Hi Evan

I've seen some interesting things recently in the job market. A friend of mine is working at a government job. In that place, Fox has been trashed by a number of developers over the years. Trashed by the non Fox people and by the Fox people too. The code is generally poor and performance has been such that recent Access systems are faster. However, my friend is no slouch. He's modified these systems and made the Access stuff look like it nodded off to sleep. He's a qualified Fox guy, but not VFP, yet.

I recently went to a job interview where the client was converting code from Fox 2.0 and up into VFP. Of course, they are running the code through the VFP converter and are unwilling to rewrite stuff. Now, I of course didn't take the job. But I know others got in. This company asked me why would I want to start over and I told them, the idea would be to build systems that can scale up to SQL server and take advantage of OOP and new VFP features. I tried to explain how OOP could be used to leverage existing functionality, but it fell on deaf ears.

I guess my first point is, that "highly qualified VFP programmers" is a relative term. Its the fault of some of these so-called highly qualified programmers that companies don't want to use fox based products.

At the same time, the employers are not aware of the abilities of the old fox products and are most certainly not aware of the new abilities of VFP. So, they will hire people who can write old Fox code, thinking that these guys are VFP experts. There are more than 100 resumes sent in for jobs. I can't imagine how an employer will determine who is a VFP expert versus a Fox expert from such a pile.

As it was, I felt lucky to even get called for the interview, but I knew as soon as I got there that I was wasting my time. I used an analogy. Let's say that the old fox code was the best possible code it could have been (which was doubtful). It would be comparable to sirloin steak. I then run this piece of sirloin through the converter. Do I get sirloin out of the meat grinding converter? No, I get hamburger. Now admittedly, this hamburger will be palatable to Fox people, but its not VFP sirloin, its FPW sirloin based hamburger.

So the question is, how do we convince employers that they want VFP sirloin and not hamburger. Hell, its all meat to them anyways.