Job hunting but no response whatsoever - is it me or the UK job market is incredibly bad?

[ForThisPost1]

I work in tech in London, and this is the first time I have experienced this. Usually, I will receive calls from recruiters shortly after I set my LinkedIn profile to "open to work, actively searching". But I have been waiting to hear something since last October. I applied for many jobs but have yet to receive a response, apart from one or two rejection emails. This is very unusual. Initially, I thought it was because of my CV, but my friend, who is a professional recruiter, reviewed it and said it was a great one. This situation puzzles me. Is it me, or is the job market exceptionally bad now?

Any suggestion is welcome. Thank you so much.

I’ve done detailed cover notes which take 30 minutes to write

Mine take hours, each. Even given that I'm autistic, are you sure that you are giving your cover notes enough time?

I work in tech and we have just had another round of redundancies for product managers. A PP mentioned that when the time is tough, there are less projects, and it's common to have the devs taking up the extra tasks of PO and BA. Tech leads in companies I've worked for are devs, not a separate management role. We are picking up tickets for new features, infrastructure and support, in addition to organising operational handover, estimates and project plans.

First off - sorry to hear you’re in this situation OP, I’ve been there and it’s pretty rough. I really hope you have some luck soon.

When people here are talking about “tech” is it largely software development? It feels like such a broad term to me I’m not always sure what people are referring to.

It's awful. I've spoken to so many recruiters who have told me that it's worse than it was during Covid. Lots of lay-offs.

I've given up on LinkedIn - you just don't hear back, particularly I think at more senior levels.

I was reading an article from 3/1/24 on Oliver Bernard's website earlier about Product Managers, https://oliverbernard.com/articles/do-we-really-need-product-managers - it does reflect the point that's been made on this thread about companies getting rid of I suppose the middle layer of management e.g test/product/project/scrum master to make their financial position and forecasts better.

@RulaLenskasHair It's much larger than just 'software development'. I'm a software developer, but I consider, DBA, DevOps, sys admins, product owners, business analysts, UX as tech. Infrastructure guys are very technical, and without them, our applications won't run in production. Also infrastructure are increasingly defined in software. That's what I meant by us picking up some of the infrastucture work. We have code that generates the infrastructure for deployment into public cloud. However, we still have an operations team. They managed our AWS organisation, direct connect, DNS and many things I have no knowledge of.

I can answer that article title's question: no, we do not need more product managers. Nor do we need change managers, service managers, project managers, etc.

More technical people with Linux skills would be nice.

@Savoury
Hi, I am a technical product manager and have not coded for a long time. I also want to keep developing as a production person. Maybe it will be the prod people's turn after the development market picked up.

I’m an EA/PA and my job market is appalling. Hard to get decent jobs, often want 2 people for same job. Worrying.

It has a point, but it applies to any management role - do we need managers in any sector? I see product managers (good ones) as good film directors. They put all the epics and storylines together, knowing the market, competitors and the company's tech capacity to produce profitable products. It is an important role, but the market is saturated.

If you have any CTO roles going, please PM me 👍

@mamma65432 Thanks for sharing that article. I agree that a manager that keeps engineers, designers and products in lockstep is definitely needed. I'm not in that market so I didn't know there's a huge influx of people wanting to do it for a quick climb of the corporate ladder. But I can see what they mean by prior qualification to become a software developer. There are many bootcamps out there, but it's easy to spot someone who can and who can't.

There are many many offshore developers applying for roles - if you're an employer looking for a developer or dev ops person with say 2-5 years recent hands-on experience and you are inundated with applications then its going to be hard for say someone who's been in a management role for the last 5 years to compete for a dev role.

Then you also have UK consultancies who take on graduates each year, train them up as dev's/testers/dev ops and put them into client companies giving the client company the option to recruit them as perm members of staff after a certain length of time. I don't remember that being a thing ten years ago.

It just feels flipping difficult right now, less manager roles but harder to get a hands-on job.

Definitely. The market is very saturated. Computer science is one of the most popular subject right now. It shows it's when everyone thinks they should get in for a easy career.

When I still see 80% failing the technical tests, then I don’t think the market for hands on development and engineering is falling, just supply is up. While yes there are consultancies taking all comers and trying to train them up, there is a natural fallout rate from that: some succeed but many others go into associate jobs longer term (project management, testing, sales etc.). Horses for courses.

The reason that product owner/manager vacancies are not plentiful is twofold: the collapse of the FinTech/tech startup world where they were most valued, mostly due to a contraction in seed/early funding, and the fact that many now out of work feel they can move into the field with less experience. The OP is very experienced so this must be frustrating! The same people wouldn’t dream of passing themselves off as a windows engineer or Java developer. It’s just a crowded space.

As the interest rates decrease and the funding situation improves, hopefully we’ll see more fluidity in the market as FinTechs pick up again.

In the OP’s shoes though, I’d prepare for the long term by focusing on polishing tech skills as these will always be in demand.

Congratulations on your new job!

If you write code, design architecture or do installations/maintenance etc, you're a techie.

If you mainly focus on numbers, schedules, reports, etc, you work in tech.

@Savoury - thank you. I am picking up my dev skills and want to retrain as a system architect. Not sure how plausible it is.

With your experience I think it’s very plausible @ForThisPost1 . Looking at a particular domain is also a good idea -payments, communications, HR, finance or whatever your domain experience is in really. That along with your tech skills will go a long way.
Good luck!

That is not a technical role. That’s what is meant by “techie”. Technical roles include developers and testers. In my experience, those roles are still in demand.

I don't think software architect is a technical role either. A lot of them just talk and do lots of drawings. The drawings are detached from reality and no devs pay any attention to them.

I think architect is a role that a senior developer might go into. But looking at jobserve for any techie role right now very specific experience is required both in terms of tools, languages and industry.

The emphasis on workers wanting to work from home has also meant employers are willing to go way further afield to make up teams. If people aren't going to come into the office why worry that they are in commenting distance?
So they save a lot of money employing people outside expensive (comparatively) job markets.

I thought there'd be more opportunities for me since the move to remote/hybrid but it's not panned out that way.

It's a double edged sword. You can work at companies based all over the UK, but they can also recruit from all over the UK, so the competition gets crazy.

I sometimes wonder if some places do hybrid just to keep the applications manageable.

DH's IT department is currently advertising for a junior sysadmin role. The advert clearly states that the applicant must live within commutable distance of their office. They're getting applications from all over the US and quite a few from India. We're in New York. It's so easy to apply that I think many people just ignore the location requirement.

Unfortunately, they're not getting much local interest despite offering a very competitive salary and nice working conditions.