It Job Market Goes Down Toilet

[this_prisoner_is_opting_out]

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.

Got a mate working over there - he spends virtually all his office time trying to remove virus' that the locals download.

[EndToBoomandBust]

According to the front page of that website. SAP skills pay 500,000 GBP average a year.

If the level of programming and QA displayed by that website is indicative no wonder IT is being offshored.

SAP skills pay 500,000 GBP average a year

Maybe if your the head of SAP AG

What utter Balls

[Lander]

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!

A Friend of mine works as an Oracle DBA for a firm in the midlands, every time I see him he says they have taken on a new client, however he's not seen the wage rise he was expecting.

On a personal level, I couldn't work in IT, it would suck the life out of me. I hear about lots of people burning out early in their careers due to the stress. Good health is more important than the money IMO

Edited May 8, 2009 by Lander

[EndToBoomandBust]

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".

Business Process Reengineering is the methodology.

In other words change your business to use it as it comes out of the box or it will cost you a fortune.

Edited May 8, 2009 by EndToBoomandBust

[Joey Buttafueco Jr]

MS havent sent out any new upgrades or versions of their action pack or MSDN for 6 months now. I havent had anything new to play with.

They have to me

[Guest BoomBoomCrash]

IT procurement of late has worked on this basis...

Manager: We want a bunch of whizz bang shit we don't understand but impresses our idiot clients

IT guy: Umm, ok.

Manager: Now we don't want to take this offshore, so we assume you can get this done for £5k?

IT guy: Not a hope in hell

Manager: Right, we'll take it offshore then. Of course we expect you to fix the broken mess we end up with.

[Jie Bie]

Speaking of ERP systems, i know everyone has heard of SAP, but do many of you know about a smaller rival - Lawson's M3 (sometimes known as Movex).

Those of you that know it, what do you think of it and the job market for skills in it?

[D.C.]

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.

Errrrr. £10 per month per user sounds insanely expensive.

Even a decent size college will have 20,000 staff & students so paying £200,000 per month just for email is insane. That is more than the entire IT budget, including capital purchases like a few thousand PCs.

Add the fact that the system will be non modifiable by anyone but 'Microsoft's special partners' who will charge you £100,000's or millions for any integration work.

Now scale those cost up for the Open University. They have 250,000 students per year...

Given that google gives you a lot more for free via google apps for education and the open api's are actually usable. Other nice feature is students can just turn their email account into a gmail account when they graduate so they don't lose all their emails...

[ralphmalph]

Cap Gemini?

More an IT consultancy than a software house. Like Logica CMG.

[EndToBoomandBust]

IT procurement of late has worked on this basis...

Manager: We want a bunch of whizz bang shit we don't understand but impresses our idiot clients

IT guy: Umm, ok.

Manager: Now we don't want to take this offshore, so we assume you can get this done for £5k?

IT guy: Not a hope in hell

Manager: Right, we'll take it offshore then. Of course we expect you to fix the broken mess we end up with.

This hits the nail squarely on the head

[Bockaaarck]

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.

I've been in change management over five years now and to be honest I quite enjoy it. I guess its because you get involved in all sorts of stuff (mostly people bitching and moaning ) from a broader perspective so it makes it quite interesting.

It can be a bit stressful but then name me a job that isn't. If you've done the techie side and found its ok but doesn't really float your boat why not give change management a try. It'll be another string to your bow at least, even if it still relates to IT. Not a bad thing in these uncertain times to have another option available for work purposes.

Not sure if there will really ever be proper careers any more but for me it seems to have worked out ok. I've been lucky that I've managed to work with some good organisations and more importantly been able to prove that I can do what my CV says I can.

Like a lot of other IT based roles at the moment things are thin on the ground on the Change Management front. However; if you can find a good company, one you're happy working in, normally the change guys and gals seem to be looked after but I guess that's because no other idiot wants to up with all the 5h1t we do

[QP1]

CAP Gemini

More an IT consultancy than a software house. Like Logica CMG.

And CAP do a lot of outsourcing. Outsourced all the IT of one large company (FTSE100) I know - the server stuff went to Mumbai and desk support to Poland. Apparently it's awful (for the users, I expect the directors got fat bonuses for the 'cost saving').

[Lone_Twin]

Errrrr. £10 per month per user sounds insanely expensive.

Even a decent size college will have 20,000 staff & students so paying £200,000 per month just for email is insane. That is more than the entire IT budget, including capital purchases like a few thousand PCs.

Add the fact that the system will be non modifiable by anyone but 'Microsoft's special partners' who will charge you £100,000's or millions for any integration work.

Now scale those cost up for the Open University. They have 250,000 students per year...

Given that google gives you a lot more for free via google apps for education and the open api's are actually usable. Other nice feature is students can just turn their email account into a gmail account when they graduate so they don't lose all their emails...

1) They scale the prices

2) At that level you would be paying for server(s) rather than per user.

3) £10 is for the full package (exchange alone is about £4 for 5Gb)

The per user licencing model works up to about 250 users if I have done my sums right. And there are a LOT of potential customers out there at that level currently paying some IT support company a fortune to fiddle about with on premise servers. As I say after 250 users M$ reduce the per user cost (i don't know to what)

I think you might have jumped the gun on this.

[D.C.]

1) They scale the prices

2) At that level you would be paying for server(s) rather than per user.

3) £10 is for the full package (exchange alone is about £4 for 5Gb)

The per user licencing model works up to about 250 users if I have done my sums right. And there are a LOT of potential customers out there at that level currently paying some IT support company a fortune to fiddle about with on premise servers. As I say after 250 users M$ reduce the per user cost (i don't know to what)

I think you might have jumped the gun on this.

Fair enough, the price quoted was £10pupm though

TBH I would still do a comparison with google apps though if you are thinking about going for MS SAS, even for SME not education.

Free basic edition (ad supported) or $50 per user per year for the full shebang.

They throw in things like online live docs & spreadsheets

[The Masked Tulip]

You know what will happen though - the 'cloud' companies will get hold of a corporate's IT and once they have them they will squeeze their balls. This is what the IT Consultancies do now.

Eventually, some will go back to in-house.

p.s.

The problem with Exchange type email systems needing vast amounts of storage is that most companies and public sector organisations are unable to get their heads around a proper email retention and deletion policy.

Probably a moot point now that Big Brother is forcing everyone to keep all their data.

[The Masked Tulip]

Also, where is the money for MS - in selling server products and licences or in becoming a hosted company?

I know that there are many in MS now who see the future for them as being another IBM or Oracle where they offer services but I suspect that will hit their bottom line big time. Also, it takes away their own high barrier to entry - i.e. expensive and difficult for most companies to write their own server suite - and will put MS on an even ground with the likes of Google, etc.

[Spot]

As for the OP, I dunno where those average salaries come from, but if you actually do a search for something specific like "SQL DBA" then the average looks about right (for outside of London).

I was a contractor for 14 years and finally went permie in late 2001 but I still get the agencies sending me job details and i've noticed in recent months the volume has decreased and the salary ranges are way lower than i've seen for a while.

Where I work, i've never been busier with loads of new projects still coming along but I know we're not hiring new staff at the moment.

However, I wouldn't be at all suprised to see all our IT move to head office (in mainland Europe) within the next 5 years.

I'd love to get out of IT but it's always paid me well and i've done it for so long i'm not sure what i could do now...

It's certainly sucked all the creativity out of me.

[Lone_Twin]

You know what will happen though - the 'cloud' companies will get hold of a corporate's IT and once they have them they will squeeze their balls. This is what the IT Consultancies do now.

Eventually, some will go back to in-house.

p.s.

The problem with Exchange type email systems needing vast amounts of storage is that most companies and public sector organisations are unable to get their heads around a proper email retention and deletion policy.

Probably a moot point now that Big Brother is forcing everyone to keep all their data.

Yes but once it all goes offsite a lot less people will care about landscape consistency. If you are just pulling a service off the web so long as you are confident in uptime and performance you don't care what happens at the back end. I think this could mean an explosion of competition which would be very bad for M$.

I definitely agree re. mailbox management.

Also, where is the money for MS - in selling server products and licences or in becoming a hosted company?

I know that there are many in MS now who see the future for them as being another IBM or Oracle where they offer services but I suspect that will hit their bottom line big time. Also, it takes away their own high barrier to entry - i.e. expensive and difficult for most companies to write their own server suite - and will put MS on an even ground with the likes of Google, etc.

See above. If M$ didnt do this then someone else would, M$ can leverage massive economies of scale and lock in revenue streams why wouldnt they do it?. As I say they need to work out a way to segregate integration of 3rd party products and systems but once that is cracked there will only be one party in town.

Technolgy and the market have removed the barrier to entry and MS needs to use their size to produce a sector dominating product and quickly.

All IMO of course.

[Yorkshire Lad]

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?

It was an improvement on Windows for Workgroups running over Netware which we replaced.

XP was installed in 2007.

Edited May 8, 2009 by Yorkshire Lad

[Guest DissipatedYouthIsValuable]

zsh and PostgreSQL ought to be enough for most things.

[Sir Sidney Ruff-Diamond]

I worked for LogicaCMG once and it made me ill - never had so much stress in my life and I ended up in A&E. I will never work for an IT Consultancy again.

Logica has always been famous for being disorganized and poorly managed - you should have known that before singing up to work for them!

[EmpiricalBear]

The original post is complete nonsense.

I've been a contractor in the IT sector in finance off and on. If you look at Jobserve.co.uk you can see the sort of rates that are achievable.

If you are have a very specific skill in a particular package rather than a generic skill then you might be able to get a starting rate of a max of £700-800.

Lets say you walked on water and got £1k per day (this is nearly impossible)

Then you would be able say to sell 200 days a year after weekends, holidays, sickies etc.

This would be a 200k salary.

Perhaps they have included city bonuses?

Its pretty inconceivable that any senior java programmer earned 386k. £70k would be more normal in a good city job, maybe £100k, outside the city you are talking maybe £40-50k depending on the where and when.

I once earned £1k per day for a 20 day contract, but in that case I was hired as a specific database performance troubleshooting expert and the company concerned was about to be hit with a £5 million lawsuit if they didn't hit a contracted performance target by a specific date. That was good money, but very unusual.

The owners of this site seem to have got a decimal point in the wrong place.

If these numbers are right I'll close down my business and go back to being a senior java programmer again!

Edited May 8, 2009 by 2MeterBear

[ZeroSumGame]

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.

The UK looks like it may end up like Canada, which is completely flooded with degree-qualified people in under-qualified jobs. Canada has the advantage (at least during normal economic times) of plenty of well-paid blue collar work in resource industries that benefit from a cheap currency and abundant resources. Not so the UK. What are people going to do when they're £20k in student debt and cannot get a graduate job? And how is the whole student loan system meant to work if many people never earn enough to trigger the paying-it-off threshold?

+1. Plus, Canada has the advantage of low wage IT staff. one of the world's largest IT companies has recently set up a number of data centres there, and some of that hosting is servicing European clients.

[The Masked Tulip]

Logica has always been famous for being disorganized and poorly managed - you should have known that before singing up to work for them!

It was during the last downturn when work was scare - biggest mistake of my life.

[ZeroSumGame]

The original post is complete nonsense.

...........................

Try this for reliable stats

http://www.itjobswatch.co.uk/

~ one fifth of the incorrect figures on the other board