Reply to: Worse Than The Pandemic

[agentzero]

I don't agree with this 'adapt' and 'agile' attitude. What do you do ... lie about your past contracts or be economical with the truth? I have interviewed many contractors before and obviously been interviewed many times too and every single time there is an acceptance that the contractor must have proper working experience of the subject matter. I am database person and could instantly tell if they had proper workplace knowledge of the subject matter anyway.

It depends on the type of projects you have worked on. For example if I've worked on a project that involved cloud and on prem, then I would lessen the on prem part of that project on my CV if the role I was applying for was exclusively cloud. I would put most of the effort in to detailing the cloud work. If I was a developer and had used a couple of languages in my last role, I would be mentioning mostly the applicable tech that the role I'm applying for wants. I'm not advocating lying or just making up experience that didn't exist.

It isn't lying, just valuing characters in a CV and using words wisely. If you've worked on something in a fact paced project and you know they won't care about it because the project doesn't use that tech, why mention it? Keep it to one or two lines and use the majority for the role you're actually applying for. I've never personally worked on one specific thing in one specific niche area within a project, but I'm not a bum on seat contractor and never have been.

Your mistake is concentrating on being one thing. These days, the higher paying roles expect you to blur across disciplines. The exception to this is Principal Architects who must know everything about one narrow subject. Most roles paying £800 to £1250 per day are going to be cross discipline or very senior. The £1650 to £4000 per day roles are for senior bods and genuine experts from Accenture, PA Consulting, Mckinsey and other such expensive consultancies and it's not worth competing for those roles.

[The Green View]

I don't much time for contractors with lengthy exposure to contracting complaining that their market is dead. Being a contractor means being agile and having skills up your sleeve.

Someone has mentioned looking at IT Jobs Watch, but you could also just go on Job Serve, sort by day rate or look at volume of jobs and start to move towards those specialisations. In software this is easy, as it is for infrastructure. Someone has already mentioned cloud.

Become agile. If you can't cope with that, which is perfectly normal and reasonable, then look at permanent roles instead where you can coast a bit more. There is no shame in it and I am not being rude. If your market is consistently near dead then you should add more skills or change and morph into what clients want. It's not easy but can be rewarding.

I don't see any point unless I do so within a works project. CockroachDB and Cassandra are both niche markets anyway IMHO. Postgres seems to be taking over the world ... mainly because its Open Source, available on all cloud platforms and its great JSON capabilities. I am at a big IB in London and they are migrating their SQL Server and Oracle databases over to Postgres. Not bad for a 40 year old DBMS.

It was always drummed into me over my career that you shouldn't ever put any complicated logic into a stored procedure (or even use SPs at all) because it won't be portable to a different back end provider should they switch to a different RDBMS. I was always thought this was a load of nonsense because I'd never heard of anyone swapping out, say, SQL Server for something else. Looks like it's happening now though

[mogga71]

If you're a DB person, did you expand into cloud offerings, RDS, CockroachDB, Cassandra etc?

I don't see any point unless I do so within a works project. CockroachDB and Cassandra are both niche markets anyway IMHO. Postgres seems to be taking over the world ... mainly because its Open Source, available on all cloud platforms and its great JSON capabilities. I am at a big IB in London and they are migrating their SQL Server and Oracle databases over to Postgres. Not bad for a 40 year old DBMS.

[TheGreenBastard]

I don't agree with this 'adapt' and 'agile' attitude. What do you do ... lie about your past contracts or be economical with the truth? I have interviewed many contractors before and obviously been interviewed many times too and every single time there is an acceptance that the contractor must have proper working experience of the subject matter. I am database person and could instantly tell if they had proper workplace knowledge of the subject matter anyway.

If you're a DB person, did you expand into cloud offerings, RDS, CockroachDB, Cassandra etc?

[mogga71]

I don't much time for contractors with lengthy exposure to contracting complaining that their market is dead. Being a contractor means being agile and having skills up your sleeve.

Someone has mentioned looking at IT Jobs Watch, but you could also just go on Job Serve, sort by day rate or look at volume of jobs and start to move towards those specialisations. In software this is easy, as it is for infrastructure. Someone has already mentioned cloud.

Become agile. If you can't cope with that, which is perfectly normal and reasonable, then look at permanent roles instead where you can coast a bit more. There is no shame in it and I am not being rude. If your market is consistently near dead then you should add more skills or change and morph into what clients want. It's not easy but can be rewarding.

I don't agree with this 'adapt' and 'agile' attitude. What do you do ... lie about your past contracts or be economical with the truth? I have interviewed many contractors before and obviously been interviewed many times too and every single time there is an acceptance that the contractor must have proper working experience of the subject matter. I am database person and could instantly tell if they had proper workplace knowledge of the subject matter anyway.

[The Green View]

I don't much time for contractors with lengthy exposure to contracting complaining that their market is dead. Being a contractor means being agile and having skills up your sleeve.

Someone has mentioned looking at IT Jobs Watch, but you could also just go on Job Serve, sort by day rate or look at volume of jobs and start to move towards those specialisations. In software this is easy, as it is for infrastructure. Someone has already mentioned cloud.

Become agile. If you can't cope with that, which is perfectly normal and reasonable, then look at permanent roles instead where you can coast a bit more. There is no shame in it and I am not being rude. If your market is consistently near dead then you should add more skills or change and morph into what clients want. It's not easy but can be rewarding.

I have stuck a response in the 'state of the market' thread.

Yes, good post although not necessarily what I wanted to hear

[Bluenose]

Just wondering if anyone else is at a similar juncture....

I have stuck a response in the 'state of the market' thread.

[Sub]

If you have a brass neck then sure big up your skills. You might get lucky. Chances are you will be found out pretty quickly in the interview.

I have interviewed people who could not answer a single question on any of the technologies on their CV including the guy with extensive Linux experience who was shown the door when he could not recall the command to list the contents of a directory.

Well, I would see getting an interview for a position that require skills that aren't your strongest is an achievement by itself. And in worst case scenario you may get found out on an interview and just get rejected - no big deal. But you also may get interviewer's interest by projects you been working on, you other skills or even by other languages you speak. Or you may find out that skills that were mentioned in JD not actually the most important ones. You will also learn about questions and areas covered in the interview, which gives you opportunity to better prepare for next interview for similar position.

On the other hand if you send your CV without mentioning skills called in JD - it more likely to be just binned during screening, no interview, not even submission to client - dead end. Almost as bad as not applying at all.

My point is that if you can "big up" skills without using outright lie to get you application tailored better - that should be done every single time.

[The Green View]

I think the mistake you made here, and a close friend of mine made a similar one and is now paying for it, was to jettison some of your core skills, in the pursuit of shiny new ones. I almost made the same mistake but considered that if I were to reinvent myself as a JS front-end speciality, I'd be throwing away over 15 years of .NET experience. I'd have gone from near the top of the .NET ladder to the bottom of the JS ladder. I'd have been pitching myself against a sea of JS front-end developers who have done absolutely nothing but front-end work in Angular, Vue or React. All these kids out there, willing to work for far less rates than I'd been accustomed to in London investment banking. So, I hedged my bets and delivered a project in Angular + .NET Core. After that I joined a previous client on a pure node.js + AWS role. No .NET. Well, I just didn't enjoy it. The rate was good but I didn't feel like a senior dev in that environment. When the pandemic / IR35 / brexit came along I took a significant break and waited for the dust to settle and was approached by a firm who saw I had a mix of both .NET, Angular and some React. This has now morphed into a microservices, DevOps, Kubernetes, Cloud role and I'm really enjoying it. Suppose what I'm trying to say is that it's correct that you have to reinvent yourself from time to time as a contractor, but don't throw your core skills in the bin for the next shiny thing. Except for WPF that is !!

Well, at least I was doing .Net core until as recently as 2020 so I don't think I've totally thrown away the core skill. I'll be swapping out the Rails backend on my last gig with .Net Core, C# and Azure ditto the NodeJS BE in the gig prior to that & see what happens.

[northernladuk]

IT Jobs Watch - Contract IT Market

The 3rd highest in-demand keyword at the moment is...

"Social Skills"

with a median day rate of £525

This is more important than Developer apparently sitting only at 4th

Makes sense. Every man and his dog can develop. To find one with social skills is extremely difficult so move that to the key requirement

[TheDude]

Why should you lie? If you want to be fair, take a JS, see what they asking for, say it is new language you never heard about - google it and read couple of articles. Install compiler or interpreter and write Hello World type programme. Should take you an hour or so. Then put it into your CV as experience you have (that's not a lie anymore, you really do) without any more details. That help you get past recruiter and get interview.

If you have a brass neck then sure big up your skills. You might get lucky. Chances are you will be found out pretty quickly in the interview.

I have interviewed people who could not answer a single question on any of the technologies on their CV including the guy with extensive Linux experience who was shown the door when he could not recall the command to list the contents of a directory.

[CheeseSlice]

IT Jobs Watch - Contract IT Market

The 3rd highest in-demand keyword at the moment is...

"Social Skills"

with a median day rate of £525

This is more important than Developer apparently sitting only at 4th

[northernladuk]

Someone has mentioned looking at IT Jobs Watch, but you could also just go on Job Serve, sort by day rate or look at volume of jobs and start to move towards those specialisations. In software this is easy, as it is for infrastructure. Someone has already mentioned cloud..

That only gives you a short snapshot in time in a pretty quiet period at that so IT Jobswatch will give a much broader time frame for the OP to think about is his skills in decline over a period.

[agentzero]

I can certainly flesh out some of the more ancilliary roles I did in my last gig e.g. docker, drone, kubernetes etc seem to be in good demand though I'm never going to sell myself as a dev ops engineer as it's clear that my CV tells a different story over the last 10 years or so and I'd have no problem swapping out vueJS with React for my last gig as I've already done a fair bit in the past.

Get keywords all over your CV and in each of your past roles. Think about what you did in each role and go into detail without going into detail, which is where you will probably find that you have scope to add more intricate details without writing screeds of text. Acronyms and keywords are good, just ensure you show that you are a well rounded developer.

This isn't outright lying, it is glossing the edges to make you look wise, show you have a varied history but are able to adapt on the ground. Be prepared with some examples in your head for each type of library and project. Clients want to see somebody that can solve problems and can handle the hassle that the permies can't handle. For us contractors a constant change of requirements direction and technology is standard on many projects. We all know it's the clients fault, but no need to remind them of that directly and instead better to show we can triumph over the politics.

We have all worked with idiots who lied on their CV, weren't intelligent and got found out. Be intelligent, be a problem solver and be positive. Then there's no need to lie.

[SueEllen]

Be economic with the truth - after all you may as well spend some time learning it - and as your last client didn’t want to be stuck on a legacy platform you investigated options for them.

Oddly I do lots of investigation for my clients for that reason.