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First of all, thank you to all of you that read my article weekly – it’s nice to feel wanted! The reason for the title is that we’re covering a number of areas, rather than having a single thread (multi-threading is so “today”, dahling). And it’s got nothing to do with 10cc. So I thought first of all we’d look at Internet browser work. For some reason there appears to be a greatly exaggerated belief in the importance of Netscape in the market. It might be better (although that’s questionable), it might not get so many virus attacks (but that’s probably due to its lack of popularity), but I’m afraid it only has 2% of the user market. Opera is slightly better at 2.2% and Mozilla has 11%. Internet Explorer still has a whopping 80% of the users. (source: http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp). So can we stop with the flaming about why we use IE? (we’re talking Morejobz.com here, not Contractor UK) I’m not a blind Microsoft lover but when reality kicks in, economics (i.e. my income) suggest that it’s not cost-effective to support multiple browser platforms when, say, 50% of development costs are spent on supporting 4% of the market. There are certain people who will cause the death of projects – and their own contracts – because they want to fight the software equivalent of religious wars. Personally, I hate C++ because it’s so easy for idiots to make code completely impossible to follow and makes debugging more frightening than facing Ringwraiths (And, no, I’m not a Lord of the Rings saddo either). And it’s bloatware. Use C++ and you are looking at megabytes of code instead of bytes. But – and this is important – it is the language of choice, along with VB, a sort of Early Learning Centre version of a programming language, so I just get on with it and use these languages. To use that much clichéd expression – wake up and smell the reality. Why are so many people anti-Microsoft? I think it’s the software equivalent of pen!s envy. (I put the exclamation mark in so that the so-called intelligent firewall filters don’t notice the naughty word. It’s the equivalent of painting a moustache on your face with charcoal so you don’t get recognised – and about as effective). I have no particular affiliation in any direction, but if you want to be commercial you have to go with the market. Bill Gates is almost the richest man in the world (depending on exchange rates etc), and his operating system (and don’t bother emailing me to say he nicked it - that was a long time ago and still not proven) is now the most ubiquitous in the world. I’m sure UNIX is way, way better and OS-X from Apple beats the pants off it, but sorry guys, you’re still in the minority. By a long way… But back to browsers. Interestingly, the contract requirements don’t quite fit with the stats regarding usage of the various browsers – perhaps they haven’t realised the economics either! We’ve only detected one contract for Mozilla, and that was in April. Netscape had a peak of 16 contracts in February, then went down to 8 in March, 2 in April and since then it’s flat-lined. Internet Explorer requirements also peaked in February at 10 contracts and has similarly dropped since, although there are still requirements floating around. As for FireFox, not a single requirement has been posted. But that might be because it’s a relatively new browser. Now, the next thing I was asked to look at was performance testing. Phew! After a poor performance (excuse the pun) in March and April this year where average rates were around the £32/hr mark, they’ve shot up to about £47/hr now! This might be due to a reduction in demand which always (contrary to what you learned at Economics at school) seems to drive the rate up. And sure enough, in February there were 57 contract requirements posted and it has reduced since then to the point where there were only 14 postings last month. Looking at the performance monitoring tools, it would appear Mercury is probably one of the market leaders and that LoadRunner is the main tool for performance testing. Well, please don’t shoot the messenger, but demand has plummeted since February, when there were over a hundred contracts posted. Last month it was down to 20. A top tip here – you’ll get more results by searching for LoadRunner than you will with Mercury. So include both search terms in your criteria. Now – will my theory about contract rates vs. demand hold true here? Okay – so I don’t win my phD. LoadRunner skills peaked at £50/hr in September last year and are now down to under £40/hr now. Mercury rates are more –ahem – mercurial, having leapt all over the place, maxing at £41/hr in April then dropping severely last month to £27/hr! So far this month we don’t have any figures. This may be because agents are putting things like “Market Rate” etc etc. Okay, continuing with the smorgasbord of subjects I’m covering this week I had a request from Amith Lutchman to look at ATG skills. Now, I will be completely honest and say that I’ve never heard of ATG so I had a look at their website. Apart from grinning in a schoolboyish fashion when I noticed one of their clients is “Newell Rubbermaid” (ooh-err missus), I then looked into what they do and now I know. So – having ATG skills looks like a good earner. Although rates have dropped slightly over the last couple of months, they’re still at a healthy £50/hr or thereabouts. As for Dynamo and Self-Service, two of their major products, the graph for rates looks like an ECG monitoring Siamese twins while they’re both being defibrillated. Dynamo skills have leapt from £34/hr in November and December last year up to £58 in January then down to nothing then back up to £44 this month. Self-Service has had rates as high as £69/hr but, like I’ve mentioned before, this could be a skewing due to the low number of requirements making the average not so accurate. Let’s have a look… Well, ATG had a max of 15 contracts posted in March, down to 5 last month. So far this month there have been 2 and one of those was today (Wed 16th). Dynamo has stayed in single figures with only four postings last month, and Self-Service barely managed to raise any postings at all with a maximum of four each month between March and May. So – I think my theory is right – the supply and demand curve is not quite right. There may be fewer requirements but they’re willing to pay a damn site more! So that’s it for this week. As I always say – I’m open to requests for areas to cover. Next week I might do a regional analysis of SQL requirements… And I’ve kept my plug until last. If you’re looking for a new contract go to our site @ www.webalertz.com. You will get notified within 10 seconds of a contract being posted on our supported sites. How cool is that? If you have any questions or comments, you can email me at alan.potter@webalertz.com. Jun 17, 2004 Email this article Printer friendly page Previous Page
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