There has been a big increase in ridiculous IT jobs being advertising locally lately. Ridiculous, how come? Simply put, a big fuck off ridiculous list of skills and specific knowledge they expect an applicant to have. 90% of it is usually flavour of the month framework/idelogy bollocks that will be completely different next month and the only way to have gained any real experience in it is to have either not slept for the last 10 years AND/OR to have worked at either Facebook or Google. Or you lie, you lie lots and lots then hope you can expect to pick it up on the job. Lots of the latter, not many of the others knocking around locally.
Without going in to too much detail it's sort of like advertising for a knee surgeon, who can also do dentistry on the side, oh yeah and is also an expert in the field of accountancy because they might need somebody to go over the books at some point. But also has a deep interest in baking, just cos. And forget overtime, don't worry about 80 hour work weeks because "we're getting pizzas in at 9pm!". The constant career learning, study, work shitting all over life is along those lines. Then to top it off you are going to get paid around the equivalent of a GCSE C in English middle manager in government whose sole career goal is to retire as quick as possible and make sure they get their flexi days in...to add there is nothing wrong with that, it's all gravy if you can get away with it.
But if the jobs are so totally fucking fantasy land and the pay so shit why does anybody do it? Brilliant question. Because if they can't find anybody already here stupid enough then because it's "IT" the government give them free reign to open up to a global market and a whole world of bullshitters (and some real talent to be fair). The talent moves on to bigger and better things, the bullshitters hang around and the company recruits more fantasy land to make up for it (before eventually realising that the talent is located in parts of the world where the existence is so shit developers have nothing better to do than develop and the cost of living so dirt cheap then can create a development hub there!) The recruitment agencies over here fucking love it because there is a constant flow of "high paid" vacancies (wet knickers time). Ah how little do they know about what an actual real proper developer is worth. All this is killing the local market for developers but it doesn't matter to anybody in the DOE because they get paid anyway, in fact they can all get excited about telling the world what a technology hub we are.
They want your soul, your family, your entire existence for mid management government salaries, a bit of pizza and a summer party to splash up on the gram. In the words of one of my great programming heroes, they can fuck the fuck off the fucking fucks.
ps but if they do want me I'm currently booked up till next June, my day rate is currently £550, I WILL finish at 5pm and you can keep your pizza.
