How to find Flex developers!
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Published
Thursday, July 12, 2007
at
4:21 PM
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Finding Flex developers is getting very difficult as demand is far greater than supply. This has induced a rise in rates and salaries for Flex developers. In many cases, Flex developers are seeing salaries and rates some 30-40% higher than last year. Personally I only see the problem getting worse and demand continuing to outstrip supply even as we grow like mad. If you know Flex today, you are in a great spot, the market is white hot, party on! So what are projects and employers to do? Where can a team/company find Flex developers?DON'T LOOK FOR FLEX DEVELOPERS!!!
LOOK FOR COMPONENT AND APPLICATION DEVELOPERS!!!
(illustration by alex eben meyer for www.patentlysilly.com)
Looking for developers seasoned in Flex is hard and there is a limited supply. You will get frustrated looking for them and you will most likely have limited success. Learning Flex is quite easy for application developers and the development model was designed to fit developers coming from Java, C#, C++, VB, PowerBuilder, Delphi or any component/class based development paradigm. I highly recommend recruiting developers seasoned in application development and training them in Flex for the project at hand. This might seem like a strange tactic but 2 of the most successful Flex projects were built from teams with no prior Flex or Flash development experience. A good application developer who understands component development, object oriented development, and who has written desktop software are an ideal fit for Flex. The key is that they already know all the patterns and skills that are needed to understand Flex. These are also the skills that are very hard to teach and can only be learned on real projects.
Look at Buzzword by Virtual Ubiquity. This team had ZERO Flex experience, ZERO, when they decided to build a document editor in the web and chose to deploy to Flash Player and selected Flex for development. At the time Flex 2 was at Beta 2 and they wrote a prototype and proved that they development model would scale to produce a full document editor on par with desktop software. The team has over 100 years combined development experience building document editors. This team is wildly proficient in C and C++ for real desktop development. This team adopted Flex and has literally taken the development model farther than any team yet. They were application developers with deep knowledge of object oriented development and learned AS3 and Flex easily.
Look at Yahoo Web Messenger. This team had ZERO Flex experience, ZERO, when they decided to build an instant messenger in the web. I met the team while teaching at Yahoo earlier this year and they had 5+ developers on the project with no prior experience with Flex or AS3. The key was the team were all experienced application developers. By my estimate that team went from scratch to release in 6 months implementing the native Yahoo Messenger protocol in AS3 using flash.net.Socket.
Look at many of the top Flex developers and several key evangelists for Flex, they all have come from a component development background. What is even stranger is that many were once upon at time PowerBuilder developers. It is this component based legacy that is a strength in learning/adapting to the Flex development paradigm. If you look closely at Farata Systems and Cynergy Systems you will see several of the leading PowerBuilder developers who migrated to Java and then onto Flex.
Here are 5 skills/experience to look for:
1. Component Development
2. Desktop Application Development
3. OOP Skills - Classes, Interfaces, Composition, Inheritance
4. Languages - Java, C, C++, C#, PowerBuilder, Delphi, VB
5. Compiler skills are a must! (Flex/AS3 are not interpreted, they are compiled)
I am sure we will see a day when there are millions of Flex developers but given the market shortage today, we need to recruit them from other development markets. The best way to do that is to port developers with application skills and experience and teach them Flex. There are 5-10 Million developers out there that qualify and many are already employed in larger organizations. In many companies, there may already be the makings of a great Flex team in house.
There will come a day when recruiting Flex will be easier, but today, focus on finding good application/component developers for your Flex project and train them. I wish it were easier and that Flex developers grew on trees but we are not there yet.
Go Flex!
My 2 cents,
Ted :)