>In an editorial in the October 2000 Fox Talk Whil Hentzen asked the question, "Are the days of the Independent Developer over?"

For 10 years I customized a base accounting package (that I had created) to specific customers needs. I also had a FeedLot app. I used Tubo Pascal 4.03a and the Borland database toolbox. Then I used a Forth based database tool called Savvy. (Anyone familiar with that?) Follwing that was Revelation F and then Advanced Revelation. When AREV didn't scale well to the Windows GUI I switched to PowerBuilder (3 - love that datawindow!). About the same time the demand for VB programmers took off and I switched to it. Between 1980 and 1990 there was more consulting work than I could keep up with in the central part of Nebraska. But, as more products like DAC-EASY or PASCAL saturated the small business accounting market, and a depression hit the cattle feedlot industry, I began contracting for VB work. There aren't many opportunities outside Omaha for VB consulting so I ranged between Denver and Chicago as north as North Dakota and south to the Oklahoma border. If I wanted consulting work I had to travel. I even considered doing a Dallas job. Traveling became a pain. Living out of a rented room for a couple of months at a time is a pain. In the my wife and I decided the money wasn't worth it.

The VB market seemed to peak around 1994, in the Nebraska, which is not a data mecca. Market saturation was reached pretty quickly. It seemed to me that the numbers of tools were exploding and the jobs were being spread amoung the tools. I was constantly studying new tools. Some I used for only one job and never again. If you work 50% of the time and charge $60/hr you will make $60K/yr before expenses. In the midwest about $35-50 seemed tops. You will need the other 1,000 hours to study and practice, plus more. And single copy desktop versions of those GUI RAD tools weren't cheap. Liability insurance wasn't too expensive, but not having had to use it helped. I ran a subscription to MS Visual C++ for a couple of years but never found a job where it would have been a solution. I've never seen a successful 40hr/week contracter either, except for a couple working for the state who have obtained year-long contracts and work the same hours the regular employees do.

As the tools have gotten more powerful jobs that were once done only by professional coders were being done by regular employees using FrontPage, Paradox or countless other job specific tools. StarOffice, for example, bsides having wordprocessing, spreadsheets, presentation tools and graphical tools, has an integrated database environment based on SQL. You can create forms, tables, queries, reports and entire packages and never write a line of code, similar to Access.

In the Linux community it is C, C++, Phython or Java. The last three are OOP. Both Phython and Java are script based but have compilers. A couple of groups are starting a VB clone project. Borland is soon to announce Klyx. KDevelop is an outstanding GUI RAD tool for writing software based on the Qt widget tookit for the KDE environment. It appears to me that there is a ground swell of consulting work building in the Penquin world. I must add that it is bery nice working in an environment that is both extremely stable and almost void of virii problems.

As far as VFP jobs go, NE gov is the biggest user of VFP and we use only two outside consultants. They live far away and commute like I used to. VFP consulting in NE and perhaps the midwest is drying up.