To take voluntary redundancy @ £115k

[anon5mill]

Around £80k after tax. Or should I stay in current role with package of £140-150k + pension, healthcare. Current role is comfortable and suits lifestyle. Could be difficult to find another role with the same flexibility and money. Have niggling doubt about taking the redundancy. Have dependents, already own home, no debts. Likely to be made redundant within next 18 months if not now.

Sorry for the late reply. I run a small consultancy (contractor), and generally supply end to end solns for my clients or consultancy, so server side (Java, database, etc), front end (JS, typescript, etc) and requisite infrastructure (kubernetes, docker, oauth2 security, etc). You’re right these fields are now ultra competitive and very few vacancies at all.

I'm still not sure what that means - if you 'run' a small consultancy are you one of the people just below the 'C-suite'/owner?
Certain orgs with a lot of legacy infrastructure are still hiring with this skillset. For people that have technical knowledge of all the 'overall' bits. Government bodies the like DWP, GCHQ (although they're not legacy!) for example and not just in London, Manchester has quite a few for example. I don't think they will match that level of, but like 80K?

It's quite valuable as a lot of specialists (say, front-end devs) won't know about backend things and vice versa. Those who have spent their career in small firms may also not have encountered the challenges of building for robust operations such as resilience, scale and reliability.

My boss for example (at senior manager level) makes technical decisions but is still relatively hands-on, speaks at technical conferences and in live debugging etc is still an ace at the command line, so he could still 'step down'.

Others however have only been 'technical' for a short while then gone on to business/architect roles with little hands on. Or project/programme manager type roles. These are the sorts of people struggling IME.

Sorry I probably wasn’t being too clear, I’m a contractor, via my own limited company (consultancy) - a PSC basically. I tend to provide solutions for enterprise clients, so these do have to scale, be extremely robust, secure and reliable. Some are smaller clients where I’ll deliver a complete end to end solution, others are larger such as banks etc where I’ll provide consultancy or development skills where they don’t have them. So I’m definitely more technical than managerial.

I agree, I think the non technical management roles are really struggling atm, but also think the tech roles are too (more my level), it feels across the board atm, I’ve heard of experienced developers who are applying for warehouse jobs to pay bills, etc. It’s the worst market I’ve seen since 2008, possibly even worse as no end in sight.

Ah OK! That confused me as I wondered how you could be made redundant from your own company, don't think you can be made redundant as a contractor? But I don't know much about contracting anyway never having done it myself, only what I've been told by other people.

I'm actually shocked at how quickly things have changed. Even at my company a year ago there were at least 10 pages of roles at any given time for UK locations now it's barely 3. And they're all mostly low level. Of course our hiring process is a bit archaic and people tend to 'earmark' internals before creating them jobs... but it really drove the point home.

However a lot of my age group (early-mid 30's) tend to be changing jobs pretty easily still. There's a definite ageist bias in the industry. I also think a lot of people who 'specialised' (e.g. 15+ years as a Java dev) get overlooked in favour of people who put all the buzzwords on their CV and know a little of everything but not much in-depth. The JD's I see these days companies want an entire IT department for one person and it's especially endemic for things like 'full stack' engineering.

The person who is an independent contractor, is not the person being offered redundancy, who is an employee.

OMG are you THE PigletJohn?
Ok yes I didn't realise person I was replying to wasn't OP anymore thanks for pointing that out. Even so am starstruck if you are

@CantHaveTooMuchChocolate sorry I thought you were the OP. my bad! but hopefully my points haven't been complete rubbish