Yesterday I interviewed one guy – who’d been a programmer for a number of years (10+) – using Visual Foxpro (whatever that is) – presumably it’s a dead language, as he wants to move across into PHP. He has very basic PHP experience (yet claims 2 years on his CV), figured out how to do FizzBuzz and Recursion without too much help – but didn’t know anything about object orientation, separation of concerns (specifically MVC), security (obvious SQL injection) or unit testing and failed to make any comment on what is almost the worst code I could find to present to him. This isn’t necessarily a problem – I would normally be happy to train someone – however, not when I’m paying him £25/hour and I’d be lucky if he was productive within a week. (Hint: students are better than this when they’ve only been in University for two years).

Today, I therefore continued hunting, with mixed success. I had three more CVs – all asking for more money, and one looked quite good – but had a requirement he worked remotely after the first few days (well he does live in Telford). Another, who is local, I’m interviewing tomorrow. Wanting to do some homework on him, I had a look at a couple of websites mentioned in his doctored CV  - the first is clearly .Net from the error message it throws when you pass a > into it’s search box – so either they replaced his PHP site quickly or his CV is misleading. The second has a PHP error on it – and is only (effectively) a themed wordpress site which looks like it’s slowly rotting. From these I found out his address (hint: whois $flamingodomain) and an invalid email address/domain (which archive.org seems to not do much with). Typing in his name into Google / LinkedIn, Facebook etc produces no obvious matches. So I know hardly anything about him, and for all intent he may as well not exist. Great sales job there.

From talking to the recruiters it seems it’s difficult to find decent PHP programmers – and anyone who may be decent will almost certainly not be programming PHP as their primary language (i.e. they’ll be doing web development in Java/.Net, and know PHP quite well). This seems a shame, but really only confirms what I already knew from interacting with others in the community. I’ve known for ages that I’ve effectively taken a large pay cut by running my own company, and doing PHP. It sucks that this continues to be the case. Clearly I’m a martyr or something.

So, if you happen to be a contractor looking for work, please make an effort. I’m not overly impressed so far, and may just end up stalling customers for another week/month instead.

(Oddly I wrote this post, posted it, and it vanished. What are you up to wordpress? Why do you want me to retype things in twice?)