[Looking for Charlie's main web site?]

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 Some content may be outdated--though not necessarily.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.

[....Continue Reading....]

Comments
Thanks for this, Charlie. I am no longer an active CF recruiter and I am no longer active on the market as a CF developer, but I started using CFML about the same time you did, and I can confirm everything you are trying to drive home here. CF is in use in far more than government offices, it is not just legacy one-offs, there's plenty of really good code work to be had out there, and yet both employers and devs continue to struggle to simply find each other. Seems to me that everyone needs to start leveraging the lovely free resources out there, like your cf411 and Nadel's job board, if they want to keep doing great work with CF's great platform.
# Posted By jfish | 6/23/17 6:51 PM
Great post, Charlie. Thanks for your long time support of CF. I can attest to hiring quality devs and teaching them CFML. I've done this for years with great success. The trick is finding people who can truly learn new things quickly. You'll likely get a better dev. Finding work can be a bit tricker if the jobs you run across don't allow remote work, but I also talk to customers on a regular basis who wish they could find more CF devs so the jobs are out there, it's just a matter of plugging in and finding them. I direct a lot of people to the #jobs channel on the CFML Slack team and also retweet all CF job offers I see come across twitter.
@jfish, thanks and great to hear of someone no longer in CF who has such a positive perspective, and especially given the post and your role as a recruiter. Let's hope people will listen and learn.

@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.)
Hi Charlie, I tried the Google job search and got "Tablets and countries outside the United States are not yet supported." so that is probably why you weren't able to get any results outside the US.

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.
# Posted By Paul Swan | 6/23/17 11:40 PM
If the only thing you know is CF, the suggestion to learn new technologies is valid because CF is and always has been a small niche product, so the number of jobs available was never that big, and is considerably less now since there are many other technologies out there, and the most popular ones are ubiquitous. Thus why you see unable to find jobs or contracts and asking "is cf dead".

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.
# Posted By Snake | 6/30/17 5:11 AM
Sure, Paul and Russ/Snake. Two sides of the same coin, really. Yep, I addressed how CF folks who can't find work may need to reach out to other technologies.

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....
Copyright ©2024 Charlie Arehart
Carehart Logo
BlogCFC was created by Raymond Camden. This blog is running version 5.005.
(Want to validate the html in this page?)

Managed Hosting Services provided by
Managed Dedicated Hosting