Reply to: State of the Market

[jamesbrown]

but I see no problem taking an inside IR35 role if the work is remote and they don't expect much or any travel...

Neither do I, FWIW. Fill yer boots with inside IR35 work if the numbers stack up.

[eek]

Indeed, it's easy to find someone to blame. People who work inside IR35 etc. etc. The current market is certainly tough, especially for generic skillsets. It will probably improve after the GE and interest rate reductions, but generic skills are biddable and that isn't going to improve.

Given that I'm currently vaguely job hunting - the only issue I've got with IR35 is working out how much I can pull out of the limited company given that if I go inside the tax of dividends is grotty if you go over a £50,000 income let alone £100,000..

but I see no problem taking an inside IR35 role if the work is remote and they don't expect much or any travel...

All the roles I'm seeing are outside ones paying about 20% less than the inside ones usually do..

[jamesbrown]

I think James's point is that some of us *( including me) should become Dick Whittington (and his cat again). Get knapsack and the wooden stick and go out and find the fortune, through networking and talking with real people at conferences and meetup (instead of relying on just Microsoft AI). Find the thing that just on the periphery of the mainstream. And just maybe, we are in the right place at the right time to catch the new wave ahead of the rest of the herd. Because there is always a new wave.

Exactly that, as best you can. IMHO, that is what contracting is all about, trying to position yourself not just for the next gig, but the next sequence of gigs. Or, more simply, get a plan of some kind, even if it isn't contracting. I appreciate it's easy to bumble along and miss the big picture when there are bills to pay, but the direction of travel has been clear for some time now.

[jamesbrown]

Not only immigrants do work for less money, look at people who graduated 3-5yrs ago, they will often work for super low wages just to have a job, why aren't they being blamed? what about all those contractors who will work for any rate after 12-18months of not working simply because they've maxed out all the credit cards, burned through their war chest and can't afford their mortgage payments? not blaming them?

Current job market is really tough and that's a fact, there's jack tulip positions and trillions of people looking, so wages have dropped and will drop, agents will try silly rates on etc.

Indeed, it's easy to find someone to blame. People who work inside IR35 etc. etc. The current market is certainly tough, especially for generic skillsets. It will probably improve after the GE and interest rate reductions, but generic skills are biddable and that isn't going to improve.

[jamesbrown]

People are allowed their views and they may not concur with yours…you ain’t the thought police …

Oh, the ironing!

[rocktronAMP]

I said back in the day, 25 years ago, that open source was going to eventually devalue/commoditise our work.

And the final nail in the coffin, AI has been trained on all that open source code as well.

Facebook are doing the same thing with AI at the moment, facebook is spending billions on AI for their own websites/apps, but then making those models open source just to devalue/commoditise the work Google and Microsoft and OpenAI are doing.

So what we would do without the excellent Linux operating system?
How about the GNU Software Foundation? (I know that Richard Stallman was/is a jerk, but respect is due)
How about Guido von Rossum and Python programming language?
How about Bjarne Stroustrup and C++ programming language?
How about James Gosling and Java programming language?

The thing about open source is who has power and control of the repository and politics with the committers.
There are open source repositories where nobody commits anything for years and years.
There are open source repositories where everybody is supremely excited minute by minute (Rust, I am looking at you)
Then there open source repositories where the hey day has come and the thrill has definitely gone.
Open source needs buy-in from human beings, not artificial intelligence, and it is rather akin to songwriting and singers/vocalists.
We remember songs, because how they make us feel and the context around the first time we ever hear the song at a certain space-time in our own wonderful corner of the universe.
No machine can feel. Only, we can feel (sorry Dolphins, dogs and cats; you know what I mean).

Anyone and any organisation can publish open source software with the appropriate license MIT, GNU or Creative Commons,
but how do we know if any of the code is good enough or great?
Open source also requires interest and attention, which mandates an ecosystem and hopefully a graceful and supportive community.
Too often though, we find toxic communities, zeolets into whatever thing, be it Scala and ZIO or C# and even AWS.
I surmise that an AI trained in a toxic codebase, might produce some weird answers for less atuned at programming.
So I keenly await the magically AI that replicates "Linus Torwald" curses at some poor Junior / Graduate programmer's tulipty Pull Request.

Just today, Microsoft have a launched a laptop with hardware AI. I wonder what my penetration testing friends have to say about this announcement, notwithstanding the potential spyware and personal identifiable information (PPI) risks to do with it. Just because it is Microsoft does not make it/them a trusted advisor.

Oh yes now just this morning OpenAI and Sky and HER and Scarlett Johansson.

I think James's point is that some of us *( including me)* should become Dick Whittington (and his cat again). Get the handkerchief knapsack, the cheese bun packed lunch, and the wooden stick and go out and find the fortune, through networking and talking with real people at conferences and meet-ups (instead of relying on just Microsoft AI). Find the things that are just on the periphery of the mainstream. And just maybe, we are in the right place at the right time to catch the new wave ahead of the rest of the herd. Because there, always, is a new wave.

[TheDude]

I saw a recent quote from a leader on Surrey University's AI PhD course saying that if they had the capacity, they could churn out hundreds of PhD students a year and they would all get great, high paying jobs. Clearly not everyone has the talent to do a PhD but the AI talent race has been going on for about 10 years and really hotted up in the last couple.

But how long will this last?

Lots of people have the talent to do a PhD.

That is why there are so many unemployed PhDs out there.

[TheDude]

To answer my own question, I think part of the problem is that IT has become too easy.
Back in the day, computer programming was intellectually difficult and complex, and this difficulty provided a barrier to entry because many candidates were not capable of getting up to speed with the technology.

Nowadays it is a lot easier due to frameworks and GUIs, resulting in millions being able to gain the skills.

Horsetulip.

I used to work with many people who worked 'back in the day'

Many found it hard to get to grips with modern programming paradigms and resorted to bluster and war stories about the legacy stuff they have worked with.

Some technologies and sectors are harder than others. Some skills are more in demand than others. These pay accordingly. That has always been the case

[Cookielove]

I’m not arguing about the relationship between migration and wages. That has been studied to death and most of these studies point to a weak negative effect, mainly at the low end. I’m saying that attempting to fight these structural changes in the economy is pissing into the wind. There are all sorts of people you may struggle to compete with, including recent immigrants, UK citizens that live with their parents, old people that simply want something to do and are wage insensitive. There’s no point getting angry with these people who can compete at lower cost or have an “unfair” advantage. It’s the failure to accept personal agency (or the tendency to blame immigrants rather than accept partial responsibility through lack of foresight and action) that I take issue with. If you can’t compete in some sector of the economy, then think about how best to compete elsewhere. Don’t sit around waiting for these quite obvious trends to embed.

How bloody condescending…”the failure to accept personal agency”….hilarious!!!

People are allowed their views and they may not concur with yours…you ain’t the thought police …

[dsc]

I’m not arguing about the relationship between migration and wages. That has been studied to death and most of these studies point to a weak negative effect, mainly at the low end. I’m saying that attempting to fight these structural changes in the economy is pissing into the wind. There are all sorts of people you may struggle to compete with, including recent immigrants, UK citizens that live with their parents, old people that simply want something to do and are wage insensitive. There’s no point getting angry with these people who can compete at lower cost or have an “unfair” advantage. It’s the failure to accept personal agency (or the tendency to blame immigrants rather than accept partial responsibility through lack of foresight and action) that I take issue with. If you can’t compete in some sector of the economy, then think about how best to compete elsewhere. Don’t sit around waiting for these quite obvious trends to embed.

Not only immigrants do work for less money, look at people who graduated 3-5yrs ago, they will often work for super low wages just to have a job, why aren't they being blamed? what about all those contractors who will work for any rate after 12-18months of not working simply because they've maxed out all the credit cards, burned through their war chest and can't afford their mortgage payments? not blaming them?

Current job market is really tough and that's a fact, there's jack tulip positions and trillions of people looking, so wages have dropped and will drop, agents will try silly rates on etc.

[jamesbrown]

I disagree, to some extent.

I’m not arguing about the relationship between migration and wages. That has been studied to death and most of these studies point to a weak negative effect, mainly at the low end. I’m saying that attempting to fight these structural changes in the economy is pissing into the wind. There are all sorts of people you may struggle to compete with, including recent immigrants, UK citizens that live with their parents, old people that simply want something to do and are wage insensitive. There’s no point getting angry with these people who can compete at lower cost or have an “unfair” advantage. It’s the failure to accept personal agency (or the tendency to blame immigrants rather than accept partial responsibility through lack of foresight and action) that I take issue with. If you can’t compete in some sector of the economy, then think about how best to compete elsewhere. Don’t sit around waiting for these quite obvious trends to embed.

[Snooky]

No amount of protectionist or anti-immigrant legislation is going to rescue you

I disagree, to some extent. Where we have fairly free movement, allowing workers to do jobs in the UK that can't be done elsewhere (or the client prefers them to be done onshore), UK resident workers are at a disadvantage to foreign workers whose aim is to work here for long enough to earn a sizeable amount of income relative in terms of their home country. The migrant workers may pay the same taxes and have the same costs while they're here, but they don't have the same long-term costs a UK resident may have if they wish to have a tolerable or even prosperous future in the UK.

A simple example: I know several Polish people who worked in the UK at rates below what a UK worker might expect, they told me that they were just keeping enough to live on but the rest was for building a nice big house back home. The UK worker who tries to compete with those lower rates will find themselves at a significant disadvantage to those Polish workers, because demand has been artificially reduced by allowing an increase in supply of those skills (i.e. allowing , thus lowering costs, yet local cost of living hasn't reduced to account for it.

I've also worked with many, many "onshored" Indian guys, all lovely and competent people, who did exactly the same. A couple of my colleagues had several servants back at home in India, yet their company charged them at a far lower rate than UK resident staff.

I wasn't pro-Brexit, but I understand completely why quite a number of Leavers were hoping Brexit would reduce this genuine problem. Instead, Government has just opened up migration from other quarters to assuage large businesses who'd prefer not to have higher staffing costs.

Immigration is a completely different issue; then the worker has committed to a life here (usually) and will bear the same long term costs as other citizens, so they'll need to earn at a similar level. The only problem then is when does a population become too big for our infrastructure, even if we extend it.

[gables]

No one could have foresaw this shift in such a relatively short space of time…jobs have hundreds of applicants now that just wasn’t the case 10/20 years ago …PMO job £150 /inside?! any takers?

Would depend on the role within the PMO, which from I've seen can be junior admin staff with a team manager.

Exacerbates.

what's a PMO? another useless so-called 'XXX Manager' ??

From memory PMO = Project Management Office but not necessarily the PMs but the team\office that tries to ensure that the orgs project management processes are adhered to by said PMs.

[SueEllen]

China are producing cheap EV cars now. The US and Germans wont be able to compete, so they will to slap large tariffs on Chinese cars. So much for 'competing in the global market place'

They keep catching fire very randomly.

Oh and it will be the EU not Germany slapping large tariffs on Chinese cars. I suspect it can done using an environmental tariff.

[sadkingbilly]

This is true of many immigrants. But many others are actively here stealing British intellectual property. Many bring their relatives over precisely when they need expensive medical care and abuse our healthcare system. Many bring their children in for free education at precisely the years it would cost them most at home to send them to school. Many abuse our tax system. Many play the system to gain British passports.

Layered on top of some demographics of immigrations who openly hate the Brits and all we stand for, they openly say it, you only have to listen to what they say at Hyde Park corner etc.

let's see....................
1) English Defence League
2) National Action
3) Britain First
4)All of the above

answers on a £20 note please.