In the movie Rustlers’ Rhapsody, Tom Berenger’s character tells the locals in the town he’s come to, that all saloon towns are the same: each town, he tells them, has a town-drunk, each town has a town-prostitute, and each saloon town has a black-hat cowboy (and the black-hat cowboy can’t win in a gunfight because he’s a bad guy). How does the nomadic white-hat cowboy know all this? Because he goes from town-to-town and he’s seen the same scenario play out over and over again.
The State of Flex Developers
As a Nomadic Software developer who has worked on the Flash Platform for the past ten years, let me tell you something: most software companies are pretty-much the same, from town to town. At each company, you’ll see some of the following types of Flex Developers:
- There’s one Flex developer who does 80% of the work, and then spends the rest of his time getting caught up on the latest technology (which requires the rest of his conscious time).
- There are a few developers who were hot when AS1 was the rage and they’re almost ready to move to AS2. But in the meantime..
- There are the Flex developers who somehow got moved from Java Development to working on the client-side (and they didn’t consider this change to be promotion).
- There are the Flex developers eager to learn something new, but they have no idea how to go about it.
In short, I see people who are burnt-out, not-interested, not-interested and unhappy, or interested and frustrated.
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