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| CURRENT SECTION :: Market Reports | UK's most visited IT Contractor Site - 250k unique visitors March 2008 |
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Well, after last week’s debacle (sorry about that) we’re now back up and running on a super-speedy new system. First down-time in 7 months – can’t be bad. Anyway, enough trumpet blowing. This week we’re going to be doing what we were going to be doing last week, which is delving into the world of media people. You know the sort I mean – always sitting in smoky jazz clubs in Soho, calling each other darling, getting smashed on expense accounts and doing about 2 hours work a day. And for some reason they all demand Apple computers! Why? The mouse has only got one button on it for God’s sake! What use is that? My mouse has four buttons and a twiddly-wheel thing! That’s much more exciting! Plus, everything’s set up for you on a Mac! Where’s the fun in that? And their computers are all designer white. Bloody trendies. What’s wrong with beige? Answer me that. Anyway, I promised to report on contract details for these people and I’m a man of my word. So let’s have a look. First of all, how has demand changed over the last six months? Well, OS X is hardly mentioned. Maybe because agencies put in “OSX” instead. My advice would be to put ‘(“OS X” or “OSX”)’ in any search criteria on jobsites (such as jobalertz.co.uk!) Having said that, you still wouldn’t get many more notifications (11 in February). Using the keyword Apple would have found you 25 contracts in January and that’s the peak. Mac, on the other hand, would have found you over 200 contracts in February and March. For the few contracts that were there, rates hung around the mid twenties, although there’s just been one posted (Mac) at £39/hr. Around February/March time the average rates were up to £35. So what about the tools that you people use? (I’m assuming that real developers have stopped reading now…) Let’s start with Cold Fusion, Swing and Flash – it sounds like an awful eighties revival disco. The best of the bunch is Swing where average rates hit £53/hr last month! They dipped after November last year but have certainly picked up since. Cold Fusion hasn’t proven to be that popular and peaked in February. Rates are now down to low £20s. Flash has fared even worse with rates as low as £13/hr! As for demand, Cold Fusion is in single figures; Swing had 85 contract ads in March, but it fell to 50 in April. Flash has climbed steadily from 10 in November to over 50 last month. It’ll be interesting to see if that trend continues. Seeing as we’re in a meedja theme this week, what about Photoshop, Front Page, Adobe Premiere and DreamWeaver? Please don’t shoot the messenger. FrontPage and Premiere barely hit double figures. Photoshop and DreamWeaver peaked in February but last month fewer than 20 contracts were posted for both. Photoshop, FrontPage and DreamWeaver also have had low rates (in the teens). However, Premiere after a complete lull, seems to be picking up. On the permie side, however, Photoshop has been doing much better, although it peaked in March at 230 jobs posted. Dreamweaver was second best having 80 jobs posted in March, and Premiere had 55 jobs posted last month. What’s more, salaries have been increasing in all roles. If you put Photoshop in your criteria you would be looking at an average salary of just under £24,000. FrontPage would get you around the £27,000 mark, DreamWeaver around £25k but Premiere reached almost £50k in March! It’s now around the £45k level, however. Back to real work – What’s happening to average contract rates for the big three (VB, C++ and Java)? Well, they seem to be levelling out. VB is sticking at £35/hr, C++ is around £45/hr and Java around £38/hr. C++ is coming down from the heady peaks of £54/hr in November, but both VB and Java seem to have hovered around the same figures for the last 8 months. So there you go. The moral of the story is: if you want to spend lots of time in coffee shops drinking expensive froth and fannying around with photo-editing programs, don’t expect to get paid for it. Get a proper job! And that’s it for this week. Next week will be about… erm… any requests? I must explain, by the way, that we collect our stats from a limited set of job sites (i.e. ones that have agreed to allow us to do so). If there are any sites people want to recommend to me that are specific to Mac development I would appreciate being told. My email address is alan.potter@webalertz.com. Back next week. Bye for now. Alan www.webalertz.com May 13, 2004 Email this article Printer friendly page Previous Page
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