Reply to: how low can I go?

[Fred Bloggs]

Nice wake up call expat, few people looking at their own futures I reckon !

Yes, perhaps I'm fortunate after all. For most of my long career in engineering I've regarded it as a dead duck industry. However, having been able to stay in work (so far) for the last 36 years I guess I haven't dobne too badly. I have had reinvent myself several times (the last Bloggs reinvention was 2008) but in nuclear now I see a bright (if boring and mind numbingly slow) future. There has been such a miserable uptake of engineering as a career for the last 25 years that the oldies really do seem to be in demand and age is apparently not a bar in process engineering. I think I now would recommend process engineering to a youngster as a career. I've changed my mind the last 18 months or so. The only caveat is that I see a lot of the future opportunities being overseas from here onwards.

[gingerjedi]

A little way. How many of these do I need in order to cut the grocery bill by the amount of the mortgage payment? Er.....

No, that's why I am looking at selling the house: the mortgage payment dwarfs all other calculations.

Every Little Helps™ ... oh hang on that's Tesco, a premium store to the less well off.

http://www.moneysavingexpert.com/ will be your friend for the foreseeable future, it's all very depressing if you used to search AVforums for advice on £3k home cinema kit.

[TykeMerc]

Everyone needs to be thinking about exit strategy right now. If you are contract, don't even think about spending more than the equiv perm and get the rest stashed or working for you.
Good luck...

I've been working towards an exit strategy ever since I started PM work and stopped being a techie, I've diversified away from pure IT projects far more into the business arena. Fortunately PM skills are fairly transferable away from IT, the tricky bit is to avoid Clients looking at me as a pure IT PM and that's far from easy.

I wish I could help Expat, but your skillset is a bit out of my arena, I'll certainly drop you a message if I spot something that I suspect is up your street.

[lukemg]

Nice wake up call expat, few people looking at their own futures I reckon !
'Do IT, it's the future blah blah'. Rapidly changing, simplifying and globalising technology is churning increasing numbers back into the pile.
You can wake up and find all you know is now worth buttons. I ended up in a perm job meeting about 80% of my actual outgoings, have had to build out from there but now looking on dodgy ground again.
Are there any other professions like this ? Not the mature ones, law, accounts, medicine etc. A few bean counters I know have been on a steady climb for 20 years, more experience, more responsibility, more money.
Transferrable skills ? Yeah a few but nothing to push you up from an entry level position you won't get offered.
Everyone needs to be thinking about exit strategy right now. If you are contract, don't even think about spending more than the equiv perm and get the rest stashed or working for you.
Good luck...

[expat]

Have you heard of 'Asda Smart Price' and the 'Oops' stickers they put on nearly out of date goods?

If not you have a little way before you hit rock bottom.

A little way. How many of these do I need in order to cut the grocery bill by the amount of the mortgage payment? Er.....

No, that's why I am looking at selling the house: the mortgage payment dwarfs all other calculations.

[expat]

expat,

when I do a search on jobserve for siebel oracle migration

i get returned 700 contracts...

http://www.jobserve.com/JobListing.a...436A0EA1ED4B45


seems like a good area

Milan.

Milan, I think that you misunderstand the Google search, and before doing a 5-second search and then snootily advising someone who has spent 4 months doing this more thoughtfully, you should engage the brain.

It is not "a good area", it is 3 areas: anything with any one of those keywords in it. I'm no nearer to qualifying for most of those than Gordon Brown is.

That search does return 759 contracts. The search "siebel and oracle and migration" returns 6, including duplicates: 3 contracts in all.

One is for a tester using a package that I have no knowledge of whatever.
The second is for a test Team Lead. No experience there.
The third is for a BI PM. No PM experience, never seen Oracle BI.
Blag it, you say? Not in this market, against 100 real candidates.

That's how it goes: Yes, I know Oracle. Oracle BI, no. Oracle Financials, no. Oracle CRM, no. Oracle Forms & Reports, no. "Oracle" as an isolated keyword is near totally useless for my search.

Better would be "siebel and PL/SQL and migration". That returns 0 contracts.

But thanks anyway.

[gingerjedi]

Have you heard of 'Asda Smart Price' and the 'Oops' stickers they put on nearly out of date goods?

If not you have a little way before you hit rock bottom.

[milanbenes]

expat,

when I do a search on jobserve for siebel oracle migration

i get returned 700 contracts...

http://www.jobserve.com/JobListing.a...436A0EA1ED4B45


seems like a good area

Milan.

[expat]

That's what I was told by the Nationwide when I asked but after complaining that the criteria would only suit someone that didn't need it I was asked if I had considered a payment holiday? …Which was all I wanted anyway.

I then arranged a 12 month payment holiday but chose to carry on paying the interest, apparently I'm entitled to have 2x payment holidays between 1-12 months during the span of the 25 year mortgage.

Yes, I'm taking that into account. I can take a payment holiday subject to their being sufficient funds in the Cash Reserve or Prepayment Reserve.

Cash Reserve = £6700
Prepayment Reserve = £0.

therefore payment holiday available = 3 months.

I'm planning to use that to keep from being repossessed during the processing of the sale!

[Cyberman]

Twenty-four years ago my job involved visiting housebound frail and elderly people. They ranged in age from late sixties to early nineties. Every single one of them told me at some point that they didn't feel any different in themselves than when they were nineteen or twenty.

I concluded that although you obviously develop mentally because of greater experience, it's only your body that actually ages. Inside you stay pretty much where you were when you became an adult, in terms of your sense of self.

The secret for staying young IMO is to mix in younger circles, keep fit and off drugs, eat healthily, do not get overstressed and keep a sense of humour, retire early, and certainly never get married.

I must be doing something right as most people never guess that I am 54 as I could easily pass as 15 years younger. :smug

[darmstadt]

Credit card mainframe systems, COBOL CICS MVS etc, IBM Assembler, RPG, ...... nothing of any value now.

Plenty of that over here though, I'm always getting calls for COBOL but turn them down as I hate it and I'm not a programmer. Just got off the phone with a company who want someone to go in and set up a new test infrastructure for mainframes and SAP systems. There is plenty of mainframe work but agents don't know what they are. Find an agent who has been in the business a long time and you should be laughing.

[NickFitz]

I'm 42 now and still think I'm 19. CM would say I behave like I'm 9 sometimes.

Twenty-four years ago my job involved visiting housebound frail and elderly people. They ranged in age from late sixties to early nineties. Every single one of them told me at some point that they didn't feel any different in themselves than when they were nineteen or twenty.

I concluded that although you obviously develop mentally because of greater experience, it's only your body that actually ages. Inside you stay pretty much where you were when you became an adult, in terms of your sense of self.

[Cyberman]

It's largely irrelevant. The biggest factor in old-age poverty will be simple arithmetic. Demographics, as they call it. When you are old, retired, and infirm, you want healthy young people to do things for you. When there are too many oldsters making the demands, and too few youngsters to do the work, not all the wrinklies will be able to get. It doesn't matter if they all have gold-plated pensions, it's a shortage market and somebody is going to be at the bottom of it, and not get what they need.

If you have children, advise them to think about it now. They are worse off than we are. All we need to do is save some money to be ahead of the crowd. But when our children see our generation living off cat food, they are going to come to their senses PDQ and start saving like crazy to avoid that. So any of our children who want to be ahead of their cohort will have to do something special.

Kids will definitely be worse off in the future as they will be underpaid due to non-stop globalisation and reduced spending power of pensioners, and overtaxed due to massive debts that this HMG are accruing at a rate of 1 Billion pounds every two days. It's a sad future indeed !!

[Churchill]

From 40 to 50 must be 1/2 a blink then, sadly. Mentally I'm 25, physically I'm a fat, unfit 52 year old. Oh dear

I'm 42 now and still think I'm 19. CM would say I behave like I'm 9 sometimes.

I'm looking for a contract too now that I've moved back up North, I've not ruled out going staff. I've not ruled anything out!

[Fred Bloggs]

From 40 to 50 must be 1/2 a blink then, sadly. Mentally I'm 25, physically I'm a fat, unfit 52 year old. Oh dear