Andy -

If you find the golden ruler that measures a great VFP programmer for hire, please publish here.<g>

There doesn’t seem to be an surplus of experienced VFP programmers looking for work, at least not in our area. As a result we have lowered our expectations for an out of the box VFP programmer and we teach the VFP interface, form design, event firing, etc. to a new hire.

Regardless of past programming experience ( FoxPro and other languages included), the biggest issues in the long run are the person’s ability to comprehend data, to be intellectually flexible, and to be able to see that we are working on a larger picture than the code they are producing at the moment.

The understanding of data seems to equate with a person’s ability to organize things in a hierarchy and by some sort of relationship– like those “what belongs to this group” and “what do these have in common” tests in grade school taken to a higher level. You know, forest, tree, pine tree, fruit tree, oranges, apples, etc.

Intellectual flexibility helps when trying to bridge the chasm between thinking like a user and thinking like a programmer. (How did that user manage to break the? He forgot to think like the programmer ! ) I have no idea how to test for this.

We produce applications for clients who have an interesting idea that the application should be easy for them to use. A programmer who “gets it” knows this will take more than just making code run without error.

We can always help someone stuck with a coding problem.

Good luck.

Eleanor