Are there any serious full-time ColdFusion jobs available? Someone asked this on a forum a few days ago. I thought my answer might be useful to folks here. https://southofshasta.com/blog/are-there-any-serious-full-time-coldfusion-jobs-available/

I was just chatting with a friend about this. They just hired a "CF Dev" and an intern. Neither of those people had a lick of CF experience. They had programming knowledge and experience. So then my friend just has them apply that knowledge inside of the syntax domain space of CF. Boom. CF Dev. And without the baggage that might come with being a long-time CF dev. And by the way, I use 6 tags, not 5. So there 😛

When we last had an opening for a CF dev, we got a ton of applications but the quality was terrible -- exactly the sort of thing you talk about in your blog @nolanerck! We even had a couple of fairly well-known CFers apply -- and they failed the interview because they had no knowledge of "modern" software development... 😞 And you didn't even touch on process -- TDD, automated testing, CI/CD... sometimes they don't even have experience working with a bug tracker or version control (seriously? in 2023?). Overall, it was a very depressing experience.

Personally I feel like this article presents a bit of a false dichotomy. Certainly there are a lot of CF devs out there who think they are better than they really are, (I have hired and fired many of them over the last 23 years). However, that isn’t unique to CF, I have also hired and fired many “Sr PHP developers” who just knew enough PHP to slap together a simple wordpress plugin but couldn’t actually architect a full software solution on their own. To make the assertion that someone is not a sr level developer just because they don’t have a lot of experience specifically with OOP, isn’t really a fair measurement of their abilities in my opinion. I have also hired and fired many developers who had previous experience working on OOP CF projects using coldbox and all the modern practices, but they couldn’t produce anything without a lot of hand holding and created bad oop code. I personally have had a mix of experience with both OOP CF and more procedural CF apps. I don’t have any problems using either paradigm. I personally believe that both paradigms have their use cases. I also don’t think that every legacy app needs to be modernized. The worst code I have seen has been large legacy apps where several different developers have gone in and started to “modernize” the code but never finished, and each developer had a different idea of what “modernization” meant. When I hire a sr CF developer I look for someone who is comfortable architecting solutions from scratch, and who is comfortable jumping into any existing CF codebase and working within the current architecture to make changes. If there is an obvious need for modernization then we will recommend a comprehensive modernization plan to our client and only engage in that if the client has the resources to invest in doing a complete job of it.

☝🏻 Yes, definitely this last point about "know[ing] at least a couple server side languages"...

Yes, the best devs are always learning

Aye... I'm 61 and still try to learn a new language every year or two... and this year I've had to get stuck in to our frontend so I've had to learn modern JS properly and React.js/Redux/Immutable/lodash/Jest/OMGSOMANYTHINGS! 🙂

The last two times we've hired for CF developers, our experience has been pretty similar. The people who had been in the business for 10-20+ years (which I have) demanded the highest salaries and (as a group, but with exceptions) performed the worst when the topic was modern development practices.

hired and fired many developers [who couldn't do the job]

@Scott Bennett I'm curious what your interview process looks like? In nearly 30 years as a hiring manager, I've never had to fire anyone I hired for an inability to do the job (other reasons, occasionally, but never actual technical ability).

There’s a couple aspects to that, I have been a hiring manager at larger sized companies for the last 23 years. In those situations, I have only had to fire 3 CF developers that did not perform to the abilities they advertised in their hiring process and who weren’t able to improve through their performance improvement plans. I didn’t personally hire any of those developers, they were all there when I started at their respective companies. I also own a consulting firm (paladem.com) where I have several clients and I currently have a team of about 20 people who work for me either part-time or full time. On my side business I had more of a tendency over the years to give people a trial run with a small contract to see how they do. That is where the many comes in. More recently as Paladem has grown, I have aquired a lot more stability and have had a pretty consistent team for the last few years.

Lots of jobs are US-locked, but there's CF-devs out there (I'm shamelessly advertising myself). Apparently companies looking for CF developers themselves stick to older approaches, including hiring process. Looking only 'on-site' worker in 2023, after Covid opened remote work for many, is like not using Git for code 🙂 Regarding notion that 'CF devs not learning new stuff' - speaking about myself - I really disregard modern front-end Javascript frameworks, because I understand that I cannot be good both on front-end and backend, focusing on back-end instead somehow can be seen as 'backwards' by some.

I will also freely admit that I was much more trusting earlier in my management career than I am now. My hiring process has definitely been refined over time in terms of the questions I ask and looking beyond the candidates resume to try and assess them as a person.

Sean nailed it with "The "uncurious" dev who never learns anything new." There are so many old school devs who are CF wizards but are still using SVN, jQuery, Selenium, etc. There is nothing wrong with those things. But that's all they know. They have never attended a user group meeting, conference or online Meetup. After 5pm they are done working / learning. The have no Github repo... We had two interns this summer who had 0 CF knowledge, took the Adobe certification course, and were rocking passable CF code in a few weeks. They were like sponges learning new things. 🙂