It Job Market Goes Down Toilet

[D.C.]

I specifically avoid legacy code like the plague. Once got offered (and turned down) work revamping a buggy flash site written in AS2.

Took one look at the absolutely hideous .fla file, with code spread all over the timeline in hundreds of different places, obscurely named objects, no code comments... gargantuan nightmare, whoever wrote it must have had a copy of "flash for dummies" on their desk, did a quick bodge job and then ran away with the cheque.

I offered to rewrite the whole damn thing from scratch using AS3 and a proper XML solution, but they seemed to think I was making stuff up to try and get more money out of them.

I hate Flash. Why do they feel the need to reinvent the language every couple years? AS - AS2 - AS3 are all so completely different they may aswell be different languages. They made a half assed job with AS3 too so I guess it will be all change again sometime soon.

[guitarman001]

I left the RAF in 98

98 Joined Anglian Water for a Y2k Bios Rollout - £25 an hour

99 BAe Systems - NT4 Rollout - 22.50 an hour

00 Clifford Chance Lawyers £25 an hour

00 WGSN.com - IT Support - £22.50

01 A Government Department near the house of commons - rollout - £22.50 an hour

01 Network Rail - NT4 Rollout in the North East - £32.50 an hour

02 - 07 Network Rail - Permanent - 25k - 34k a year

07 - Redundancy

08 - Prison Service - £14.40 an hour

Yep rates have dropped over time

I look on Jobserve now - and there is very little. Agencies have never seen this before.

How did you enjoy Network Rail...?

My father works there.

[Jie Bie]

Ah, that'd be me then. 10-6-8 and all that stuff.

Me also - Amos and Blitz Basic on my trusty Amiga500!

Now THOSE were the days...

[guitarman001]

1. GET THE F*CK OUT OF ENGINEERING.

2. DON'T VOTE LABOUR

[grumpy-old-man-returns]

none taken, everybody hates Change Management.

If everything is going really well, working and going in on time people say "Why the hell have we got a change team, they're obviously not required, why are we paying them?...". As soon as anything goes belly up or some dodgy code gets released you start hearing "Why didn't the change team spot this, they should be preventing things like this, why are we paying them?..." its a lose/lose situation.

My communication skills were always pretty good and the tech side I was competent at but certainly no whizz kid. So for the benefit of all decided to stay well clear of all the fancy technical stuff and see if I could help out in another way.

It's kind of worked out ok so far *he thinks* (waiting for the fateful cry of "Oh my god, its gone in to production!! )

nice talking to you. Good Luck.

[50%deposit]

therew moss growing in the window seals and bumper of my jeep. do they count as green shoots?

[AteMoose]

There is clearly something wrong with those average salaray stats. Average salary for a SAP consultant is £693,333 according to that, looks like they have added all the top salaries together and forgotten to divide! Doesn't sat much about the other stats does it

They take average salary of all the advertised jobs that contain the word SAP... (Includes sales and managers, Fds etc etc, and all the Bs jobs advertised by agencies fishing for contacts.

But the average salaries look ALOT higher than last time i checked so it could be a broken site

Edited May 8, 2009 by moosetea

[Yorkshire Lad]

How did you enjoy Network Rail...?

My father works there.

It was alright, but like everything else in IT, support was no longer a local issue it was done using the phone and a help desk in Crewe. People at local IT offices would be left with maintaining printers and very little else.

I think it was very dependant on the job you had. From one month to another you could have a different job description due to reorganisations.

[grumpy-old-man-returns]

They take average salary of all the advertised jobs that contain the word SAP... (Includes sales and managers, Fds etc etc, and all the Bs jobs advertised by agencies fishing for contacts.

But the average salaries look ALOT higher than last time i checked so it could be a broken site

when i worked at VIA Systems in Tyneside in 2000, they employed a team of SAP people. They were on £500 per day in 2000 ffs. They hardly did any work & the system never got used. The company shut the site down in 2002 iirc.

We will have never ending SAP's under whatever guise/name.

We need to get rid of the people who are sanctioning these ideas & thinking them up.

Sh1te at the top always guarantees sh1te most of the way down.

[xux42]

01 Network Rail - NT4 Rollout in the North East - £32.50 an hour

.

.

08 - Prison Service - £14.40 an hour

NT4 rollout in 01 So they'll be gearing up for XP soon then.

As tight as things are, surely there must be gigs, albeit in crummy places where you will have to stay away during the week, that pay a fair bit more than the Prison Service?

[Ruffneck]

According to an article in Computer Weekly a month or so back, the number of IT guys from outside EU being given visas , is now higher than during the dot-com boom. The market is apparently being flooded with cheap labour.

Also, IT is extremely vulnerable to offshoring, since you can send the product down a wire. At least outsourcing of manufacturing may be slightly reduced by the cost of shipping goods. Not so IT.

The future for IT workers in this country doesn't look good to be honest, unless the pound falls dramatically against currencies of the countries we currently outsource to. Then again, even if India gets too pricey there's all of Africa, and why shouldn't server farms be located in Ukraine, Belarus etc? No end to it in sight.

nah , africa has very poor infrastructure.the place is doomed to fail with perennial civil wars stopping any kind of advancement for the majority.corruption is rife.

as for the pound i noticed the aussie dollar hit 0.502 AUS/GBP today , first time in a very long time!

[Greg Bowman]

Thanks GB - what you say is correct but you sound as if you are a bunch fo IT bods who got together to form an SME for this work. Much different for a one-man person to gert involved in this kind of thing?

Actually started off with a phone in my boys bedroom cold calling (very scary always been a techie) then we progressed, really just giving you the benefit of hindsight.

If you do a good job you will grow either through partners or employees.

The remote control and management stuff is a so much cheaper than it was even 5 years ago, so I would chance my arm.

You will still have to do hourly rate work to pay the bills but hopefully you will gain some recurring revenue quickly.

Even now we are still 70% recurring 30% project/upgrades/moves etc

The key is to look like you can manage it.

Edited May 8, 2009 by Greg Bowman

[thomasthetanker]

Agency told me she had 230 applications in 2 days for a £20K Helpdesk job.

Obviously half will be completely hopeless but that still means I'm competing against over 100 hundred other people for an entry level position. My 3 years experience isn't worth anything against others who have SQL, advanced Citrix or Cisco skills.

I'm not whinging or making excuses but believe me, its harsh out there.

[grumpy-old-man-returns]

NT4 rollout in 01 So they'll be gearing up for XP soon then.

Windows 7 running in my VMWare, I can't see any difference. Will have to take a proper look. Fooken add on updates no doubt. More control away from the user & given to the OS.

Microshaft will rule the world.

Edited May 8, 2009 by grumpy-old-man-returns

[Ruffneck]

Agency told me she had 230 applications in 2 days for a £20K Helpdesk job.

Obviously half will be completely hopeless but that still means I'm competing against over 100 hundred other people for an entry level position. My 3 years experience isn't worth anything against others who have SQL, advanced Citrix or Cisco skills.

I'm not whinging or making excuses but believe me, its harsh out there.

hopefully for you maybe many will be graduates with minimal real world experience

[the_duke_of_hazzard]

Be wary of generalising

Always?

[fluffy666]

Me also - Amos and Blitz Basic on my trusty Amiga500!

Now THOSE were the days...

Amiga 500? That's luxury mate..

Try a VIC-20, 3583 Bytes free.. CBM64 for softies. Converting machine code to DATA statements, load it in, crash the whole system, rinse and repeat. etc. When I were t'lad etc.

[callaght]

I've been a microsoft certified contract DBA for over 5 years now. I've always practically finished one contract on a friday and started a new one on the monday. Plus, there's always been tens of new dba contracts going on jobserve daily.

This time - finished my last contract last week and only had 2 phone calls from agents, plus there are under 5 new dba jobs appearing on jobserve daily. seems quite bad at the mo!

[Lone_Twin]

I've been a microsoft certified contract DBA for over 5 years now. I've always practically finished one contract on a friday and started a new one on the monday. Plus, there's always been tens of new dba contracts going on jobserve daily.

This time - finished my last contract last week and only had 2 phone calls from agents, plus there are under 5 new dba jobs appearing on jobserve daily. seems quite bad at the mo!

Yep, I was flipping a coin on whether to go contract (1st time) when leaving my last job. Decided on perm to weather the storm, very glad I did.

GOM - Interested in your previous comments on SAP. You don't think there is any place in the market for large scale ERP systems? Don't get me wrong SAP is a pig to configure and use but there is obviously a market for it.

[OnlyMe]

I don't understand those average salaries. I never seen jobs advertised at those salaries! The most I've ever earned is 33K and living costs ate up all my extra income.

Click on the link to the jobs for a particular area, then you will see all the jobs!

Just scanned through a few pages, the average salary quoted - like you say, baloney. It is difficult to find even some quoted at the supposed average.

[spivT]

Went for a training day at Microsoft TVP last month on BPOS. Its pretty good tbh, they need to work out a few kinks and it won't be for everyone but if you are a SME who wants to eliminate many on-site costs and much of the support costs its a winner.

Exchange/Sharepoint/livemeeting/comunicator for £10 per user per month. 3x9 uptime SLA. Garuntee to upgrade to the next release at no extra cost only 12month contract. Not going to be great for corporates as the integration potential is near nil at the mo but its definately the future. I hear that the next office release might have an "online" version too.

the areas where a 'live' or hosted service is a no-brainer is in so-called 'unified' communication so that's email/voice/collaboration, and crm. And that's not just for small companies without the in-house skills. Some of the biggest uni's with requirements for tens of thousands of student email accounts use Microsoft live@edu service which i believe is based on the next version of exchange. Think of the storage, server, and admin costs of hosting such a service for tens of thousands of users in-house and the annual storage increases that need to be budgeted for. Then there's aspect of companies meeting archival requirements which add to planning and costs.....so much easier to let a third-party deal with it so long as they can provide SLA's and provide a good seperation and security between customers.

I'm staggered as to why companies of all sizes have bothered with running their own services given the scaling requirements and running costs for as long as they have. Even new ERP applications today which costs millions to develop and deploy are almost entirely web/java/.net based even though these client sever apps are in-house managed......if your clients are pointing their browser to the relevant app url does it really matter where that server farm is for as long as you have sufficient B2B security and isolation between yourselves and the service provider...who could/should be hosting the app. The first stage of this is companies with scattered locations colocating their services into purpose built facilities....from there they'll start wondering why they are we paying to run these facilties why not oursource the contract and reponsibility onto someone else.....let someone else worry about the A/C bill and hiring of suitably qualified staff.

[iainp999]

I haven't read the whole thread due to time constraints (at work). However, I've picked up on the outsourcing discussion.

The issue there is that most of the time it is not cost effective over the long term; some businesses are coming to realise this. If we are talking about software development, then the quality of the offshore engineers - in general - is not as good as a UK engineer (note: in general). The other problems are with management and communication - not so much the language barrier (although that can be problematic) but more the communication of requirements etc.

It can be a full-time job keeping on top of an offshore team. IMO if you have more than a handful of offshore developers then forget it. You're much better off paying the extra and employing someone who can be managed locally.

edit: I am not one of these "British Jobs for British workers" types; this is just my experience with regards to IT outsourcing.

Edited May 8, 2009 by iainp999

[QP1]

Don't get me wrong SAP is a pig to configure and use but there is obviously a market for it.

Pitched for some development work at a company that had recently moved to SAP. Senior chap at the meeting was bemoaning how complicated it was going to be to split my bill among the five departments that would benefit from the proposed system; felt I should defend SAP (I got a few crumbs out of that implementation) by saying "sometimes you need to change your business a bit to fit in with the way SAP does things". "Yes" he said, "but we like being a pharmaceutical company".

[thedebtisreal]

I couldn't agree more to be honest. I got my Microsoft certifications in the late 90's and enjoyed the techie side but I was never going to be a guru at anything. I thought by moving in to IT Change Management I could at least use some of my skills to help architects, developers and coders get their stuff implemented without them having to explain it to some manager who didn't understand what they were trying to do.

I'm interested in change management myself. I'm taking a foundation ITIL course in a few weeks time and wonder if this is a good career move. I'm a techie by nature and although I play computer games and watch Star Wars, I can give presentations and talk to human beings and techies.

[Lone_Twin]

Pitched for some development work at a company that had recently moved to SAP. Senior chap at the meeting was bemoaning how complicated it was going to be to split my bill among the five departments that would benefit from the proposed system; felt I should defend SAP (I got a few crumbs out of that implementation) by saying "sometimes you need to change your business a bit to fit in with the way SAP does things". "Yes" he said, "but we like being a pharmaceutical company".

That is very funny

But on the serious side, any business that is looking at a massive implementation such as SAP should go into it with their eyes open. Process change is inevitable.

Saying that I would HATE it if someone managed to sell it to a company I was at. I would probably leave.