As per this eWeek Europe story, the latest UK jobs market numbers are better news for IT professionals than for employers. Apparently it’s getting harder to find developers with specific skills, and among them is ColdFusion. While a bit of a back-handed compliment, it’s good to know that ColdFusion developers in the UK are in demand (and can thus probably charge a premium for their expertise).
Demand For ColdFusion Developers In UK
11 responses to “Demand For ColdFusion Developers In UK”
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This is also one of the key reasons why companies are determined to move away from ColdFusion. If they already now have to pay premium it’s not going to get any better in couple of years.
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Hi Ben,
Not only in UK, here in India also its a hard time for recruiters to find CF developers…CF looks hot now -
This is also a problem in Denmark. For years we haven’t been able to get any coldfusion developers and have instead had to hire php developers and retrain them. It’s starting to become a serious issue and in the end it could definitely mean we’d move away from Coldfusion.
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Ben, how you can spin this as a benefit is beyond me. What has happened is that Allaire/Macromedia/Adobe have failed to break the server technology market in the UK (and Europe) due to their inability to compete with ASP/PHP/JSP. I would say you failed by the year 2005. However all you lot see is the US market and how wonderful that is. Seriously pull your head out of the sand and have a serious look around you. Your amazingly poor pricing policy is a joke (at one point it was cheaper to pay for a flight to New York and buy a licence).
What’s left in the market is a number of businesses that are successful, have archaic out of date software solutions based on CF, but hey, it makes money, so we have to support it. Being a UK CF contractor since 2000, the reason there is a shortage is that some clients expect to pay pitiful rates which nobody is prepared to work for.
Adobe learnt their lesson with Flex. THIS is what should have happened to standard CF. Sell the tool. Not the deployment. Flex is absolutely huge and you damn well know it.
You look at any hosting environment these days (and Cloud is a big thing) and you can’t find a single experienced CF hosting company that is offering a cloud solution priced comparable to a LAMP stack. I can’t even find CF on Amazon EC2.
Adobe FAIL when it comes to CF. Seriously fail. It’s embarrassing to hear you make it sound like there is anything remotely positive about CF in Europe. -
Adam, while the blog title was more tongue-in-cheek overly upbeat, I don’t think I spun this at all, and did call it ‘a bit of a back-handed compliment’. For the record, the shortage of ColdFusion developers may be a short term opportunity for some, but it is a not a good thing. Agreed.
And while I agree with some of your ColdFusion pricing comments, and think that we’re still not pricing ColdFusion appropriately, I have to disagree with your underlying assertion that if we had decided to give away the server years ago that things would look radically different. That opinion chooses to ignore lots of other factors, like the cost of maintaining a team, the lack of adequate alternate monetization options, and the fact that CF Enterprise being *under* priced has hurt higher end sales, and more. Bottom line, if we had dropped the price to CF to $0 back by 2005 as you are suggesting we should have done, there would be no CF9, no CF10 in development, and no CFB2 announced today.
— Ben -
Thank you for your honesty 🙂
I was looking more at CF standard as the give-away solution. In all honesty I would be looking to ‘split’ the functionality into modules, have CF ‘core’ become cheap/free (or give a key away with CFBuilder), then allow licensing on a per module basis. If you needed PDF generation, you could add it to your server by buying that module.
The way Adobe finally went with development/staging licences was good. Huge respect there.
Get clever with the licensing model, and you could provide a hosting company with free ‘core’ hosting and then allow the hosting company to up-sell CF modules for you per site/customer.
CF is awesome but it feels waaay too late and people have moved away from it (or are trying to move away). It’s a career dead-end these days. -
Hi Adam,
I never think so that about CF "It’s a career dead-end these days. " Its becoming very hot than ever for the last couple of years. Lots of fortune listed companies are having customers who want there business in latest CF versions and new projects too…But the only thing I would like to mention is that there are no CF books in market even CF8 too. We need latest books in market with indian edition prices. This will eventually help CF to grow more in popularity… -
I just wrote an article on RIARockStars about the topic.
http://riarockstars.com/2011/03/10/a-managers-take-on-the-state-of-cf-the-scarcity-talent/ -
I have to agree with Adam. Had worked with cf for around 10 years and have to abundant it last year. Do a search in IT job site and you have all the answer you need. It is really a shame.
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As a former CF developer (v3 to v8) and now a .NET (Umbraco) developer. I must agree with the other comments.
It is almost impossible to find CF jobs in Denmark. A couple of years ago I almost moved from a company that had stoped using CF to another company (probably the only CF company in Denmark). But could not agreee on the contract.
Now I have converted to .NET, but miss all the nice features and simplicity in CF. And keeps following Raymond Camden and Ben Nadel.
4 years ago I asked you and others at Adobe to try to do more advertising for CF in Denmark. But nothing has happend. The problem was/is that no one knows about CF, If you ask Adobe DK, their main interests is the CS suit.
Right now I believe that CF never will have a future in Denmark – the CF game is over in Denmark. Sad but true 🙁
The best of luck to CF in the US -
With offshoring these day, you can find a developer anywhere. I don’t buy that Danish or UK companies can’t find CF developers. Post your listing somwhere and developers will find you.
As far as pricing goes, I too think CF should be free. It’s killing CF. Adobe will make more off the support and certifications of a 50% market share product than they will off the licenses of a <5% market share product. With all the competition, and Railo, Adobe is crazy to think they’re going to keep it up. Sure, it’s an awesome product, sure it’s got stuff you would have to pay for with any other server, but NOBODY CARES. There’s so much free addons out there that you can make PHP do everything CF does. And PHP keeps eating markey share ever day.
At the very least, Adobe should give away all the old versions, and reduce the price on the new versions. And get rid of the per CPU pricing, that’s just ridiculous, plus the two IPs for developer edition, what is that a joke. How can a start-up developer have a QA environment even for ONE client with that kind of restriction? No start-up will spend the kind of money they’re asking when they can retrain in PHP for cheaper.
Also, Federal Government is a huge IT client and they barely use CF even though it’s the easiest to use and maintain for a work force like the Feds. It’s not even approved for use in many agenices. Why? For starters, Adobe does not know how to market server side products, they’re a workstation company, and always have been. They need to have a "COTS Tool" version of CF that ships as a WAR file only to be deployed on any J2EE, so Fed Gov IT Security folks don’t freak about supporting a whole new "SERVER".
I could go on but…it’s falling on deaf ears I’m sure.
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