a "digital transformation" as if that's the sure way to increasing efficiency etc. it's basically what Agile was back in 2015-2020, the magical ticket to hyper-efficient organisations.

As for re-applying to your own positions, that's also happening where I am now, some people suddenly found their name not on the new org charts and having to re-apply to their own positions effectively. One manager I worked with recently has really been fecked by this, he agreed to be an interim manager for a whole team which he thought would be a positive thing to have on his CV and now that whole team was wiped from the org chart, so he's basically an interim manager of nothing and has to apply to another position elsewhere in the business or have no job. If he stayed as a standard manager and not taken the interim position, he would've been placed in a new team for ops and still have a job without having to reapply to anything.

[Ketto]

In my case there already was a re-org like a year ago, but mostly just shifting people around, this time though it's pretty major, with new org groups and the new manager is hell bent on pushing people hard and thinks consultants are just money grabbing lazy bastards, so pretty much every non-permie is going out. Of course that leads to situations where a bunch of skill-less permies are left and the consultants who've been doing the brunt of the work or have very niche skills are getting chopped. All this whilst announcing left / right that there's so much work coming in 2025 that everyone will be uber busy and not realising that if you cut some skilled people, they won't be available in 6 months time when the work load comes.

Gotta love those "digital transformation" idiots at the steering wheel...

Is it just me or is permie life just constant reorganisations, worries about redundancy, applying for your own job etc? I’m not sure having a permanent role is any more secure than contracting for
many, just minus the war chest we get to build up.

[GJABS]

Right, I've just finished my gig on Friday, so budge up on the (unfortunately very long) bench please.

I've just gone onto my LinkedIn, for the first time in a couple of weeks, and was greeted with this:



Unemployed! Grrr

[dsc]

My client (mid sized FS firm) is at the early stages of (yet another) reorg triggered by the firing/resignation of their c-suite Tech guy.

Apparently their parent co has given them a payroll reduction target and (at least according to my manager) the new king of the hill is considering using more contractors instead of perm hires. To balance that out he also said that the consultants they've appointed have reported that their salary scales and rates in the delivery teams are 'too high', whatever that means.

They've been trying to get rid of day-rate contractors (I'm now on a PAYE FTC until Christmas) outside super specialist short-term roles so it'll be interesting to see how this pans out...

In my case there already was a re-org like a year ago, but mostly just shifting people around, this time though it's pretty major, with new org groups and the new manager is hell bent on pushing people hard and thinks consultants are just money grabbing lazy bastards, so pretty much every non-permie is going out. Of course that leads to situations where a bunch of skill-less permies are left and the consultants who've been doing the brunt of the work or have very niche skills are getting chopped. All this whilst announcing left / right that there's so much work coming in 2025 that everyone will be uber busy and not realising that if you cut some skilled people, they won't be available in 6 months time when the work load comes.

Gotta love those "digital transformation" idiots at the steering wheel...

[oliverson]

It would be nice to have a separate thread for the wannabe Warren Buffets and save this one for tales of the state of the market in contracts.

Totally agree

[willendure]

It would be nice to have a separate thread for the wannabe Warren Buffets and save this one for tales of the state of the market in contracts.

You don't think the two are linked?

[Peoplesoft bloke]

It would be nice to have a separate thread for the wannabe Warren Buffets and save this one for tales of the state of the market in contracts.

[edison]

Here is another technical indicator that suggests a major correction is coming - it advance singalled very well the dotcom crash for example. This is the Dow Jones Transport average versus the S&P500. You can see they are strongly correlated, but have now diverged. The transport average tells us what is happening in the real economy and indicates when the S&P500 has diverged into fantasy land.



For comparison, here is the divergence that happened ahead of the dotcom crash:



There was no such advance signal for the 2008 crash, but there are earlier examples for crashes in the 70s and 80s.

The S&P is very heavily weighted towards tech stocks now, mainly the so called Magnificent Seven, a few chip firms and the largest SaaS firms. The top 25 stocks by size account for nearly 50% of the total index and tech makes up over 40% of that. And I believe that it would be more but there is a maximum weighting factor for single stocks otherwise Microsoft, Apple and NVIDIA would be close to 10% on their own rather than 6-7%.

Ever since I started my own SIPP about 12 years ago, I've gone long on tech stocks as a long term buy and hold investor. But I'm getting nervous now as my overall tech exposure is reaching 55-60% across my whole portfolio so I will be starting to trim this soon.

There is a mania but it is different in some ways to the dot come boom because these tech companies are making huge profits. It's just the PE ratio for stocks is priced for near perfection.

[Fraidycat]

Here is another technical indicator that suggests a major correction is coming - it advance singalled very well the dotcom crash for example. This is the Dow Jones Transport average versus the S&P500.

One thing about the stock market is its hard to predict when the next crash will happen.

Probably better to post after the crash has started, eg when the FTSE 100 and S&P 500 are down more than 10% from highs or at least below the 200 day moving average. Rather that post charts that try to predict an imminent stock market crash while the market is at all time highs.

Its only been two years since the last bear market for stocks. Outside of some big names, the market hasn't even fully recovered from the last bear market.

[willendure]

Here is another technical indicator that suggests a major correction is coming - it advance singalled very well the dotcom crash for example. This is the Dow Jones Transport average versus the S&P500. You can see they are strongly correlated, but have now diverged. The transport average tells us what is happening in the real economy and indicates when the S&P500 has diverged into fantasy land.



For comparison, here is the divergence that happened ahead of the dotcom crash:



There was no such advance signal for the 2008 crash, but there are earlier examples for crashes in the 70s and 80s.

[edison]

French, UK and US election uncertainty not helping.

German elections next year too.

Portuguese finished in March and Netherlands did not have a fully functioning government until today.

Doesn't seem much uncertainty about the UK election. Labour to win big, just a question of how big.

[agentzero]

That chart has a Farage-esque level of fable about it.
It starts in 2020, but your comments talk about “pre Covid levels”

Do you think we are all as gullible as you? It’s like you’ve taken the worst of Scooter and combined it with the far-right to make false assertions.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/IHLIDXUSTPSOFTDEVE

The website won't allow data prior to Feb 1st 2020.

[sreed]

My client (mid sized FS firm) is at the early stages of (yet another) reorg triggered by the firing/resignation of their c-suite Tech guy.

Apparently their parent co has given them a payroll reduction target and (at least according to my manager) the new king of the hill is considering using more contractors instead of perm hires. To balance that out he also said that the consultants they've appointed have reported that their salary scales and rates in the delivery teams are 'too high', whatever that means.

They've been trying to get rid of day-rate contractors (I'm now on a PAYE FTC until Christmas) outside super specialist short-term roles so it'll be interesting to see how this pans out...

[dsc]

Bench time here I come...was told I'm not getting extended due to re-org and cost cutting. Mental as there's heaps of work coming and the current team is already stretched. No worries though as they have a few scrum masters so I'm sure they will manage...fecking bean counters. Anyways, at least timing is good for a holiday.