In London at least. Tech companies dislike the fact there aren't enough engineers to fill roles which has led to a few things. 1. Permanent salaries on the increase that also has a trickle down effect on other related IT roles.

2. A healthy contracting market with rates steadily increasing despite IR35. Contractors are deciding what they'll be paid and are still be lapped up. Nothings worse then a late or undelivered project to your end clients. Maybe layoffs are a strategy in shaking this trend?

There's certainly a recession happening and or on the way but why should markets such as the UK be worried when roles in my company at least go unfilled for 6+ months at a time.

Previously Londoner for ~8 years here. I can confirm the six month unfilled position period has been going on for at least a few years now.

If anything else, and at least on the high(ish) end of skill and seniority there's an artificial reverse bubble that I can only attribute to the almost pathological and almost allergic insistence of UK employers to have as few well paid employees as possible.

Hmm - I've moved from London to Helsinki. I've been the hiring manager for several (Software Engineer) positions in Finland and it's been quite interesting.

The supply of CVs for any position we open there for mid/senior positions is a trickle compared to the UK, and it's not really been like they're all perfectly qualified, there's a lot of 'noise' too. We let go of any geographical constraint, as long as you're willing to work close to our time zone and in a nation that we're legally allowed to do business with, then we'd consider it.

In short - if you're an established engineer who's easy to work with and has some initiative, I would not be worried. Salaries/raises might slow down, inflation is here and is going to bite you, but such is life.

All the UK folks I know fled to the EU and work on visas. Germany, France, Norway, Denmark. Remote roles. All the multinationals who moved IT out of UK after Brexit..

UK just can’t compete. EU is bigger, and have more money.

This isn’t even the beginning of pain for Brexit.

Not really sure how Brexit would explain my experiences of having fewer candidates in the EU than post-Brexit London.

The EU as a whole surely does have more money, although developer salaries on average are higher in London than many other places in the EU too.

Also noticing this - very hard to find software engineers in the UK right now. Apparently we have a major skill shortage[1] - which I'm not surprised by, given how little CS/coding was pushed in schools 5-10 years ago.

[1]https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-62098767

How is it that Silicon Valley is in America, when we have so many net-savvy tech-heads here. They may have the silicon chip, but we have the silicon chap, and of course, chapesses

More people and more money, but also respect the quip if it was just a setup.

Could it be about attracting talent from abroad instead? I work in the UK and more than 70% of my team is not from the UK. It used to be even more.

Curious what a typical top 10% contracting rate in London is?

I spent 8yrs working as a contractor in London for rates between £600 - £950pd.

Architecture roles - which to some companies meant spending time coding (yay) and to other companies spending time on non-coding activities; aligning teams, strategy, planning, managing stakeholders, slide decks etc...

sorry, I'm not familiar with the terminology: in £600 - £950pd, "pd" means per day?

For what duration are these contracts usually agreed upon?

Usually all start with 6 months and options to extend. Market is the same in Asia Pacific. I’ve yet to work with a client who couldn’t find something for me to do after, they all want to renew unless they’re axing heads across the board.

In which case they get me to work remotely and bill directly to the project, whilst funnelling communications through the project manager or tech lead. That way regular employees don’t see me, and they still get the work done.

yep, exactly my experience too.

Never had an initial 6 month contract turn out to be "just" 6 months. Shortest duration during my stints was 18 months (2 renewals).

Cloud/Security Operations usually hit 600-1k. Higher end of this would be government contractors that need to pass through stringent/strict security clearance ie. UK nationals etc. Even some non-gov contracts want SC sponsorship because end client will usually have sensitive customer data.

You can see market trends by looking at reports published on the top 5 UK IT recruitment websites (usually published every 6 months), ITJobServ is a good site too for real time trends.

London based contractor here. It's sort of hard to say since rates keep going up. My gut feeling is 700 outside/850 inside would put you in the top 10%.

I've had a few short-term contracts (3 months or less) at £950-1100/day as a staff level data scientist, although those are usually 'exceptional need' situations where the company has their back against a wall for some reason or another.

These days it feels like the market is actually cooling down to me, but that could just be because I'm looking in the wrong sectors.

Personally, I think that there's definitely a correction going on, but it's far from explosion on the scale of a dotcom crash. "Tech" is not a separate industry now, but a set of technologies and professions that are used in a wide array of different industries. Companies in food, tourism, real estate and wherever else are hiring software engineers, dev ops and data analysts and are building "tech". And this tech that they're building, even if it's only "CRUD apps" that HN crowd loves to scoff over, is still creating a lot of real business value.

It's a buyers market, with such reliance on tech in virtually any industry I don't see a decline in demand for CS roles at least within the next decade.

Wouldn’t that make it a seller (of tech labor)‘s market?

Sure, why not. I have seen the dotcom crash and 2008 crash, they were healthy in terms of pruning the tech market from speculative ideas and returning it to something working. Yet another healthy correction is long overdue.

Tech is so intertwined in everything these days, much more so than the previous tech bubbles, that even if there is a prolonged slowdown I doubt techies individually are going to end up too effected. Tech firms sure. But who cares about them. They don't stand for anything worth shedding a tear about.

Bubbles are usually caused because people think to sell to a greater fool down the road and at some point there are not enough fools to sustain the upward price momentum. At some point all the fools want to be out and the price collapses. Crypto going from a 3 trillion market cap to 1 Trillion in the space of a few weeks is a great example of that.

Technology stocks are mostly different with the exception of some startups that are valued based on user growth instead of revenue growth. Users are not customers though, and customers are the only real sustainable source of finance.

There are a lot of technology firms now that are financed by their customers so even if there is a full stock market meltdown in tech stocks, you shouldn't be afraid of unemployment but salaries will adjust to the reduced competition from VC-funded startups.

The belt tightening has certainly begun. Down rounds and layoffs to reduce burn are all around [1]. These are fairly natural given the macro economic forces at work eight more.

Will it ‘explode’ and lead to an ‘apocalypse?’ Your guess is as good as mine.

Personally I don’t expect it to be like 99 again as many tech companies have real profit and VCs have plenty of cash… but I suppose there are plenty that don’t as well.

[1] - https://www.trueup.io/layoffs

Money was being thrown at any tech stock that showed momentum no matter the price. Heck, shopify was 150 in november as a great example of this and now its 30. People were buying it at 215x FORWARD earnings.

Was there a bubble? There is noone with a conscience who can claim there was not.

Is there still a bubble? I think so. I think a combination of current fiscal policy combined with a need for companies to react to their stock price (fiduciary duty to investors) will result in cuts almost everywhere.

Stay safe out there.

So far it appears that most of the layoffs are outside engineering. It's probably that the other salaries in the org are overinflated if anything in contrast to the value they generate for the organization.

I anticipate it being a bad time for middle managers with no skills outside of that.

I wonder if companies using tech will go back to preferring CapEx as opposed to high OpEx. Back to buying perpetual licenses that will be renewed when it is worth it instead or because you'll lose access to the product. Partially back to raw hardware or VMs hosted at not one of the usual suspects instead of suboptimal cloud implementations that sometimes resort to expensive VMs anyway because it was implemented by cheap outsourced labor rather than subject matter experts.

What answer would you like?

Hit me with the truth then tell me a lie so I can sleep tonight

There eventually will be masses with pitchforks and torches at our doors when they finally get the whiff of the software "engineering" we all do. That won't happen this decade.

I'm not sure that "explode" is the right word for what's happening, but where I live we went from "we'll double our teams in 2022" to "we stopped hiring" to "we're laying off x% of our staff" in under 7 months. I personally love it, too many YouTube self-made engineers on the market.

It’s not a bubble. Just a garden variety recession.

Europe is in for a very long decline. There is no consumer generation (35-45 y/o) left in Europe, and the US is about to block Europe from exporting their excess production to the last standing consumer generation on the planet.

Which one?

The US is threatened by the rise of both China and India. India seems to be quite capable of sabotaging itself however.

No, I also live in an European country and I've heard about several companies around starting to freeze the hiring and doing some lay offs.

What? The European economic outlook is substantially more dire than in the US. The knock-on effects of EUR depreciation alone will be massive.

Big advantage of the EUR depreciation is that hiring talent in Europe is now cheaper for US companies.

Given the rise of remote work, cultural proximity, excellent English skills in Europe (I even heard that there's a country that's full of native speakers although they do have a slight accent and an obsession with tea) this might not work out so badly for _some_ developers.

Not likely if the comments elsewhere are true as there seems to be quite a shortage of tech workers in the UK.

I live in Sweden and I've seen several big names in tech lay people off this year. Klarna, Boozt, Kry, Storytel, Voi.

Seconded, actually we just got a 2 digit raise this month on our base salary, and on top of a massive hiring target for 2022.

Salaries won't go down but they will be inflated away.

It's why Fed/ECB targets 2% inflation, to keep the treadmill moving.

No. The tech market is doing fine

Then what would the generation in between be called? Groomers? Pushing their children to places with higher class expectations with minimal effort?

More like the Doomers. Realizing it's all...