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Newy Dev Update: September 2020

24 Sep, 2020 | 05 mins 38 secs

Our Dev Update for September 2020 is here – learn about what’s hot in the market as well as what skills and frameworks you should watch out for in the dev space.

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Transcription

Liam Potter:

– Hey there. Spring has sprung and Newcastle seems to be fairing fairly well in the pandemic. What does that mean for the dev market? Liam Potter here again with another instalment of The Newy Dev Update. So September, usually a bit of a weird time in the year with respect to hiring, but it looks really positive.

So we’ve got 30 dev jobs in the past 30 days. So a job a day, if you wanna do the maths behind that one. That’s an increase of six on the last month. And I get that that doesn’t sound like a massive increase, but if you sort of look at the context behind it, it’s a bigger jump than you’d initially realise. So let’s sort of extract that, pull out a bit more and discuss that. So this graph is a pretty rough guide as far as what really happens in the Newy dev market over the course of a year.

And really just the tech market in general. This is sort of an aggregate over the past five years based on our own internal data and based on Seek’s data, obviously not including 2020, but it still gives a good insight as to what generally happens over the course of a year. So looking at the start of the year, sort of that January-February period, we generally see a pretty slow start. What ends up happening is that companies try to squeeze their hiring in sort of towards the October-November period or realistically, they wait until March-ish.

The December-January period generally speaking, people are off on leave, approvals take a fair bit longer than usual as a result. It’s honestly like the dev market as a whole just has a really big hangover between December and realistically, up until February. So once everyone sort of figures themselves out and settles down a bit, we have that peak towards March and maybe April, but then we see a bit of slide up until about June.

So the June-July period is usually quite strong because the end of the financial year, a lot of the larger organisations maybe have a bit of leftover budget that they really wanna get through and make hires while they still have that money available. And then on the flip side companies that maybe run out of their budget a bit quicker than they expected, suddenly have access to a new year, new financials come July. So the August to October period is usually a bit of a valley. We see an uptick October, November.

Like I said, previously, people start to try and squeeze in hiring before the Christmas break or the holidays break rather. But what we’re seeing this go-around is that sort of the August-September period stayed quite steady, which is really encouraging to see because it’s usually quite a substantial drop.

Okay, next up, I’ve got a few interesting pieces that I wanna pull out a bit more. Obviously, we have the usual suspects, you.nets and that sort of thing, but there are a few interesting things that I want to really touch upon that you don’t really see too often in Newcastle and seems to be a few emerging trends that might continue on into the future.

So surprising no one, is the continued strength of the Microsoft Stack in the Hunter though, I will call out that there’s been a pretty big increase in .net core specific roles, as opposed to just generalist framework, but those are pretty standard in Newcastle. They’re always pretty strong and I’ve seen I think maybe five, six, seven in the past month or so. So always a strong area. Interestingly, a lot in the sort of junior to mid section. So it does provide a pretty good pathway into a senior dev role or lead role if someone wants to do that long term, which really cool to see. One thing that’s been surprising me quite a lot over the past few months is the need for mobile developers. Newcastle historically, not really big of a market for mobile developers. And when there is, it’s usually sort of the framework stuff like a React Native or Cordova or Xamarin or something like that.

Now look, that market’s still there. There’s still a lot of organisations hiring that framework stuff but there’s been quite a strong uptick in native developers as well, which is really great to see. I commented on this in the last Dev Update in August. And I kind of thought it was maybe a one-off thing at that time, but it seems to be a continuing trend and it looks like that’s going to continue to be the case for a fair amount of time. So maybe we are seeing the start of a proper native mobile development market in Newcastle, which would be awesome.

One thing I’m going to particularly pull out on our books at the moment, we’ve got a Flutter role available. Permanent Flutter role Flutter, obviously pretty new. Stable releases like the start of 2019. So to see a company really, really pursuing Flutter as a, as an option for their tech stack is awesome to see. I imagine we’re going to get quite a lot of interest, not just from Newcastle, but beyond. If you want to know a bit more about that one, if you just want a bit of information by all means, send me a message, give me a ring, whatever you want to do.

Another thing I’ve seen are a lot of roles that have a partial or full remote element. And that’s obviously the case during the pandemic, but it seems to be the case that a lot of these larger companies are moving to a remote-friendly or really a remote-first approach, which is really interesting to say considering the state of the market in Newcastle even 12 months ago. There was no shortage of dev teams in Newcastle that required you to be 100% on-prem in office all the time, nine-to-five.

You couldn’t take anything home. You probably had a desktop workstation as opposed to a laptop. So it’s been really interesting to see that transition into partial off-prem stuff and really how that’s gonna play out in the future. It sounds like there’s a lot of big companies that are happy with how the partial remote and full remote thing has occurred. And it sounds like they’re gonna adopt this approach going forward. Anyway, in summary, really, big things happening in Newcastle in the dev space at the moment. Obviously, COVID’s made it a bit of a weird year as we all are aware. The strength of hiring in the dev space in Newcastle has really retained. There’s a slight decrease year-on-year, but it’s really, it’s maybe one to five roles per month. So we’re pretty much business as usual. On that note, if you’re looking for a new role, if you want a bit of information about anything that I’ve talked about here, if you’re hiring people, really, I’m always happy to have a coffee, have a chat and really let people pick my brain.

Give me a ring, shoot me a message, whatever you want to do.

Anyway, that’s this episode of The Dev Update. Bye for now.

 

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