Contract roles and rates on the decline in Ireland?

14ned

Curious to see if others are seeing the same as me, but I've been noticing that in the very niche field of C++ contracting in Ireland, day rates seem to be down a bit from the last time I was interviewing exactly two years ago, and the number of contracts vs permie roles has also dropped?

So, purely as a subjectively noticed thing:

• Day rates on offer for C++ were about €450-500 two years ago, now they're €400-450. The US dollar to Euro has slipped by approx 8% in the past two years which is about €40/day, so the day rate decline almost exactly matches the exchange rate shift.
  
• There appears to have been a large increase in the number of permanent C++ roles on the market, and no corresponding increase in the number of contract roles. Some of the permanent roles are paying well, I've been offered €130k for a senior engineering role in finance. But I have no wish to live anywhere near Dublin, so contracting it remains for me.
  
• There appear to be an awful lot of "medical devices" contracts around in C++. I mean, like 80% of the C++ contracts in Ireland right now are in medical devices or other small specialised equipment. Must be a R&D tax credit thing.
  
• There are tons of permanent roles in C++ in Finance as bits of London relocate to Dublin, but unlike in London where contracting in Finance is common, I see virtually no contract roles in Finance in Dublin. Which I find very surprising. Perhaps they're trying to fill permanent first, and if they can't fill, then they'll try contracts?

So my question is: have other contractors here noticed the same thing happening in their niche fields? Or is this just a C++-in-Ireland thing?

Niall

srsly78

It's just a C++ thing, time to diversify. And yes those medical device companies are all rubbish.

The fx rate does actually affect me, if my budget runs out I may be forced to take holidays

14ned

srsly78 wrote: »

It's just a C++ thing, time to diversify. And yes those medical device companies are all rubbish.

The fx rate does actually affect me, if my budget runs out I may be forced to take holidays

It's a C++-in-Ireland thing rather than time-to-diversify thing. Ireland is not a hub of specialist C++ like say London is where day rates in HFT are £700/day upwards, and thirty new roles are posted a day. No shortage of work there, but I need to remain within fast driving distance, so Dublin/Limerick/Cork it is.

But also it's that 100% remote contracts in C++ coming out of the US have really dried up this year, so I had been making a great living 100% remote here in Mallow, but I've been out of contract now since January, and money is running low. There seems to be a big push in C++ in the US at least that everyone must be permanent and onsite. Salaries are markedly up too, it's getting quite frothy, but recruiters are telling me that contract roles are very out of fashion right now. As with all markets, it's ups and it's downs. You play the hand you're dealt in the location you're at.

Niall

moycullen14

Seems to me that contracting is becoming (always was?) a sort of 2nd class thing in Ireland. My experience in the UK was that companies employed contractors to get specialist skills and that meant a wage premium for those contractors. Contractors would have been at the top of the tech food chain.

My experience is the opposite here. Contracting seems to be a way for companies to avoid employment costs and contractors are very much seen as second class citizens. Most contractors where I am would take a permanent job, if it was offered.

Maybe it's just Cork and the market is a bit tighter in Dublin?

srsly78

Everything you said happens - sometimes at the same time. There are highly paid specialists employed as contractors just to keep their wages out of the personnel budget. Many of these specialists refuse to take permanent positions.

14ned

moycullen14 wrote: »

Seems to me that contracting is becoming (always was?) a sort of 2nd class thing in Ireland. My experience in the UK was that companies employed contractors to get specialist skills and that meant a wage premium for those contractors. Contractors would have been at the top of the tech food chain.

My experience is the opposite here. Contracting seems to be a way for companies to avoid employment costs and contractors are very much seen as second class citizens. Most contractors where I am would take a permanent job, if it was offered.

Maybe it's just Cork and the market is a bit tighter in Dublin?

Heh, many years ago I became unemployable in Cork for any programming job. Too specialised, they won't hire you. Even in Dublin when I'm submitting a deliberately simplified CV, most recruiters go onto LinkedIn and get the full fat version, and I never hear from them. Over qualified, and not helped by there being exactly three employers in Cork who hire for C++, none of which pay well.

The recruiters who do reach out and are very keen tend to be the specialist ones, the ones with a compsci degree or better. They are generally a genuine pleasure to deal with, and really fight hard to land you into a role because they understand my unsimplified CV. So it's not all bad.


Regarding contracting being a second class citizen thing, contracting in all countries has always been a catch all for many totally different things. Some companies just want a body to fill a slot occupied by someone on long term sickness. Others use contractors as a form of recruitment interview. Still others are looking for a specialist skill set which they really need right now because it's blocking the rest of their workers, but they don't need for more than six or twelve months. Still others have a very uncertain budget, and need the ability to drop headcount with a day's notice.

For the company hiring I really don't think it's about employment costs. It's cheap to fire people anyway in the UK and Ireland at the salary levels we're on, and if you work it out, they invariably pay exactly the same in pre-tax pre-overhead costs to contractors as they do to permies, and in C++ at least, often it seems at the US dollar rate in Ireland, not in Euro. I do think that as the economy is improving, there is less uncertainty regarding budgets and planning, and therefore an increased desire to bring on permanent rather than contractors on the basis that there can be less churn with them. Equally, once the market heats up some more, permanent employees start rapidly switching employers to speed up their salary increases, and at that point contractors start to look like a good idea again because when they quit is predictable and can be planned for.

So my best guess is that right now we're in a lull for C++ contracting because absolutely everyone is hiring permanent. Or, put another way, I get more cold calls by recruiters trying to fill permanent openings they can't fill each week than total C++ contracts posted in all of Ireland. Before someone else suggests "so just go permanent then", I live in Mallow, and I have no wish to live in Dublin or any city. And besides, if you wait long enough, something will turn up. Or we emigrate to Britain, because if we have to live near a capital city, it might as well be London paying £750 upwards a day rather than Dublin at €400 a day. Though we're a long way from that yet.

Niall

14ned

srsly78 wrote: »

Everything you said happens - sometimes at the same time. There are highly paid specialists employed as contractors just to keep their wages out of the personnel budget. Many of these specialists refuse to take permanent positions.

I'm definitely one of those. I consider the paid work as the "jail time" I must serve to buy time to do the real work which is what I do between contracts. The real work is challenging, exciting, blue sky, state of the art stuff. Stuff which could transform all of computer science forever. Far more interesting than the meaningless drudgery which paid work requires, usually using ancient technology stacks and deeply inefficient techniques in highly dysfunctional organisations.

If you love software and haven't been made to hate it by the jail time, it's uncommon how frequently people end up seeing their outside-of-work software development the same way. If you attend the major C++ conferences, it's quite rare that anyone is there talking about what they do at work, because their work is full of the same meaningless drudgery using the same broken legacy crap. A large majority present on what they do outside of work, their side projects.

Some of the US employers are very generous with allowing their employees significant time to work on their side projects, but in Europe it's almost unheard of. Hence Europeans are mostly contractors.

I've often wondered what could be done to turn these side projects into tech startups. It could be a source of an enormous tech boom in Europe. But there are huge disincentives to it here, and nobody I've talked to thinks of turning their side project into a living (at least in C++, that cryptocurrency crowd are rather different).

Niall

srsly78

I was a c++ consultant, but am more of a data scientist now. My work is both well paid and interesting, which is indeed not the norm. If I could be bothered employer would even sponsor a phd (still get paid part-time).

Scanning for new contract roles is a bit depressing alright - I am lucky to have this gig.

14ned

srsly78 wrote: »

I was a c++ consultant, but am more of a data scientist now. My work is both well paid and interesting, which is indeed not the norm. If I could be bothered employer would even sponsor a phd (still get paid part-time).

Ah data science is so much in demand right now. It's like C++ used to be before 2008, they are so short of skilled people at the top end that they'll pay almost any price and accept almost any conditions of work.

Interestingly, I'm a fully trained Economist and thus in lots of stats, so I have strongly considered pivoting over into Data Science.

However, equally, I also know that that bubble will pop at some point. Far better to pivot into a potentially hot specialism which may come to replace Data Science as the next big hot thing. And that's exactly the "real work" I do between contracts. It also has the big advantage of me being enthusiastic in it, whereas as much as Data Science is interesting, it doesn't float my boat in the same way.

Before you ask, my best guess for a next big hot thing is low latency storage. This past month has been super exciting on that actually, Intel gave me remote access to their whizzy new storage devices and using my software which I'm building out, I discovered the cause of a read latency bug in Windows which had been plaguing them internally. Using my contacts in the Windows Filesystem team, I got the problem raised, and there may be a fix coming down. Interestingly the latency bug was actually intentionally designed in, it makes 10Gbit networking much better. But nobody had realised until now the dire effect on QD1 reads from low latency storage.

Intel are delighted for obvious reasons, and are sending me a reward which will be very useful for even more low latency storage testing. I know that most reading this will be rolling their eyes and/or wondering how low latency storage could ever become a hot specialisation paying silly money, but there are limits to how much RAM you can fit to a machine. And getting 4Kb to/from storage can now be achieved, using currently available hardware and software, in just 30 microseconds with a 10x improvement coming shortly. memcpy(4Kb) takes 2 microseconds, so you can see what that would mean.

Niall

Berserker

Interesting post. Good friend of mine who is a .Net developer with ten years experience is moving on from his permanent role and he was telling me that the majority of the opportunities that are coming his way are contract roles.

14ned

Berserker wrote: »

Interesting post. Good friend of mine who is a .Net developer with ten years experience is moving on from his permanent role and he was telling me that the majority of the opportunities that are coming his way are contract roles.

There also seems to be an uptick in web development contract roles too.

Weird how different skillsets can have such different economics. For C++ in Ireland right now it's all permanent, no contracts. Meanwhile I've started seeing 100% Remote C++ Finance contracts out of London appearing for the very first time ever that I can remember (HFT hates remote working). But then I'm told they're suffering a flight of talent recently as Brexit uncertainty mounts, quite a lot of people moving to Paris, Frankfurt and Zurich, so permitting 100% remote is one way to retain people.

Niall

protosByte

Off topic I know, but is there any specific reason why you think the current demand for good data scientists is a bubble? Especially in the Online SW Development world, all decisions are now driven by data - as it should be, and we'll always need data scientists / analysts to make some sort of sense out of the available data.
Your low latency work sounds pretty interesting- and ties into data-mining as well. Analysts on my team sometimes have to wait days to get the results of queries from our datawarehouse - it can be a real bottleneck. Is your work specific to Windows, or to the Intel hardware?

14ned

protosByte wrote: »

Off topic I know, but is there any specific reason why you think the current demand for good data scientists is a bubble? Especially in the Online SW Development world, all decisions are now driven by data - as it should be, and we'll always need data scientists / analysts to make some sort of sense out of the available data.

It's several factors.

The first, and most important, is that management has a poor understanding of what data science can and cannot do. Right now, because the quality of data being stored keeps exponentially rising, if you throw some data scientists at that data store they'll generally come up with something useful. So, especially as it's fashionable right now to "do" something with your data, it's a safe management decision to throw money at data science, even if you haven't a clue of what it's useful for, or even, how it works at all.

That's classic bubble thinking, and two things will puncture it. The first is spectacular failure to deliver on tight goals set by management because data science is very good at some things and really terrible at others, so setting clearly defined tight goals to a team which cannot be delivered upon will eventually sour the fashion around ever more data science. The second is that the data being stored is growing less exponentially than it was, in fact in 2016 there was a slight bump in the road not seen since the Thai flooding hit hard drive prices. I've kept an analysis of this for years actually:



Finally, the third thing is the "low hanging fruit" principle. Early during a bubble expansion one plucks all the easy fruit. That fuels the bubble, the potential seems endless. But almost always it gets harder and harder, it requires exponentially more investment of capital and people to get the same unit of returns.

So between those three factors I reckon the data science bubble will pop, there will be some retrenchment, and it'll become a "normal" area of tech with high paying but slowly-dropping-in-the-tech-hierarchy characteristics. Same way as C++ developers still get paid more than Java developers, but not by as much as it once was. Meanwhile, Python developers are now getting paid the most out of any mainstream programming language it would seem. Well, outside Ireland at least.

protosByte wrote: »

Your low latency work sounds pretty interesting- and ties into data-mining as well. Analysts on my team sometimes have to wait days to get the results of queries from our datawarehouse - it can be a real bottleneck. Is your work specific to Windows, or to the Intel hardware?

Oh no, it's fully portable: https://ned14.github.io/afio/. And at some stage I'll be writing an automatic SWIG generator which will let you bind it into any of the SWIG supported languages, so Java, Python, .NET, Swift etc

The algorithms you write on top need to be specific to OS though. Windows has very different characteristics to Linux for example, Windows is about 10x slower for 1Kb i/o blocks and there are lots of other differences. The new DAX based storage devices are a real game changer, if you can afford it, it's a whole new world of low latency storage millions of times lower latency than a hard drive.

Very, very pricey right now though. Suitable really only for very rich multinationals. But its cost will drop exponentially, and I am hoping for a nice steady stream of fat consulting contracts because I sure ain't earning much right now.

Niall

beauf

I'm doing a lot of data work alongside my development work. My concern is that I'll be confused with data analysts with no development skillset. The ones I've worked with thus far struggle with their lack of dB &
Development experience.