Comments on: Another ColdFusion Shop Bites the Dust

By: Peter Bell

Peter Bell — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 13:02:21 +0000

I agree with Adam and Marc. Don’t hire CF developers (I mean, feel free if there is one that meets your needs). Hire web developers. Ideally a Java developer with some experience of either Ruby or Groovy (or maybe with a background in Smalltalk at college). That way they’ll be comfortable with the Java environment, but will still “get” dynamic languages. Anyone with that background will be productive in CFML within a week or two (and will be delivering code in the first couple of days).

It’ll take them a *little* longer to get the ins and outs of the frameworks, but there really isn’t much to getting started with ColdFusion. Plus by hiring non-CF devs we’re growing the market.

By: Mike

Mike — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 18:58:11 +0000

This is SO true at this given time. We have just finished trying to hire a seasoned ColdFusion developer, and found the canidates extremely lacking. Even the ones who claimed to be proficient, really didn’t know CFML. We ended up changing the position to a .NET role and were flooded with qualified candidates. I am much like you, in that I love ColdFusion and the community, but if I had to choose right now at a pure business level, I would go in another direction.

By: Steve Brownlee

Steve Brownlee — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 16:51:52 +0000

@Adam: Hey there Adam. Just wanted to make it clear that this is not my company that we’re talking about.

And deep experience is, obviously, a subjective term. For me, it means that the person has worked on high transaction, business critical applications for at least one full year, and had an integral part in solving real business problems.

I don’t want to get into some kind of argument here. That’s not the point of my article. I’m truly sad when large CF shops decide to move on, but given my own experience trying to hire someone with ANY ColdFusion experience, I’m just not that surprised any more.

By: Marc Esher

Marc Esher — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 16:24:09 +0000

We’ve had a tough time finding people with good experience tackling tough systems, too. We’ve adopted the stance that a great programmer can become productive in CF rather quickly, so we started looking outside the CF community for people. Our last hire, in fact, was a Ruby guy who had some CF experience, and he’s worked out quite well for us.

By: Adam Lehman

Adam Lehman — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 16:12:25 +0000

@Steve – I’ll respectfully disagree about training CF developers. Sure, if you find someone off the street w/ just HTML knowledge, it’s going to take a while for them to get up to speed. However, if you are hiring intelligent developers, it shouldn’t matter the language. In my personal experience, a mid/senior Java developer can be productive w/ ColdFusion in less than 30 days.

You company is part of the problem, not the solution. Adobe can only do so much to expand the community (it’s nearly doubled the size of the community since 2006) But guess what, all those new developers only have a few years of experience. I don’t know how you measure “deep experience”, but it sounds like your definition is many years coding CFML.

How can we attract new developers if all the job opportunities require 5+ years of experience?

Anyway, it’s disheartening to hear that your company is moving away from ColdFusion. Please post back in a year and lets us know how it’s going. More often than not, customer who decide to move to .NET/Java come right back to CF when they realize that it’s hard to find “deep experience” regardless of the technology.

Also, please let your existing CF staff know that there is a world of opportunities out there for them. It’s a great time to be a CF developer and it would be ashame to spend time replacing existing skills (.NET over CF) when they could be learning complementing skills (Flex, AJAX, ORM, etc).

On a final note. Adobe/MM/Allaire have done a poor job in pushing their community to grow their technical skills. To remedy this, we are completely re-writing all of the ColdFusion course ware (which will be freely available) to a higher standard. We’re also rewriting the certification test to ensure that ‘Advanced’ means advanced. All CF developers will be taught and expected to know about CFCs, ORM, Caching, etc.

-Adam Lehman
ColdFusion Product Manager

By: Steve Brownlee

Steve Brownlee — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 13:53:36 +0000

@Lola: Bringing someone up to speed means going through the process of many, many mistakes, a lot of time and a lot of money. When organizations start the hiring process, that means that there is an existing deficiency or need in the organization that needs to be filled immediately. Rarely does a manager or director get the chance to say, “Well, I feel like hiring someone who can’t perform the job duties, but may be able to 9 months from now.”

By: Marko Simic

Marko Simic — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 11:49:11 +0000

Steve, good point.
That is just one of many reasons why Adobe needs to make CF platform free for use and to charge exceptionally(!) good IDE. Also, they can rip of goodies from CF (document/pdf management, charting, office tools, etc) and charge them separately.
I have impression that Adobe doesn’t invest enough in CF marketing.
From what I’ve seen, it looks like they invest 70% in Flash, 29% graph tools (where they, btw, have monopoly) and 1% on CF. They rely too much on what community will do.
Second problem is certification. People don’t see a viable reason why to certificate in any of Adobe technologies.
I had high hopes that some of these things going to change with release of CF9 and CF Builder, but no.
However, it is, always, going to be difficult to find experienced developer in any field. Especially unemployed or not-expensive.
To me, being experienced means that you succeed to persist for long time in different (difficult) environments. It means that you are capable to change, adopt and communicate on satisfactory level, through time. Those characteristics are rare enough by itself.

By: Lola LB

Lola LB — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 11:13:39 +0000

Being on the other side . . . maybe companies need to bite the bullet, hire developers who may not quite have what they need, and spend some money bringing them up to speed.

By: Qasim Rasheed

Qasim Rasheed — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 02:01:38 +0000

Steve,

I completely agree that it is almost impossible to find high caliber CF developers who can build large scale enterprise applications. I found myself in a situation where we have been looking to hire good CF talent for a while with no luck. Even our management has started considering alternate options to avoid this situation in future.

Thanks for a well written post on a topic that closely relates to reality that many organization face these days.

By: Steve Brownlee

Steve Brownlee — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 01:12:01 +0000

@Roger: Good point, but in this specific case, education of the business leadership was not needed. They already were familiar with ColdFusion’s capabilities and had invested in it for years.

Apparently their needs grew beyond their existing capacity and they simply could not find qualified people.