I similarly spent a few years working in this space (TfL, digitising their data and website etc). It always struck me just how nuts the weekly meetings between different station operators and TOCS within the GLA would be, essentially a shouting match to determine who would have to keep their station open that weekend. Resultant timetable changes on the fly were always fun content to keep updated.
Timetabling (at that point) remained very much a manual process, I think they had to bring a poor chap out of retirement who wrote them by hand.
I've been contracting for 8 years now. I'd recommend CWjobs / ContractRecruit and PurelyIT - just search and refine based on location / skills / required rate.
I’ve worked on this in London recently, presenting my working concept (and months of data in tableau by location behind it) at a few events. The industry is a few years off it, particularly the physical tech, which would require digital screens to be hooked up to an ad server of sorts (that doesn’t really exist programmatically either) and then serving custom ad formats (non IAB format) in real-time (taking in variable factors that could effect the demographic and/or volume of eyeballs). Measurement of the eyeballs and said demographic is the gap, though that’s more than currently exists in the Out of home market right now(nothing!).
It has legs, you just need serious commitment from an owner of inventory (physical boards), which are controlled by 3 or 4 organisations.
Perm - Mid level benefits + Pay (maybe options in a startup)
Contractor - Individual with their own Ltd company, pays less tax and much higher take home pay but without any benefits.
Consultant - On-site via a supplier on a framework of some kind, however, often a permanent employee of the supplier with the supplier cashing in the margin.
At least 50% of the tech workforce in companies I work with or where peers are at in London are made up of contractors, especially in Banking.
Totally agree with you here. The contracting market in the UK (particularly London) is much more lucrative than relative permanent roles, even when their benefits are taken into account. It's actually more lucrative on tax here, though the Gov't are trying their best to change that.
It's also my experience that you get what you pay for, contractors in the whole tend to have a much wider breadth of knowledge from various sectors and hit the ground running whereas I don't tend to see the same appetite from Permanent employees (in most cases!).
I've been using Momondo recently, which has all of these tools and a much better UX. This just feels like a re skin of the ITA site and a bit of a poor effort at that.
This seems a rather odd article, there are many useful sites (particularly in London) that enable you to search for properties in a much smarter way these days, check out the tools on www.findproperly.com , find spare rooms on www.spareroom.com or even act as a property caretaker on www.guardiansoflondon.com
It should be great!. I'm not overly concerned, we had our own riots and disruptions prior to the Olympics in 2012 here but when it got to the point of the event common sense prevailed and everyone seemed to get behind it.
I was in Bangkok during the riots a few years ago and then Crete during the Greek ones, just being sensible helps you navigate around those sort of things.
I've been doing the same for the last 3 years, albeit not on the same scale. I contract every 6 months and then take a month or so off until like you I find my brain starting to feel neglected. I try to fit in a few weekend trips to cities during those 6 months.
I'm a technical PM so I tend to have to be on site for contracts and yet to find a remote PM role. That aside though I'm getting back to more coding these days so hope to be able to work remotely in the future.
In the last year I've taken about 10 weeks vacation, travelled all across the States, Hawaiian Islands, Fijian Islands (Yasawa's), Australia, Sweden and Snowboarding twice.
Contracting (think on site day rate) has allowed me to do this but only because I engineered it this way, I looked at Job boards a few years back and saw the qualifications I needed to get to get to the position and sort of rates that would allow me to take that time off to strike a good work/life balance.
I work 6 month contracts (sometimes longer) and take a month or so off at the end. Doing so not only allows me free thinking time and the opportunity to meet new people, travel to great places and experience new things but I also find I'm a lot more refreshed and valuable to the hirer for the next contract.
I know this isn't possible for everyone, hell, people need to work permanent roles right, but striking a good work / life balance is possible if you look for it.
Timetabling (at that point) remained very much a manual process, I think they had to bring a poor chap out of retirement who wrote them by hand.