[Gllug] VACANCY: Site Reliability Engineering

[James Laver]

On Thu, February 19, 2009 11:34 am, Bruce Richardson wrote:
>
> All of this has changed.  There are fewer jobs on offer, budgets have
> been slashed, a large number of people have been sacked in a short
> period of time.  Not only will the companies I mentioned will be more
> likely to leave the jobs vacant until they find a permanent recruit but
> they will not have to wait nearly as long or pay as much.
>
> No matter how good you are, or think you are, there are simply more
> people at your level looking with less money on offer to them.  This is
> likely to get worse - significantly worse - over the coming year, so
> anybody who is unsure of the longevity of their current employer should
> be looking seriously *now*.

I'm not particularly worried. The perl contract market is a bit shot at
the minute, but other skills are booming. PHP in particular is
experiencing a lot of growth in the contract market because perl
contractors are seen to be too expensive. The banks inflated perl rates
and now they're all going bust and there just aren't as many banking jobs,
perl is suffering.

PHP isn't quite my preferred technology but rates are impressive and a lot
of the users are new media-ish places that are fun to work and sometimes
even without the total disorganisation of too many startups. It helps that
most PHP people are awful and it's not hard to persuade people you're in
the minority who know what they're doing.

With the recession, people are more reluctant to hire permanent staff when
they don't know how their finances are going to look in a few months and
whether they'll have to pay redundancy. The way around this is to get more
contractors in, they can be let go of easily and there's no faffing around
with NI contributions and suchlike since all of that will be taken care of
by the contractor's company (or an umbrella company). The recession is
actually looking very positive for contractors, unless you happen to
specialise in investment banking work.

Good money, plenty of jobs, fun workplace. There are worse situations to
be in.

--James
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