PHP Developer Shortages Abound

<%image(20060722-ripedev.jpg|120|97|)%>I’m not sure if any other PHP developers are getting this, but it’s got to the stage where I’m getting 3 or 4 calls a day from agencies asking if I’m available for urgent PHP dev and project management work. I think it must be the time of year – projects overdue, everyone on holiday, people moving jobs, etc. Today was the first Saturday in a while where I’ve had calls, and there were three (all I suspect for the same role): I think I’m pretty much booked up to the end of the year now, too bad ‘cos the role sounded tasty.

Trouble is there’s too many bedroom coders out there – teenage youths who learned PHP4 while sitting in their bedrooms, doing their own homepage and thinking that they’ve got sound commercial experience because they did a five-page website for their Dad’s best mate. It’s just the same as perl was in 1997 when kids were leaving before their A-levels for a dotcom which went tits-up in 5 months, and stuffing their University careers: those chaps are now working in MacDonalds, in a salary ceiling, or have retrained.

So, comedy moments in CV triage:

• We came across one candidate a fortnight ago who’d actually invented his own language (written in PHP!), but didn’t know how to write advanced stuff; oh, and he’d been at University from 2003 to 1996.
• The bloke who wrote his CV in colour and put a background on it and had company logos and everything – how cute!
• More annoying than comedy, but the lad who’d signed up with us and was going to start, then phoned to tell us he wasn’t starting a few days before he was due to begin – we reckon he’d only done it to get a better salary out of his current employer.

Nothing, however, beats the lad whom I had joining me once at a former employer: CV checked out, passed the tech test, references were academia but that’s not unusual. He started, and in the first day it became apparent that he couldn’t code at all – after a bit of digging it dawned that he’d taken his technical test on the phone and he’d been Googling (or whatever search engine was around then) for answers – and the test code he’d sent us had been done by his mate. Don’t try this at home kids.

(Apropos of which, if you’re a PHP developer who wants work in Leeds, my current contract are looking for a full-time junior developer to start asap – drop me a line, preferably with a chunk of PHP5 code you’ve written and a small database schema you’ve done so I can gauge what stage you’re at).