where are all the back-end coders?
Julien has unleashed a storm of comments about montreal’s web community. Evan, Patrick, Sylvain, and Robin have weighed in, as have I. Julien followed-up.
But in all that, I think Boris (comment on Julien’s site) hit on something important. In my crazy-project-starting-life, I have learned you need 3 things for a web project to work:
a) an idea
b) a designer
c) a back-end coder
a) and b) are well covered in Montreal. c) is the one where we seem to have problems - at least within the community of people I know. You can’t do anything without a good back-end developer/coder willing to hack some stuff together. We could use more of you, if you’re out there, let me know!
So coders: Where are you? Anyone want to do a couple of projects? I have some.
I was running low on gas for the last six months or so, but I am getting my game back. I’d love to get involved with Drupal stuff, for instance :)
Comment by Robin — January 29, 2007 @ 1:45 pm
Yeah, that one comes up at least once a week for me; where the hell are the reliable (and not already overworked) back-end freelancers??
Comment by Patrick — January 29, 2007 @ 6:32 pm
Here in this part of the world, the situation is slightly different. Backend coders (php mysql or asp c#) programmers can be hired, even though a bit hard to find, But finding good creative web designers are still harder.
Comment by Web developers — January 29, 2007 @ 7:06 pm
hey there web dev… do you guys work for equity, if there’s no money up front? there would be a trust thing there, that would have to be worked out… but maybe we set something up where “we” (whoever that is) can “broker” your back-end work on projects with people here in Montreal doing design stuff, and you’d get a set bit of equity in the project (if there were any revenues) and “we” would make sure you get it.
(i say “we” cause I am not sure I’d like to do all that brokering, but it’s a very cool idea).
Comment by hugh — January 29, 2007 @ 7:14 pm
As a web developper proxy (in my role of project manager or project “sponsor”) I can tell you that we are simply seeing the “invisible hand of the market” doing what it does best… demand breeds scarcity!
Developers with good technical skills are hard to find. Developers with good organization skills are hard to find. Developers with good social skills are hard to find… compounding those % points make for a slim piece of pie in a chart!
I like the idea of brokering, it’s a bit what I have been trying to do for several years, with varying degrees of success (easier at smaller scale)… Maybe the “talent agency” is the good model, I would not go for a large system where “quantity” is prime over “quality”…
As far as working for equity, it’s a tough call for most senior developers, the ones that were there for bubble 1.0 are seriously burnt by bad experience for the dotcom days. But it might be possible, if we can find a way to hedge the risks.
Comment by Sylvain Carle — January 29, 2007 @ 8:32 pm
What sort of projects, and what kind of backend experience are you looking for? I like the brokering idea…
Comment by Nick — January 29, 2007 @ 9:45 pm
well, webdev above is from india, so that’s a different story, but
re: sylvain, what I’ve always wanted was to get a group of developers (idea, code, design) together with some seed money and just start prototyping small projects, and then having another group take them the next phase, so you have:
phase 1: idea, design, developer
phase 2: refine
phase 3: launch
phase 4: market and promote
phase 5: revenues or sale
1-4 are “easy” …sorry, that #2 is a kicker too… and 5 is the unceratain one. idea would be to get a collective together who can bang together a bunch of projects and get them off the ground. I don’t know if this is a good way to develop on any kind of larger scale… but the idea is to have a funded idea-lab here, not really an angel fund, but something similar, where resources can be put to interesting use.
maybe this is a pipedream. I’ve been lucky with having a good coding/development partner with collectik and some other projects, but that’s the bottleneck here in montreal: enough ideas, and designers to do things - but not enough coders around.
of course, people did get burned in 1.0, so its understandable that they are leary, but that’s abig problem for getting stuff off the ground: we either need interested coders, or interested funders, and my bet is that coders are more fun to hang out with than funders.
Comment by hugh — January 29, 2007 @ 10:01 pm
Might be worth nothing that the projects you’ve mentioned to me (and some of my own ideas) are mostly somewhat small scale in terms of development effort so it’s not a question of exchanging a year or two of salary against equity, more like a few weeks spread out.
Comment by Patrick — January 29, 2007 @ 10:50 pm
patrick: yes yes yes! these are all small database/backend projects … for a rough prototype, prob 1 week of work.
getting a smooth-working finished product, however, is a different story. but the idea is to crank out a bunch of these ideas.
Comment by hugh — January 30, 2007 @ 8:34 am
Wow, I’m a backend coder from Montreal, and I’ve been wondering where all the savvy dev people are in this city, so fancy that. I’m booked into the first few weeks of February but have been looking for some ideas to have fun with, so maybe we should talk. If nothing else I’d like to get more involved with the local community.
Comment by Chris — January 31, 2007 @ 6:03 pm
cool! i’ll be announcing a geek night soon, I think… I’ll try to ping everyone who commented here, on patrick’s blog, julien’s & anyone else who might have made a relevant comment somewhere.
Comment by hugh — January 31, 2007 @ 6:42 pm
As the freelancer consultant sitting on the business side of the Web project fence, wouldn’t there be a need for product managers in a web project, i.e. someone to define product requirements based on market needs?
Comment by Sebastien Provencher — February 12, 2007 @ 9:23 am