{"id":9416,"date":"2009-02-11T11:29:00","date_gmt":"1999-11-29T20:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/aidanfinn.com\/?p=9416"},"modified":"2009-02-11T11:29:00","modified_gmt":"1999-11-29T20:00:00","slug":"14-of-irish-companies-making-it-staff-redundant","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/aidanfinn.com\/?p=9416","title":{"rendered":"1\/4 Of Irish Companies Making IT Staff Redundant"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>More doom and gloom I\u2019m afraid.\u00a0 There\u2019s a story on <a title=\"Silicon Republic\" href=\"http:\/\/www.siliconrepublic.com\/news\/article\/12248\/cio\/it-staff-in-jeopardy-under-pressure\">Silicon Republic<\/a> that 1\/4 of Irish companies say they will be letting IT staff go.\u00a0 As usual, IT is seen as a non-revenue generating cost centre that cannot add value to the business.\u00a0 Personally, I see that as being a failure on the part (not necessarily both) of two parties: <\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Management or directors who do not appreciate the skills of their staff and lack the vision of how to use IT to enhance their competitiveness and efficiencies. <\/li>\n<li>IT staff who fail to develop their skills and provide advice to management, i.e. the 10-till-4 administrators that you may seen me talk about before.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>It seems that most of these businesses have ongoing IT requirements and projects that must be finished and they will be looking at contract or temporary staff to complete them. <\/p>\n<p>The last time we had an \u201cIT recession\u201d was in 2000-2002.\u00a0 There was almost no movement on the permanent job scene in IT.\u00a0 But contract work was pretty lively.\u00a0 I tried to get into contracting then but couldn\u2019t do it.\u00a0 You had to have some sort of background in contracting before an agency would submit your CV.\u00a0 I got lucky when a relative put my CV in with his employers and I finally got my foot on the ladder.\u00a0 I think it might be like that again. <\/p>\n<p>If you are contracting for the first then consider your options and requirements.\u00a0 In Ireland you must have a company.\u00a0 You cannot set up as a sole trader in IT contracting.\u00a0 That\u2019s reserved to the likes of builders, i.e. it\u2019s defined as someone who works under their own direction and brings their own tools onto the site.\u00a0 A call to Revenue confirmed an IT contractor must have their own company.\u00a0 You can set up a company but there\u2019s a tonne of paperwork that can take months, e.g. set up the company and 2 directors, set up VAT, set up bank account, set up PAYE taxation, monthly VAT reports, quarterly VAT reports, annual VAT reports, annual CRO report (this is a real biggie because there is ZERO flexibility on it), annual directors reports and pension compliance.\u00a0 The benefit is you have all the perks of a company, e.g. purchase assets, depreciate them and write them off from VAT.\u00a0 If all the paperwork sounds too nasty and you need to get up and running quickly then you can join an umbrella company managed by an accountant.\u00a0 All you have to do each month is submit your timesheets to the accountant along with your expenses.\u00a0 You cannot expense assets, e.g. a laptop, because you don\u2019t own the company. <\/p>\n<p>Finally, do a lot of research on the accountants.\u00a0 I went through 3 before I found one I could trust.\u00a0 The first one was a fool.\u00a0 The second wouldn\u2019t answer the phone or return my emails.\u00a0 The 3rd didn\u2019t do the paperwork or advise me and put me in a bind which took some work to sort out.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>More doom and gloom I\u2019m afraid.\u00a0 There\u2019s a story on Silicon Republic that 1\/4 of Irish companies say they will be letting IT staff go.\u00a0 As usual, IT is seen as a non-revenue generating cost centre that cannot add value to the business.\u00a0 Personally, I see that as being a failure on the part (not &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/aidanfinn.com\/?p=9416\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;1\/4 Of Irish Companies Making IT Staff Redundant&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_uf_show_specific_survey":0,"_uf_disable_surveys":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9416","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/aidanfinn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9416","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/aidanfinn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/aidanfinn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aidanfinn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aidanfinn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=9416"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/aidanfinn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9416\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/aidanfinn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=9416"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aidanfinn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=9416"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aidanfinn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=9416"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}