Good news! UK IT jobs up. Bad news? They're with a bunch of bankers

Cockle-warming stats from the UK jobs market show that job openings for techies went up at the end of 2012 and that opportunities in the well-paying financial IT sector rose for the first time in six months. Permanent IT jobs advertised in the UK went up 6 per cent in the last three months of 2012 compared to the year before, …

[Esskay]

Error in title

You spelt "wankers" wrong.

[jake]

Re: Error in title

Actually, they spelled "Wunch", the collective noun for "Bankers", wrong.

[Andrew Moore]

Re: Error in title

Many, many years there used to be a CB (remember them) magazine that had a comic strip called Buck Fusby which was a piss-take of BT's mascot at the time, Busby. Buck had a brother called Wusby and I always remember the line "Wusby is a banker"

[Mark York 3]

Re: Error in title

Glad & rather embarrassed at not being the only one recalling that particular comic strip.

http://www.badgecollectorscircle.co.uk/assets/badges/user/18_1340204316_5019_300_300.JPG

Icon being the closest resemblance to Buck Fuzby!

[Jelliphiish]

Re: Error in title

I came accross the term in Accelerando and it took me far to long to figure out... it sound Germanic and my brain just parsed as a collective noun I'd not heard of prior..

Mine's the one with the lobster in the pocket.

[phuzz]

Re: Error in title

It's taken me until reading that comment to realise the joke Charlie was making there, and I must have first read Accelerando about 5 years ago.

Still, I'm sure there's some other joke in there I haven't got yet.

[Corinne]

Are they all different jobs?

From my recent experiences, each individual job seems to be being advertised by at least 3-4 different agencies. Each agency advertises the same job on at least 3 different job boards, and often repeats the advert a couple of days later (sometimes 2-3 times more).

So potentially there are around 10-15 adverts altogether for each job out there, I wonder if that was taken into consideration?

[Magister]

Re: Are they all different jobs?

Have to agree. Most jobs seem to be advertised on multiple job boards (not always the same recruiter either), so you have to be a bit careful about just how many distinct jobs are actually being advertised. (I've also noticed that the same vacancy might get re-posted several times on the same job board as well.)

Add to that, there are still a number of recruiters out there that are placing adverts to get a load of c.v.s that they then pimp out to all of the employers that they know. In many cases, these "vacancies" exist only in the minds of the recruiter. It's a bit frustrating to put it mildly.

However, looking at it from another angle; my landlady is doing some temp HR work for an engineering firm and they are currently recruiting graduates. She has been surprised by the lack of applicants and the quality of those that do apply is not good. The wage offered compares favourably and they are offering additional training options that make it quite an attractive provision, but they are still struggling to find sufficient warm bodies to even fill all of the interview slots. Add to that, a number of the applicants didn't even bother to show up (which I find appalling).

I also spoke to an engineering director (or another company) yesterday; they have closed their production faciltiy in this country. I suggested that it was due to costs, but he said not; the biggest problem they faced was getting sufficient people to actually work in their factory to maintain production levels to fill booked orders. After having worked on it for the last five years, they finally gave up last August and moved it all further East.

[bailey86]

Re: Are they all different jobs?

If you read the Steve Jobs biography you'll see he had the same problem. As he explained to Barack Obama - the reason he outsourced to China was not the cheap labour - but the fact that China could supply the 30,000 degree level engineers needed to run the plants for the tens of thousands of workers.

The US does not seem to get it - you need the state to invest in education to be able to compete globally these days.

[Dr Andrew A. Adams]

Re: Are they all different jobs?

Didn't St Steve of Jobs say the same thing about why Apple manufactures in China and not America - not enough engineers with decent quality skills.

[dogged]

Re: Are they all different jobs?

I don't know, but Anna and the reporter who compiled the list seem to have an issue with the technologies involved.

C# and C round out the top three. .NET was the fourth

Mono aside (it's a vanishingly small percentage of the C# platform), you can't do C# without .NET. And yet .NET is fourth. Except that it can't be, because C# is second.

So what we have here is either a) the .NET figure actually refers to VB or .NET is actually second, being C#+VB or the stupid recruiters get their data from equally stupid HR departments and thus the whole table is pretty much meaningless.

[Arrrggghh-otron]

Re: Are they all different jobs?

This reminds me, I'm still waiting for Dominic Connors article on the problems faced by recruiters... I still want to know why recruiters do all of these things (multiple job listings for the same job, jobs that don't really exist, job specs that bear no resemblance to the skills the interviewer is asking for etc).

[Cari]

Re: Are they all different jobs?

And how many of them are real? When I was using job sites to try and find work, most of them seemed to be adverts for agencies to lure you in and onto their system, rather than there being an actual job.

[thegrouch]

You have to allow for the number of adverts which are just fishing exercises written by agents looking for CVs, these represent no job whatsoever. I'd lump recruitment agents in with bankers, estate agents and Justin Bieber as prime candidates for Soylent Green. That said, I'd rather have a Findus Lasagne.

[vic 4]

Presumably

the number of these adverts are going to be related to the amount of CVs they need, so if they are posting more false ads then they presumably need more CVs for more vacancies. They might make the total appear more than there are but I'd assume that an increase in ads means an increase in jobs.

[Anonymous Coward]

are they new jobs though?

Financial institutin has a massive IT staff cull, then they realise they've let go loads of people they actually really need to get their in flight projects done, so repost a selection of the jobs they've just culled.

In some cases the specific people they needed, who they let go without thinking it through, end up coming back as contractors, in most cases they have enough sense to tell them to take a running jump.

[Dan 55]

My rule for applying for jobs

Finance jobs are at the bottom of the list. Always. They attract a certain class of people as suggested in the headline.

[Silverburn]

Re: My rule for applying for jobs

You're in a good position if you can pick and choose.

A lot of us have mouths to feed and mortgages to pay, and can't afford to be that selective.

[Dan 55]

Re: My rule for applying for jobs

I said at the bottom of the list, but that doesn't mean under no circumstances (unfortunately).

[Velv]

Re: My rule for applying for jobs

Says more about you and your attitude to work if you can't accept certain types of people.

[Dan 55]

Re: My rule for applying for jobs

If I wanted to accept everyone I'd work in an NGO, and so would they.

[Tom Wood]

Re: My rule for applying for jobs

"Says more about you and your attitude to work if you can't accept certain types of people."

Says more about you and your attitude to work if you don't have any scruples regarding who you work for.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: My rule for applying for jobs

Perhaps you like working with sociopaths?

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: My rule for applying for jobs

I work as a java developer in the financial industry.... I make over £120,000/yr at 30... I would never want to work in any other industry. It's chalanging, and interesting... Specifically I write software for realtime interaction with financial markets as well as reporting and analysis of data... I got my first job in this industry when I was 22 and was paid £65,000... Not bad for fresh out of university. I've worked in Canada and the UK and have travelled for work to a number of other countries.... I _love_ my job...

True, I have to work with wankers, but that's half the fun... Those guys can sure drink! And it's always free beers.

[TwoWolves]

Does no correlate with experience

Myself and my whole team have just been given notice. All work is going to India.

This article doesn't agree with my experiences or those of colleagues in other banks right now who are in a similar position.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Does no correlate with experience

Really? I work in finance and the team I'm in is hiring. Just because you've been made redundant it doesn't mean that the overall trend of the industry is the same as your personal experience.

[Prof Denzil Dexter]

Beware Finance industry figures!

As a contractor at a big bank, I would take the figures with a pinch of salt. My bank's IT is almost all outsourced, bar the desk monkeys. Every few years the bank decides that it has become over reliant on the contractors, hires a few middle men to "refresh the contractor pool" and manage these contractors. Inevitably the productivity halves overnight and then they have to take on a good few of the contractors they just got rid of.

So your advert for a Bank IT job might not be sector growth, so much as replacing staff (forced) turnover

[Corinne]

Re: Beware Finance industry figures!

You also have to consider that the majority of adverts I'm seeing for the financial sector are specifically for investment banking rather than retail. And they won't accept any CVs that don't have at least a fair number of years of investment banking experience, they say as much in the adverts.

Of course this leads to the catch 22 situation of how do you get that experience when they won't employ you there until you've already done it before......

[Anonymous Coward]

I had the pleasure of working at ABANAMRO many many moons ago.

All the people except the security staff were a bunch of twunts, I have not set foot in the city since!

[Anonymous Coward]

I wholeheartedly agree. Working in NL lowered my opinion of Dutch people. ABN is a scummy bunch to work for

[Anonymous Coward]

Darth Banker

“Good news! UK IT jobs up. Bad news? They're with a bunch of bankers”

Looks like they're building a new Deathstar then...

[Anonymous Coward]

As a contractor I'd take the figures with a pinch of salt. Throughout 2010 / 2011 my phone would ring five or six times a week with the offer of a new contract ... throughout 2012 this slowed down to the point where for the last three months nary a single call from any of the agencies with which I'm registered, and all the calls I've made to agencies and other contacts have turned up nothing.

Oddly though, most of the agencies tell me that they could get me a permie job tomorrow if I so wanted ...

[Zilla]

Ride the gravy train

As an IT contractor I have great hope for the future of this profession.

The majority of companies I have worked for are totally crippled with permie dead weight that they have no choice but to hire contractors. Layer upon layer of managers all fighting their way up the totem pole leaving the people on the ground apathetic to near comatose levels.