Has the employment market got worse ?

[Tony Collins]

I notice even more negativity on this forum. My question is has the employment market got worse this last couple of months, or is it a realisation that alot of work is gone for good ?
Tony

[Marcus Raphael]

Who cares!
Not interested!
Stop stiring things up!
If it as then... deel with it!
dont make people more worried by asking stupid questions.
If you are an I.T professional, you wouldn,t ask stupid questions like this.
Bexcause you would be well aware of what was going on in the field anyway!
so kiddy........buzz off!

[Tony Collins]

Marcus I am an IT proffesional I have 10 years experience. Please inform me of yours, I take from your tone that you don't have any.
I personally ask as I am thinking of moving out of the profession this year.
Tony
[ December 22, 2003: Message edited by: Tony Collins ]

[Steven Broadbent]

Tony,
I have been out of IT for a year doing something else, but will be looking to get back into java from Feb. Friends tell me things have been pretty dire over the last year. I get a lot of emails from recruiters, claiming 200 new jobs uploaded today etc, but I have to ask how many of these actually exist outside the diseased minds of the recruiters.
Most of them want 5 years EJB, with struts, oracle, websphere, supermodel good looks and god knows what else.
Maybe there will be an upturn in feb/march - if anyone out there has any inside knowledge on this let us know, god knows we could do with some Xmas cheer.
Marcus, don't be a berk, your post was rude as well as bordering on the semi-literate. I see from your other posts that you are still doing your masters and are looking to get into IT. If that's the case you should listen to guys like Tony - his posts show he knows his stuff.
Merry Xmas to you all....
[ December 22, 2003: Message edited by: Steven Broadbent ]

[Greg Neef]

It still seems pretty dire. After 85 resumes sent out, I got a call last week for the first time from a real company about an actual, full time, Architect Analyst position (for which I am very well qualified). However, during the initial phone interview "sniff test" the interviewer was late arriving and seemed hardly interested in what I was saying and did not ask me any questions. I am still a bit puzzeled but can only assume that they already have made a decision about someone and are simply going through the motions to comply with some bizare HR policy.
Personally, I plan to keep up my search through the winter but have already had to take a blue collar job at one-fifth of what I was making in IT.

[Mark Fletcher]

Tony, Steven,
Ignore Marcus's comments. If you check his profile for earlier messages you'll see that he is simply a troll. A troll with poor language skills.

[Tony Collins]

I've noticed the tone on the noticeboard is geting worse which leads me to believe that the recovery just isn't happening. Which makes me wonder if it ever will, but it is a very tough decision to jack it all in and move to another field. There is no way back when you leave IT.
Tony

[Steven Broadbent]

Tony, you can go back. I've done it before, but there's a lot of luck in finding the right moment.
hang in there mate.

[Kevin Thompson]

Tony,
I don't think things have actually gotten worse. That is because it is not possible to get worse.
If the current economic statistics are that the last time the economy was this bad was during the great depression (in the 1930s), how can it "get worse" than the great depression?
Our economic situation has been documented by the federal bureau of labor statistics on their web site (but now I can not find the link!!). They actually had a written report that showed the last time there was this long of persistant un-employment was in 1939. This has effected ALL segments of the ecomony, not just the IT people.
However, on a positive note, I have had some "chit chat" type of phone calls from recruiters who tell me that they expect January of 2004 to be the "turn around in the IT market" that we have all been hopeing for.
As for me, I am getting myself ready. Doing things like:
re-writing my resume
getting all my references updated
studying for technical interviews that might happen in January 2004
getting my interviewing clothes all lined up
and so forth
All I know is the great depression actually ended at some point.
Steven: I like your comment "in the diseased mind of the recruiter"! That is good! There is plenty of HR funny business going on right now that is also quite demoralizing.
Kevin
[ December 22, 2003: Message edited by: Kevin Thompson ]

[Steven Broadbent]

On the positive side, if I fail SCJP tomorrow, I can fit in the retake before the upturn swamps me.

[Joe Richard]

Tony,
I have noticed over the past few months that the feeling of a turn around in the IT market will happen in 2004. I have been getting a few more calls from recruiters also. It has been my experience that from the mid to end of January most companies post new positins for the current budget year. Based on what I have been here the last few months, I would expect more jobs to be advertised next month.
Joe Richard
:roll:

[Mark Herschberg]

Originally posted by Marcus Raphael:
Who cares!
Not interested!
Stop stiring things up!
If it as then... deel with it!
dont make people more worried by asking stupid questions.
If you are an I.T professional, you wouldn,t ask stupid questions like this.
Bexcause you would be well aware of what was going on in the field anyway!
so kiddy........buzz off!

Marcus,
These discussions are quite welcome here. If you do not like the topics, you do not have to read or participate.
On this site, we do not tell other people their comments are stupid. If you continue to post in this way, they will be deleteded and your account closed.
--Mark
-------------------------------
If you see behavior like this, please feel free to send me a personal message, and I'll take care of it. I do monitor the forum daily, but obviously can't see everything at all times.
--Mark

[SJ Adnams]

From the looks of this page
http://www.jobstats.co.uk/jobstats.d/TOTAL.html
its contract rather than permy roles..

[Richard Scothern]

Tony,
If you are looking for a position in London, and have good C++ skills (I take it from your previous posts that you do) then why don't you pass me a copy of your CV and I will give it to my hiring manager (a technical guy, thank god). My email address is in my profile.
I won't be back at work until the 5th, but I will make sure it gets to him then.
Richard

[Jonathan Hendry]

Things seemed to pick up a smidge in late summer, here in Connecticut, but have dried up again.
It's probably not a good sign that Monster.com is showing as many "WORK AT HOME!!!" bogus jobs as there are real jobs, and sometimes more.
Kevin wrote: "All I know is the great depression actually ended at some point"
Yeah, I think it was ended by something called "World War 2".
I hope *this* slump can be ended without genocide and nuclear explosions.

[Don Kiddick]

Things are picking up in the financial sector which should have a knock-on affect on other sectors. <touch wood>

[Al Newman]

I don't believe that anyone knows exactly what is going on in the jobs market, but one thing that years of observation has taught me is that there are yearly cycles in the market. Each year there is a drop-off in activity beginning in November and continuing through the new year. November-December is a lousy time to look for work. Has always been. If you think about it you'll understand why.
Another drop-off is during the late summer, July and August. I've seen only two exceptions to this in 20 years, in 1987 and during the palmiest of dot-com days in 1999-2000. The two hottest employment markets I've seen yet.
I don't know whether the job market is down or whether it's the usual seasonal thing. I suggest we suspend judgement until mid-January at the earliest....
[ December 29, 2003: Message edited by: Alfred Neumann ]

[Tim Holloway]

Well, the holidays are just about over. By some reports, the retail sector did well only when compared to last year, but hard numbers remain to be seen.
My (not-entirely-trustworthy) spies tell me that things are getting really stressed in the network support world. Apparently a lot of secretaries and overextended independent network consultants have been pused to the limit to keep the LANs running for year-end processing. So I won't be surprised to see an uptick in the next week or 2 for network hires. Long overdue, since around here, I saw fewer network positions advertised than J2EE positions. Of course, if holiday sales were bad enough to drag down confidence for the months ahead, that prediction may not come to pass.
The $65,536 question is, of course, where the IT pro job market is headed. Not only because it's of personal interest to us, but because we're pretty much the prototype for offshoring of all white-collar jobs.
In the 90's, companies rushed to offshore all manufacturing. Often the effort failed and the work had to return. The companies examined their failures and tried again, more successfully. Now manufacturing is no longer the overwhelming metric of the U.S. economy.
In the last few months, I've seen this pattern repeating itself in IT. Big money-saving projects failed and the work had to be brough back in whole or in part. From what I can tell, aside from the obvious cultural and distance factors, a big contributor to failure looked to be lack of experience, both in technology (5 years appears to be pretty senior for a lot of the IIT influx) and - more importantly - in actual industry experience. That is, people, who not only know software, but also know health care (complete with HIPAA), the U.S. Banking system, etc.
How serious those hurdles are; and how easy it is to rectify them is one of the two things that will determine whether we can adjust and adapt to a new way of doing things or be utterly swept away. The other is whether the economy is truly making a recovery or not. I'm not especially happy to be seing significant local layoffs happening at a time when the reverse should be the norm.
I can only put limited faith in the stock market indicators. The market reflects expectations of future income more than it does actual present circumstances. And much of those valuations are made by economists (long list of economist jokes omitted here). So far, economists only seem to see offshoring as something that happens to someone else.
Alas, only time will tell. Probably by mid-March we'll see which way we're headed.
And if you think the Great Depression was bad, study Germany post-WW-I. Or any number of countries in recent times. The bottom's a lot lower than you think.
Thought for the day: If the whole world mugged Bill Gates (obviously this requires a really big dark alley) and divided up his fortune equally between all its peoples, quite few of them would walk away with 2 days average income.

[Ashik Uzzaman]

Who cares!
Not interested!
Stop stiring things up!
If it as then... deel with it!
dont make people more worried by asking stupid questions.
If you are an I.T professional, you wouldn,t ask stupid questions like this.
Bexcause you would be well aware of what was going on in the field anyway!
so kiddy........buzz off!

Marcus, your tone in response to Tony's query does not introduce a gentleman's approach to me! JavaRanch is a friendly place, please be gentler.

I have noticed over the past few months that the feeling of a turn around in the IT market will happen in 2004. I have been getting a few more calls from recruiters also. It has been my experience that from the mid to end of January most companies post new positins for the current budget year. Based on what I have been here the last few months, I would expect more jobs to be advertised next month.

Joe Richard, I agree with you.