Hello Terry:

Actually, I have spent most of my professional life as an independent consultant, including running my own software company with 18+ developers for a number of years until I sold it in the '90s.

There is merit in what you say but...

1) A lot, if not most of the time, your job as the outside gunslinger is the clean up all the bad design and code in town that the locals can't handle. Fixing other people's lousy design and inept code is not something I want to do on a daily basis.

2) Any virgin projects you are likely to land are small, simple, and something you have already done more than once. Sure, they're the bread and butter, and result in glowing referrals, but how many customized inventory applications can you get really excited about?

3) Large, complex, cutting-edge projects require corporate sponsership. The days of spending 6 months writing an application then selling it to a marketer or developing the market yourself are pretty much over. It takes too much money to successfully compete today. As an outside guy, you are not likely to have access to these large projects. The one I am finishing up now took 4.5 years to finish, and had a development budget of $2.8 million. Of course, on the pre-release sales alone, the company has already made a profit -- but as an independent where are you going to get access to that kind of cash? Venture capitalists to be sure -- but there is not much independence working for those guys.

4) I enjoy marketing, and I am pretty good at it, so I rarely have a problem finding consulting work. But, as I said, the kind of jobs you land as an independent are not often the ones I like to do.

5) In a well-organized corporate structure, you have a lot of independence. Ideally a design committee establishes the project specification that generally state what, but not how, the application must work. It is up to you to design the "how". Do they all work that way? Certainly not, but the successful shops do. How the design process is handled is a good indication of whether a prospective employer is likely to continue to be successful.

I may have been a little hard on HR in my post. Some HR departments are actually quite good. Most, however, do not know how to recruit programmers. Sharp employers use programmers to recruit programmers, using the HR department for the paperwork.

I may not have made it clear, but that's exactly the point I was trying to make:

(1) Developers should take on a larger role in identifying, recruiting and hiring other developers, and
(2) The job sites on developer forums should be restricted to developer to developer recruiting.

I have hired six developers and two interns for my company, not once going near monster.com. Figure out the skills and experience needed, identify the people you already know that have the needed skills and experience, and start telephoning. Either they are interested or they can identify yet other developers that meet the requirements. Pretty soon you have narrowed down the potential applicants. Only then does HR gets involved in the hiring process -- but rarely in the recruitment process.

This may cause a minor turf war with the HR directory, but you'll win that one. And most of the time it doesn't because, really, down deep, most HR people don't like recruiting and would just as soon you do it.

I know I'm not the only one who does this, because I receive one or two telephone calls every month looking for people who can do specific jobs.

But I also know that this process is limiting. There are scads of qualified programmers out there that I do not know. If we had a professional, developer to developer, forum for jobs I would make much more extensive use of it. I think other development managers would as well.

As it is now, the job posting sites on the UT, Wiki, VFUG and the like are merely mirror images of monster.com. We already have enough monster.coms. Were the professional forum job sites to become true developer to developer media, then they would be providing a valuable, needed service to the FoxPro community that is not being provided now.

Regards,