Hi Alex
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>So, without providing any background information that may steer the responses, how difficult would it be for a company in the Northeastern US to create a development group with say 6 - 10 GOOD Visual FoxPro programmer/analysts? I would say the definition of good would be a developer that can also discuss business needs and challenges with users, translate them into functional/system specifications, and then code and deliver the product.


Depends what you mean by 'GOOD'. Having worked on, and put together, more than one such team I would say that the key element is to define the individual skill sets that you will need on the team. Once you have decided what you need it is usually relatively easy to find the right people - especially if you can find a decent co-ordinator to handle the first pass 'weeeding' out of resumes.

What I means is that for any large project you need different skills. Thus you will probably need people who are good at class design, database design, report specification, UI design and layout and so on. For example, I would class myself as 'expert' at the first two, but definitely 'not good' at reports and only 'average' at UI and Layout.

In any team development getting the mix right is, I would say, more important than the 'level'. In fact with too many prima donnas around things can get pretty tough :)