This is an exceptionally nice “digest” of great links.

The biggest skill to learn, I think, is selling. ”Let's face it:   you're expensive.” If no one understands the value that you bring, and if you can't explain the benefits of “your product, i.e. you” without pulling-out a slide rule, then you plainly know nothing about selling.

Companies who are facing financial pressure – and these pressures are now extreme – feel pressured to cut costs anywhere they can, literally in order to remain solvent. (They're not joking about this.) You need not only selling-skills, but good selling-skills, to make the case that your job (or your department or whatever) is vital to help the company make money and avoid expense.

As an aside, I would caution you about “getting your desperate dreams up” about striking out on your own. This is not an advantageous time to take any sort of plunge along those lines, because funding for the kinds of projects that might get outsourced to people like you was probably the first thing to get frozen.

I have partial disagreement about contracting in this economy.

The problem with contracting right now is that there are a lot of laid off people, and many of them are trying to go into contracting. So there is a lot of competition. However on the flip side a lot of companies who did layoffs have found, or will find, that they now have too few people for some key project X. They do not wish to hire full time employees at the moment, but the project is still necessary. As a result contract work is opening up.

The question is who gets that work. First dibs tend to go to people who the companies in question know to be good. Which means that if you're fresh out of work and are looking for a break, you're going to have a lot of trouble. However anecdotal reports from some people I know says that people who have established a reputation for themselves are now busier than ever.

Speaking personally I'm on both sides of this dynamic. I was not laid off, however my employer made me go part time for a few months. (I have been offered my full time job back starting in May.) I therefore have been looking for contracting. I'll be honest and say that coming up with contracts takes a lot of effort. But with what I've found already, I'm better off now than I was when I worked full time. Of course who knows how long that will last?

For obvious reasons I would not recommend that anyone voluntarily quit their jobs in this market without a very good reason. However if you're without a job, don't automatically rule contracting out as a possibility. If you're interested in doing this, though, do everything in your power to make it happen. Post your resume on job boards. Register for sites like Sologig. Let your friends know that you're looking. And above all, take advantage of everything that Linked In has to offer. Update your profile and your friends will know you are looking. They have a job board and lots of people don't think to look there. Plus if you have a lead on anything, anywhere, go look up any names you hear about on Linked In. What you're looking for is to find out whether you're lucky enough to share any connections. If so, then try to get your connection to make a personal referral for you. When a hiring manager is looking at a stack of resumes, there is no simpler way to force him or her to look at one in the middle than to get a referral from a friend.

Update: I added some advice for people who are on the market.

The biggest skill to learn, I think, is selling. ”Let's face it: you're expensive.” If no one understands the value that you bring, and if you can't explain the benefits of “your product, i.e. you” without pulling-out a slide rule, then you plainly know nothing about selling.

Very well put -- I think I'm going to have a chat with my manager tomorrow on that very point.

Alex / talexb / Toronto

"Groklaw is the open-source mentality applied to legal research" ~ Linus Torvalds

As an aside, I would caution you about “getting your desperate dreams up” about striking out on your own. This is not an advantageous time to take any sort of plunge along those lines, because funding for the kinds of projects that might get outsourced to people like you was probably the first thing to get frozen.

That's certainly a common assumption, at least. Personally, though, I've been freelancing for a bit over four years now and things don't seem any better or worse for me than usual at the moment. I've also seen a lot of people on the various freelance blogs and such saying that things have really been picking up for them lately - far more than are reporting harder-than-usual times.

That said, though, I expect that tilly's theory is probably correct: If you have an established reputation, things are likely to be getting better. If you don't, you may be left out in the cold if you go for it on your own.

You've been doing it for four years, and you started in a better economy. All that I am really saying is, “don't harbor any illusions.” Contracting is neither easy, nor certain, nor is it particularly attractive. I was meeting last night with an attorney (“attorneys make the big bucks, right? ...”) who's having a baby! Great news, huh? Uh uh. No insurance. Nor will they now be able to get any:   the future bambino is a “pre-existing condition.”

You can set up a proper LLC, build up a customer base, and purchase insurance, and even write it off when you do. But all of that takes time. If you have never actually done it before...

“Just no illusions, okay? Good luck! It may well be the best, or the only, chance you've got. But, no illusions.”

Anyone with similar experience, contradicting takes, etc.?

Nothing can help you if your employer makes stupid decisions. Invest in yourself.

It's timely that this post appears tonight on Perlmonks, and is also the Best Node of the day. A couple of people at the company I work at were 'cut' recently, and I'm beginning to feel more than a little paranoid about the security of my own job.

I've been working hard recently on a project with a vague, changing specification and an impossible deadline. The first part's almost done, and another guy is going to be taking over for the second part while I get up to speed on his stuff (which is similar -- there are only two of us familiar with this collection of code). And I smell a fish, because once he's up to speed on my stuff (not that I've been hoarding information), I'm expendable.

Thanks lots for your post -- I hope I don't need it any time soon. I've tagged it for a more complete read later on.

The first part's almost done, and another guy is going to be taking over for the second part while I get up to speed on his stuff (which is similar -- there are only two of us familiar with this collection of code). And I smell a fish, because once he's up to speed on my stuff (not that I've been hoarding information), I'm expendable. [emphasis added]

Or he is. And he probably realizes this, too, and is feeling just as paranoid.

Best of luck to both of you.

HTH,

planetscape

It's pretty obvious that:   “one shall be taken, the other shall be left.”

If the project is “vague and impossible,” it might be “a wart on the project plan.” In other words, it has become a task that (a) may no longer have a (pressing) business requirement, and (b) at least represents a lot of sunk-cost until someone can figure out how either to defer it or to get rid of it altogether. “But the good news is,” as someone is surely saying in a high-level meeting, “at least we know there is a sure-fire way to cut costs by 50%.”   .. .. ..  :-/

As an aside:   this is one of the best threads I have read anywhere in a very long time, and it's a link to a great many other older threads that I never knew existed.

• Helping your former company
• The Business of Development
• Programmers Blue Collar?
• Would you work at a porn company?

Besides networking, where do you prefer to do your job hunting? We used to love jobs.perl.org. While the rest of the company relied on recruiters, we developers had the luxury of a low-volume, high-quality source of applicants. However, the last few times we posted there we got a flood of very low-quality responses, and we've semi- given up on using the site. We've turned to the recruiters, and they're pretty good. From the best I can tell, they just get leads from the big sites like monster.com, but they filter out the junk and pre-interview candidates, saving us a lot of time and effort.

If I can offer one bit of advice: clean up your resume and make sure that you can explain all of the points mentioned in it. It amazes me how often people list some interesting-sounding project that they were responsible for, or some experience with a particular language/platform/db, but then cannot give a clear explanation of it. That completely undermines your credibility.

I'm curious, are many other monks part-time or full time managers? Surely I can't be the only one around here who eventually got pushed into management. After many years of being just a developer, I spent a couple of years doing half-and-half management/developing, and just this past year I've wound up doing full-time management when my boss retired.