Soldato
Pretty much seems dead. Lots of lay offs. Many people jobless
Is the situation really this bad?
- Thread starter neverminder
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Yup, there’s been an increased focus on cost this last year, any specific costs allowed tend to be cybersecurity.
27 years in the industry. I will give it another couple of weeks and then it’s refocusing to retrain and take up something new perhaps.
27 years in the industry. I will give it another couple of weeks and then it’s refocusing to retrain and take up something new perhaps.
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Software development isn't dead. Everything runs on software. Sure it's a slump at the moment, but there's work out there. You need to be adaptable and not assume the tech stack you're familiar with is going to keep you in employment indefinitely, need to be adaptable and keep an eye on where the tech industry is heading.
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It's always good to have a second calling to fallback to. For instance, I worked in constructions (family business) and even ran my own crew at one point when I was young, so I know that worst case scenario I can always revive those skills.
It's also good to have a side hustle, no matter if it's tech related or not. I play an occasional live gig, as an aspiring musician. Also all that time spent looking for a job gave me an idea for a side project.
Having said all that I would not burn the bridges unless there really is no other way. But there almost always is. It took me the entire last year to find a job to lay low and weather out the storm. It's a toxic ѕhithole and it takes thick skin to endure it, but I've been looking for something better and the moment I find it I'm gone.
I've been a recruiter within software engineering (predominantly contractors) for the last 10 years and this is the worst consistent market I have seen in that time.
I first noticed a dip around October 22 (coinciding with the peak of inflation). From there was a steady decline and then it flatlined for probably about a year - definitely think that the market is improving but rates surely are not. I imagine that when the interest rates go down more we will see a further improvement in the market.
If a client has the stones to put out an outside ir35 role, they know they can pay peanuts to find candidates that would normally go for way more - the day rates of £800 I could get for a Java engineer a few years ago are long gone!
It's definitely improving out there but not so much on the contract side of things.
If anyone wants a chat about the market or to see what I have on feel free to reach out - long time member of the forum and not your normal wide boy recruiter. (mods I hope this is ok?)
I first noticed a dip around October 22 (coinciding with the peak of inflation). From there was a steady decline and then it flatlined for probably about a year - definitely think that the market is improving but rates surely are not. I imagine that when the interest rates go down more we will see a further improvement in the market.
If a client has the stones to put out an outside ir35 role, they know they can pay peanuts to find candidates that would normally go for way more - the day rates of £800 I could get for a Java engineer a few years ago are long gone!
It's definitely improving out there but not so much on the contract side of things.
If anyone wants a chat about the market or to see what I have on feel free to reach out - long time member of the forum and not your normal wide boy recruiter. (mods I hope this is ok?)
Soldato
Thanks, helps to know it's the market and not me being a complete failure.
companies are just correcting the post-covid hiring spree. Engineering numbers are still above 2019 numbers, but the land grab gor developers has gone . This also has made a correction on saleries which at one point were silly. The days of 150k for a fresh grad who claims to be an ML expert because they did a Udemy course ate thankfully behind us.
Soldato
Yes but sooner everything will run on AI software which requires next to no humans to actually make software.
What is the latest trend to jump on then from your point of view? Becoming a python LLM developer?
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That's a big part of the problem. An enormous number of bootcampers was produced in recent years. Everybody and their dog wanted to become a programmer, I had every family member asking me how to "get in on it". And now that they've all been dumped, they are scrambling like mad for every job ad and generating so much noise that even experienced engineers with double digits of years of experience drown in it unnoticed. Like someone said on a different forum - a couple of years will have to pass for all the oversupply to eventually give up and move away from the industry.
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Small world - a fellow musician. I use a modeler, moved away from amps long time ago. There were some low points last year when I thought I will have to sell my Black Beauty... That danger hasn't fully passed yet either, still living hand to mouth.In other news .. my tube amp has made major leaps forward as too has my understanding of music theory
Machine learning is one obvious avenue to go down, yes. Given the relative immaturity of the tech it's actually very possible to become competitive and employable in that area quite quickly, as you're not competing against people with 20 years experience.....and it's fundamentally different enough from regular software development that only those people putting the legwork in will be in that market.
Other than that, I would be looking at things like Java and other pretty old hat, bespoke infrastructure stuff as a dead end these days and be looking at building skills in data center platform side.
Game dev is pretty obvious, C++ isn't going anywhere and as the industry coalesces more and more around Unreal, having skills there is essential to maximise your employability.
But really, knowing what the trends are is very easy. Just search for software engineer jobs and see what tech people are asking for.
Alternatives and reserves is critical for sure. I have reserves for a couple of years not earning if I scrimped.
If I end up out of work next year (quite likely atm), I'm probably going to take a break from full time, and the AAA game industry. Either have a proper crack at one my prototype game ideas and go indie, or have a proper go at earning off my YouTube channel which I've been slowly building on the side.
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I'm curious, as a recruiter, do you have any insight of contract market outside of UK? I've been desperately trying to break out of UK market, be done with all that IR35 ******* and ultimately move my personal tax residence out as well.
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It's definitely the market.
What is everyone's approach to finding a role out of interest? I can provide some insight as to how I find people that could help, as every person I have had this conversation with has appreciated the advice:
Job boards are pretty dead these days, they have hiked their prices up (along with LinkedIn) and the candidate quality is pretty low. I would make sure that you are focussing on using your network and LinkedIn for your search.
Speaking of LinkedIn - take a look at your profile and see if it is findable for the type of role that you are most likely to get a contract in.
When we search for a candidate we get a list of 25 search results per page, and then multiple pages. We can see your name, sub title and then the last 3 jobs and specifically all we can see is the job title, company name and the length of time you were there. We can then expand this to show the job titles and durations for the last 10 companies. Without clicking in to every profile, this is all the data we see. In an ideal world I would read every persons page but in a contract market when you are head hunting - you are up against multiple agencies with the same data source so getting to people quickest is paramount.
"Software Developer" is a terrible job title to use, it is generic and difficult to find a specific specialist with and whilst you might be able to code in multiple languages, a contract role will most times needs someone that has a lot of experience with the required language - I've not once in 10 years been asked to find a software engineer.
"Java Developer" is more specific and can be found much easier, I understand that the official jobtitle is often something else, but using a descriptive job title on your LinkedIn will help you be found for more relevant roles quicker. I would even go as far as adding more of the tech stack or even domain - "Java Developer (Spring, Boot, AWS, Docker Kubernetes)"
The skills section is unreliable, as linkedin automatically adds skills to peoples profiles for example GCP is apparently "Good Clinical Practice"
Basically, think of yourself as an SEO result, optimise your profile to be ranked highly for the roles that you would be a good fit for and you should get found quicker - if you're on page 9 of a set of search results from a poorly designed page, you going to find it much harder to get found for a role.
Not really to be honest, other than I sometimes will hire off-shore dev's for UK based projects - my client base is predominantly in the UK. Best rates are in the US by a longshot, if you can get work for US companies and base yourself out of Cyprus I think you would be laughing
Soldato
Yes java is quite old.
Machine learning could be a interesting avenue to go into but I am no AI mathematician expert though?
Or is that not a requirement anymore these days to be some kind of algorithm math expert to do anything AI related?
Machine learning is basically completely different to programming, at a fundamental level.....but there are some similarities and areas where skills overlap.
Firstly, just being able to be efficient in python and generally knowing your way around a computer to use the software.
Secondly, machine learning is all about abstraction. You need to take a problem, and abstract it into a set of scalar inputs, and set of outputs....quite familiar to anyone that's done a lot of high level software architecture.
Then you need some (LOTS) training data, or a reinforcement learning method..... then you let the neural network learn how to solve the problem.
It's really very interesting to learn, and definitely won't do anyone any harm to do a short course and know how it works in practice.
Soldato
I carefully updated my LinkedIn and CV. I tried to be seo friendly and do get messaged a lot, not always relevant though, sometimes I think the recruiter hasn't even bothered to read my profile, sounds like they can't even see it, which is irritating. I'll try putting stack in job titles as you suggested, see what happens. It also doesn't help that of my 3 most recent jobs, 2+3 were short, I got messed around so didn't stay, my 4+5 jobs are actually my strongest (principal+lead) so it's annoying if they aren't shown. Every 1-2 weeks I adjust slightly some wording and 'open to' stuff which seems to attract fresh attention. I pay the LinkedIn subscription, not sure if that does any good.
Despite having principal + lead experience, there aren't many of those roles, so I'm applying for anything senior upwards, for about 10k salary less than my last senior role, which is depressing, but I'd rather hear about the opportunities than not hear at all because I set my expectations too high. I started off looking for perm full remote, but had to give up on that because there just weren't enough roles and now consider hybrid and contract - something that's annoying me is applying for a remote job then later finding out they want me to be somewhere half way across the country several times a month/week, quite a bit of time wasted by not having that clearly defined in the ad.
I've had many conversations with recruiters, either because I've applied for their jobs or because they've scraped my cv off reed. We chat about what I'm after and put me in their system, every now and then they call with something to apply for. Considering the amount of time I've spent doing this, they come up with very little that I haven't found myself on job boards, and I often get calls from multiple recruiters about the same role, sometimes even from the same agency.
Every few days I search LinkedIn, Reed, Otta, several variations of searches, remote, hybrid. This takes up a lot of time because most of the results aren't relevant, I'm .net/vue/react and there's loads of java/python/node/ai/crypto etc which I'm assuming I'd never get. LinkedIn is totally broken in that I mark a job as seen, it says it won't show it again, but it does always show it again. So I'm sifting through many pages of trash to find the handful of genuine results. I also find the whole .net / asp.net / dotnet name a pain from an seo perspective, microsoft should rename it imo. -- I shortlist everything that seems like I have a chance of getting, sometimes I'm stretching a little as to whether I'll be the best candidate, but I'm pretty desperate so I'd rather apply and not get it than miss an opportunity. I dedupe the shortlist, duplicates happen fairly often. It's annoying that a lot of jobs don't even name the company so I can't easily tell if I'm applying multiple times. -- Then I apply for every result I've shortlisted and wait to hear back.
(Google drive's just gone down, so I can't check exact numbers, so I'll use guess numbers to illustrate the point)
About 30 reputable recruitment agencies are aware of me now, and probably another 30 more which I don't expect to be helpful.
I have applied for about 50 jobs, heard back from 10 mostly just standard rejection, given up on about 30 due to not hearing back for a few weeks.
I had 2 first stage interviews, didn't progress, feedback was I was a solid candidate but not exactly what they're after, they have many applicants so can find the perfect candidate. That's inevitable when I'm applying for things I wouldn't normally apply for out of desperation.
I'm torn between being more targeted about where I put my effort, to try and avoid tiring myself out and wrecking my confidence, vs the shotgun approach to make sure I don't miss an opportunity. I'm also starting to think about whether it's time to consider other types of roles, hands off lead, product manager, testing, etc. Not what I want but maybe I could at least find a job that way idk.
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I remember a glut of LinkedIn invites from Quantum developers.. Java and offshore devs that had added quantum programming to their CVs without any physics or advanced mathematical statistics education or qualifications. Their CVs went Java Dev.. then Quantum interested..
There's a level of maths needed in data science/ML/quantum that if it's not present becomes a liability and a serious risk (ie businesses making decisions based on data that has not been characterised or even understanding the distribution bias etc).
What I'm going to start doing is recording the job specifications, and build up keywords that align close with the sections within my CV itself. I may be a product manager but "family", "portfolio", "lead", "senior" etc all become synonymous. I'll build a word map and over time build up the most common distribution of that concept.
Naturally it would be good then to drop a role spec and that model then temperature indicates the wording of my CV. However the key here is to search roles specs similar and play the battleships with the ATS.
The key here is a product manager crosses domains, markets etc - this is where keyword based searching fails the hiring companies. You can educate yourself in the market, do competitive analysis but if the software filters based on historic matches then it becomes a null-win. It's at this point that your relationship of being seen in that area and interacting in forums etc is the only way to bypass a problem with an ATS.
My CV is now reading more senior, specially I feel that my experience places me out of contention.