FINDING DEVELOPERS FOR E-COMMERCE PROJECTS

23 May 2000

by Paul Harmon

Everyone who's involved in software development knows the labor market is very tight. It's hard to find good people for almost any important task. In the past few months, Cutter Consortium conducted a survey to determine the demand for developers of distributed, component-based systems.

We began, simply enough, by asking each company if they have enough developers who are capable of developing distributed enterprise systems. Thirty percent of the companies said they do; 70% said they don't. That suggests our survey is on target, because this is within the range of more general surveys aimed at gathering data on the software developer shortage.

Next, we asked respondents how they acquire new distributed systems developers when they need them for a project. Respondents could choose more than one option. The answer showed that 67% attempted to hire new people, 75% sought to train their existing employees in distributed computing skills, while 50% used an outside organization to provide people with the needed skills. Overall, it's obvious that most companies obtain roughly an equal number of their new people by hiring and by training, and that they supplement this with outside consultants.

To follow up on the training aspect of the acquisition problem, we asked how many organizations were currently giving training courses in distributed concepts and techniques. About 40% of the responding organizations are offering some kind of training in distributed development, while about 60% are not.

Wondering about the quality of the training, we asked companies who had been responsible for developing the organization's major distributed systems to date. Almost half of the major systems to date have been developed by internal teams. A little over 20% have been developed by outsiders, and 16% have been developed by teams made up of equal numbers of internal and external developers. This suggests that companies have done an adequate job of training (and hiring) distributed enterprise developers, and that the companies depend on them entirely for the creation of almost half of their distributed systems.

-- Paul Harmon, Senior Consultant, Cutter Consortium Distributed Computing Architecture/e-Business Advisory Service