Looking for CF people, or CF work? What can you do?
Note: This blog post is from 2017. Some content may be outdated--though not necessarily. Same with links and subsequent comments from myself or others. Corrections are welcome, in the comments. And I may revise the content as necessary.I'm often asked by clients or folks in the community about whether I know anyone who could do some CF development work (or how they can find someone), or whether I know of any jobs/gigs available (or how they can find them).
I do have a pretty standard answer, and it's not what most would expect to hear.
@Brad, same thanks to you and for confirming the "hire good" idea. And about the #jobs slack channel, I do have that listed on the cf411.com/cfjobs page.
(I don't know if you happened to notice that or not. I was a bit confused today and thought it was gone, so I moved it down my list to the bottom. But since you mentioned using it currently, I figured it must be there and I had to be mistaken. I looked into things and as a very infrequent slack user, I didn't know how one should click the "channels" link to see all available channels. I see it there, so I have repositioned its mention on my list.)
I have moved back to Australia since I last saw you in Qatar and in the 11 months that I've been home there would have been less than 2 jobs each month in all of Australia that came up in ColdFusion job searches. Most of those just mention ColdFusion as a nice-to-have and several have been looking for people to convert their legacy ColdFusion code to something else.
There have probably only been 5-6 jobs specifically looking for ColdFusion developers. I've also been looking overseas for ColdFusion jobs and at least 80% of jobs I find seem to be in the US. Unfortunately, most of those will not consider non-resident applicants.
To be honest, it's been a heartbreaking experience as I feel like my 17 years of ColdFusion experience is now almost worthless. This old dog is learning some new tricks but it'll be a while before I meet the 2-3 years minimum experience that most employers are asking for.
I would make the same suggestion to someone if the only thing they knew was Ruby or Perl as well, as these are also very nice.
And Russ, I thought it was fairly self-evident that it was wise for any CF developer, but since one other person also made the same point in reply to my facebook post on the blog entry, so I have added a new paragraph at the top making the point very clear.
And Paul, about clients wanting 2-3 years of experience, you could pick something that's so new that no one has that. Of course it's a roll of the dice to pick something that will last. But you could be studying up on something you really prefer to do long-term while you "take work" however you can get it.
And to you and others who may feel they are in your shoes, remember that what you know as a CF developer goes WAY beyond just CF itself. It might surprise some to stop and think what CF developer typically deals with beyond just "CFML" which might be marketable.
In fact, I started to write a number of ideas here, and I realized it really was worth of its own post, so I will do that now. And I've updated this comment to point out that I did post it, here:
http://www.carehart....