I was at Vegas last year for the conference and as everyone probably knows now the idea of on-premise SharePoint was always referred to as “legacy” with a big emphasis on moving to the cloud. The merits or otherwise have been done to death in other posts but I was wondering how many SharePoint professionals here think that the amount they can command with their skills is going to go down over time?
A big plus point according to Microsoft about the cloud based SharePoint and especially the app model is that “anyone” can code SharePoint now as only way of interacting is through the client object model. If you consider the JavaScript client object model then the idea being that your app can actually be written in Python/Ruby/Java or whatever floats your boat. You are simply calling into a bunch of JavaScript libraries or REST services or whatever.
So for the more developer focussed people out there what does this mean? If anyone can knock up “apps” or code that can interact with SP and you don’t need to be a .NET developer with specialist SP knowledge any more then why does a client need to pay more? Certainly in the contracting world, day rates for SharePoint developers have been higher than those for straight .NET dev in general.
App model is in its infancy and change is going to take a while but SharePoint online is getting updated much faster than the older traditional releases and the app model will mature and gain capability in the future.
Anyone considering a move to a different technology or a switch in focus with their skills? or do you think that SharePoint solutions will still require a specialist set of skills that will command a higher salary/day rate?
Interesting article showing trends in rates. http://www.itjobswatch.co.uk/contracts/uk/sharepoint.do
For me, I don’t think SharePoint online/on-premises will decide the salaries. I would say the market conditions and the place of other competitive CMS products will decide the jobs and the success story of SharePoint further.Â
Just for the sake of argument–let’s say Apps take off as fast as we are lead to believe.
What about the massive data on SharePoint 2007 and 2010. How is all that data going to magically get into the clouds without SharePoint talent. Â Conversions from 2007 with customization is no piece of cake to convert.
I wouldn’t put up your SharePoint Shingle just yet!!
I think the market which will dictate the rates. If its flooded with SharePoint people then it will drop somewhat. Still think its a specialised skillset. Theres lots of reasons which affect a rate not necessarily the skills required. In short its likely but not for quite a while.
