I have noticed as a web designer of late that it has been a chore to get anyone to hire me as of late. My typical resourses say its a slow month but it still has me a bit worried. Is anyone noticing a gradual slide in opportunities in the dot com industry? Or is it all in my head?
Be blunt if ya have too (though I would like a lil reassurance I will be able to pay next months rent hehehe)
Also along that vien, does anyone have any good contractors or places to seek a job in the tech industry in Southern California? I know of almost all online ones such as Monster.
Well, not dying out, but a lot are getting weeded out. Many because they just had an infeasible business plan. Quite a few because they got caught in the landslide and couldn’t get further funding. The companies that are left are tightening their belts and focusing on profitability rather than growth. So there’s less hiring going on and more skilled people out there to fill the jobs that remain.
You might consider widening your skills – I don’t know what level of web design you do, but our company has found it a lot harder to find, for example, good programmers than to find web designers.
We’re in the shakeout period. Crap business with crap business plans and venture capitalists with poor judgement are being found out. If you’re good, don’t panic; there’s always a demand for quality. My experience is that design agencies with experience behind them are doing just fine; maybe you need to look at agencies with an established portfolio.
Is there going to be a huge glut of IT professionals in the next couple of years? I have wondered about whether large numbers of people starting college in 1997-99, when it seemed like anyone who knew HTML could get six figures plus stock options, spent their college years preparing for the IT field. I might’ve done the same.
When I first started out in web design, I was happy with the niche I found myself in. And I’d like to stay in it for a while yet. But everyone else seemed to be talking about all these advances and developments in high tech dot com net superhighway bollocks that even I could see, really cleraly, would not sustain themselves.
The hype was so obviously hype, it would never last, and it’d burn out very soon!
And it has. I was right. I’m still chugging along in my niche (not very lucrative, but easier to do) while all the tech-heads who are more widely educated are now in a dying part of the industry. Only the exceptional have survived, and they deserve to.
Interesting…and if you look at it, true to the word.
I have worked as a designer for several failed dot coms. Many were led by some truly outrageous business plans. I did work for a brief time for one of the biggies (I will not mention it) and they suffered from the exact same problem (liquid crystal displays in the lobby- a whole building rented yet they use less than 25% of it) and left that one. After that, I went back to doing some contract work. But now, I dunno if I want to go perm or contract.
I am looking into a couple of design centers and am taking my time, really trying to get into that perfect job.
Also, this little vacation is providing me with the perfect opportunity to update my portfolio and website. This is a good thing considering I am embarrassed by both.
Hopefully, I can get a good design job that takes advantage of my artistic talent. God knows I can code monkey with the best but I would really love to use my art to its fullest.