Question for programmers....

[voodooflux]

That's probably because you are. Anything below £300 per day is criminally cheap, even in the north. I suspect your agent has seen you coming...

Not sure I'd agree with that - £300 per day is certainly "decent" for development roles around the Midlands at the moment. There a few higher rates around, but plenty lower.

Where are you based?

[Scotchpie]

Do people really work for rates that low?



That's probably because you are. Anything below £300 per day is criminally cheap, even in the north. I suspect your agent has seen you coming...

Well I actually started lower than that but successfully negotiated an increase. I've only been contracting a year and it's certainly more than my permie role was paying.

As I'm new to contracting and only had two contracts to date I felt that a lower hourly rate would be better to get something on my CV. Or rather I would have something if they didn't keep extending but in the current climate I'm not complaining.

[VectraMan]

Not sure I'd agree with that - £300 per day is certainly "decent" for development roles around the Midlands at the moment. There a few higher rates around, but plenty lower.

I agree - I was trying to get at least £300 a day when I was looking 2 months ago, but am working for less, partly because it's local but also because I started to feel I had to get something. I'm sure I could have got more if I'd held out and chased roles that required my more specialist skills and industry knowledge, but then that means chasing a much smaller number of potential roles and they were few and far between. All the more generic roles, the agents were talking £30-£35 ph.

[PAH]

Where are you based?

Cloud cuckoo land, also known as Amazon, postmark EC2.

£300 is probably above average in the north, or indeed anywhere outside London, for anything mainstream.

[jkoder]

The biggest of which will be getting into programming!

It's only a matter of time before writing code is obsolete. Just look at what tools (such as IronSpeed) can do already. At some point the middle management won't need to mess about with Excel and Access, they'll be knocking up proper apps instead!

The future for programmers is good old systems analysis and design, or whatever bolloxy name it goes by these days. The actual coding will involve little more than installing a few libraries and running a wizard. There are even design methodologies that do the code generation already, and are bound to get better.

No.

The scenario you describe has already been going on since the beginning of programming. It's true that things become easier and end up being automated but what is also true is that new problems which couldn't be solved before, can be solved and require manual intervention. This is simply software development evolving and new world problem becoming more complex, the tool you mentioned is a stupid gimmick and fits a very limited, generic domain.

If you could completely get rid of anything in IT it would be management which could happily be automated right now and also be a lot smarter than a lot of these jackasses that find their way into the industry and not to mention testers, these are the biggest chancers in the industry and I hate working with these guys because 9/10 are totally useless.

Besides, who writes all these wizards anyway?

sed 'pah/meh/g'

[voodooflux]

I agree - I was trying to get at least £300 a day when I was looking 2 months ago, but am working for less, partly because it's local but also because I started to feel I had to get something. I'm sure I could have got more if I'd held out and chased roles that required my more specialist skills and industry knowledge, but then that means chasing a much smaller number of potential roles and they were few and far between. All the more generic roles, the agents were talking £30-£35 ph.

You've done the right thing there - better to have at least something at the moment. The higher paid roles (£45/hour onwards) are definitely few and far between around these parts, and will be hotly contested when they do appear.

[voodooflux]

£300 is probably above average in the north, or indeed anywhere outside London, for anything mainstream.

That sounds about right from judging from what various associates of mine are on at the moment.

[jim2406]

300 a day here, .net, public sector, birmingham - i would consider it 'good' in current climate

[victorantos]

birmingham 300? tell me please your agency

if you are over 35 don't go for programming you'll be bored probably
but you could try anytime.
I recommend you try asp.net C# sql server for web development:

there is a lot of tutorials and information on the net and Microsoft support http://www.asp.net/get-started/

[voodooflux]

if you are over 35 don't go for programming you'll be bored probably
but you could try anytime.

That's a bit of a sweeping generalisation. I'm *cough* well *cough* over 35 and I still get a kick out of development (I consider myself very lucky to be well paid for doing something I enjoy). OK, so maybe I should get out more.