Soldato
What type of developers are you looking for? Is it based in Glasgow or remote?
Current feel for the IT job market?
- Thread starter NickK
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What type of developers are you looking for? Is it based in Glasgow or remote?
I get a load of nonsense via LI as well, often for development roles despite never having been a developer and not putting anything there suggesting that I want to be one (other than perhaps a few certifications). But that's easy to ignore. Think about it this way, when you put a job search in indeed / job search site of choice, is every single job that comes up in the list relevant? No, so treat your inbox the same way, just brush over all the irrelevant stuff. Obviously, do try and look at your profile objectively and think about why you are getting offered cloud engineer roles, is there anything you could tweak to reduce that a bit etc (you will never win the battle entirely as some recruiters will just be scatter-gunning any profile listing "Cloud" or one of the big cloud providers like Azure/AWS/GCP regardless of the context).
In terms of churn, I've loosely been keeping tabs on the old team I used to manage; since I left 14 months ago, 5 of the 6 perm devs and 3 of the 4 perm BAs have moved on (the two left being in their 50s and not really looking to rock the boat too much).
I think a typical IT worker (i.e. not great, not terrible) is overpaid. Heck, when I was contracting even I considered myself overpaid for the role I was doing, and I'd like to think I was better than average based on feedback. You'll of course get some genuine rockstars that earn their top coin but aside from them I look at how much it costs and wonder how the business case stacks up. I guess some of it is needing to invest to remain competitive, the short term costs may be high but if it gives you the technology to avoid being left behind by more nimble competitors, I suppose it can have merit.
As the IT sector transitions to remote/hybrid working I do think offshore is something to explore (given the disadvantages of offshore are reduced in a remote model), at least until the rates converge even closer (certainly there is a major issue with retention in India as well with soaring salaries and hence rates). Really what should be happening is other countries with lower costs of living should be recognising this UK skills shortage and churning out IT workers to start undercutting us and cool things off a bit.
Certainly a great time for those that are young and ambitious in IT, people will be hitting heights in their late-20s I would have considered a fantasy at that age (admittedly impacted by the financial crisis), they can effectively shortcut their careers by at least 5 years with the state of the market at present. A couple of years experience under their belt and then jump straight to big boy money.
Company finance directors love low digit figures for engineering salaries. Hence there's always pressure to find the next country that has the graduate-technologist training infrastructure in place. Poland, India, Estonia etc have all gone through this. I found the graduates for a large Pune team far more progressive and effective compared to Bangalore, however the senior managers really have issues with status ego in both locations. Keeping good engineers is a nightmare but no different to the UK in the late 1990s and early 2000s - partly driven by the dichotomy between modern expectations vs the senior management status-ego.
Current applications rates seem aggressive - according to Linkedin, within 24hours you're looking at 40-80 applicants for senior roles like Head of/CTO/CIO. I'd expect 2-3x that through combined channels. It's bananas.
LOL
I'm out of date by a few years now but one place I worked at had those issues when we had dev teams in India, we kind of inherited an office there via another company in our group and we were supposed to start a team there too.
We had various issues like we wanted to pay one guy the equivalent of 28k to retain him but HR was super wary, apparently, it would have caused chaos if it got revealed to the rest of them, despite the fact this guy was obviously really good.
Apparently, the guy who ran the whole Indian office for our parent company/group expected that everyone call him "sir"!
Lastly, the whole cultural losing face thing caused all sorts of grief in reviews - lots of them marked themselves down for the highest grade in every single category then would just nod along when it was explained that we expect the full range of marks to be used and most employees should be scoring in the middle for most areas... that they need to be more objective etc.. and then come the next review they'd do the exact same thing again and mark their self-appraisal with top marks for everything.
Yup, lots of people moving and lots of new opportunities - generally a good thing if you're a salaried employee and not a business owner/director with significant equity or partner.
Yeah I went out to visit a supplier in India three times, the cultural dynamic was interesting. If a senior manager was in the room the 'less senior' manager would be playing up to them, giving it the biggun about what they could do, but then act differently in a smaller setting. The main advantage I got from being out there was identifying the smart engineers, maybe not the loudest people in the room (subservient to their masters) but when they did speak they made good points. This then informed who we requested to bring onshore for a period of time where they could be free of the hierarchical shackles and just generally work more efficiently (pre-covid when we'd typically be in the office 4-5 days a week). It honestly felt like some managers were there just so they could hear the sound of their own voices, with what I term a 'management accent'.
I seem to be getting a load of IT security Job adverts lately. Because I applied for a Job in a IT security company but it wasn't related to security. Shows you how dumb those algorithms are.
I disagree that the typical IT worker (non development) is overpaid. Most have hard skills that are not cheaply or quickly attained. The bean counters underestimate that.
Outsourcing to off shore low cost centres often doesn't work out.
Security, as a risk to manage, is becoming the top risk in the CIO agenda. There's no point competing if your doors are open and your customers trust is gone.
I used to build and operate services for the bank, that includes the secirity, there's more to security than people that think they can 'have a go' at it. I sold quantum cryptography in my last job but the specific was it was around provable QRNG generating the keys - so it's not about insider threat detection, or graphing or ML based response systems. It's a specialist job and one that needs specialists.. hence the demand.
Still radio silence on the job front.. I'll keep going.. and I'm keeping my eye open of opportunities rather than roles too.
I used to build and operate services for the bank, that includes the secirity, there's more to security than people that think they can 'have a go' at it. I sold quantum cryptography in my last job but the specific was it was around provable QRNG generating the keys - so it's not about insider threat detection, or graphing or ML based response systems. It's a specialist job and one that needs specialists.. hence the demand.
Still radio silence on the job front.. I'll keep going.. and I'm keeping my eye open of opportunities rather than roles too.
Soldato
A lot of senior experienced IT workers with decades of experience not returning post-pandemic is leaving gaps in IT organisations that leave gaps further down. Good BA's and solution architects in digital business areas are like gold dust. But employers only discover this when they try to replace them.
Hopefully! as it means I can ask for more RSUs
Unfortunately I think it's impossible for me or anyone else from AWS to go to Azure, we sign like the biggest non-compete ever!
I know of an L7 that left very recently to go to Microsoft so it can be done.
I think someone from AWS could go to Microsoft, but not to Azure I *think*.
I do know that Amazon enforce the **** out of the non-compete, they're absolutely ruthless with it. If he did go to work on Azure - there must have been some very very special circumstances.
Just had a look at their LinkedIn profile, and it's definitely in the Azure org.
Fair enough, -
Have you considered reaching out to CxOs in organisations you 'like'? With such specialist skills; you may need a role carved out for you rather than applying to a watered down job spec that nobody really understands what it is.
It's only hard to find people when you're not willing to pay for the talent. Too many companies are not willing to pay the (now increased) market value for the skillsets that they're looking for and then they wonder why they can't hire anyone.
What would you consider to be a "US tech salary"?
I'm curious to know what you consider to be an "insane salary", given that the market value for tech skills has grown massively in recent years.
Soldato
Markets good right now, seeing plenty of good roles about for Developers, DevOps, SRE etc.
Saleries still on the up as well IMO at least in London/South East
Saleries still on the up as well IMO at least in London/South East
I may start doing this, at a minimum canvasing the current state of play.
I have had some interest at last - It's taken 3 months and I feel a lot of organisations have slowed senior recruitment (perhaps at board level) due to the economic outlook. I've just had a call with a mate of a mate, as a CISO he had security roles open but not generalist but he's opened up some of his contacts. I've had a few recruiter emails around the blockchain area.
Given L7 Principle Engineers are typically heavily tied into the market and customers within as experts in their field, I'd expect AWS to be looking at commercial impact of perhaps loosing business and customers. That's their value, unless he's been deployed to an area in MSFT that AWS aren't competing in, or, there's financial hardship/constructive dismissal in the mix. Senior members may offer enough business value that the legal team of the headhunting business may work through the legalities.
Soldato
It's only hard to find people when you're not willing to pay for the talent. Too many companies are not willing to pay the (now increased) market value for the skillsets that they're looking for and then they wonder why they can't hire anyone.
Whilst I do agree to an extent, this is because there aren't enough and you're suggesting you tempt people away from their current positions. Surely the only way this is actually the problem is if developers are sitting at home thinking "I'm not working for that money" which I don't believe is the case. It would make sense if it was an 'unskilled' job, like stacking shelves. If you don't pay well enough, people will go and do something else and you'll struggle to recruit. If you're a dev, you're not going to think 'Nah, not paying well enough, I'll go and be a doctor'.
I think the whole point is, that even offering a 'normal wage' there is more demand than there are devs. As suggested by others, and maybe what you're saying, you have to pay over the usual price in order to tempt people from their current roles. But looking at the wider situation, this just moves the problem (to someone else) rather than solving it.
I'd be similar. It's been a good 16yrs I did much coding. Too long out of it to get back to it. Also now a generalist, but more on the DevOps side, a lot of SQL and admin work in the back end and cloud. Tbh I was happier when I was in the BA/UI space. I prefer to build new things than maintain things.
I find I get spammed on LI with gibberish enquires from recruiters who don't know anything about IT or the roles in it. Maybe I'll go back and do a better profile.