At Riff Raff, we're looking to hire an experienced PHP web developer to join our Newcastle web design team, and we've noticed a pattern emerging amongst this latest generation of developers in our region that we find quite concerning; Very few of them seem to have the capability to build anything from scratch.
This is slightly worrying for us, as we tend to design very complex, bespoke web applications on a daily basis, and are looking for developers who can apply their technical vision to a blank canvas, just as readily as they could an existing application.
The vast majority of experienced web developers we've come across so far have a long list of credits to their names - site after site of Wordpress and Drupal mash-ups, cobbling together patchwork sites using off-the-shelf packages.
They are the web equivalent of handymen, assembling rudimentary websites quickly and cheaply using whatever materials they can lay their hands on. But most of these developers wouldn't know where to start if I asked them to write something from scratch - something that would almost certainly be expected of them at Riff Raff.
True, we have been known to create the odd Wordpress site from time to time, when it makes good sense to do so, but we consider it something of a Hello World exercise for our front-end developers to familiarise them with a PHP environment before letting them loose on anything more intimidating.
We certainly wouldn't expect it to be the pinnacle of a PHP developer's career, and find it disturbing how few developers we speak to know anything about subjects that we consider critical to the developer's craft, such as knowledge of design patterns, security and performance.
We can't blame the universities for this erosion of skill either, as these are not graduates; These are agency-experienced developers, who have never properly learned their craft, for one reason or another - presumably under pressure to deliver enormous amounts of work for shrinking budgets, squeezing out any hope of producing something even vaguely inventive.
It's an alarming trend, and something that threatens to damage our sector as a whole if it isn't addressed quickly. There will always be a place for handymen, and I genuinely don't mean to devalue their important role in our digital ecosystem, but I am forced to ask where will the next generation of highly skilled architects and engineers come from?
Our answer to this is to continue searching for those few talented developers out there who are frustrated with their daily diet of mash and itching to get their teeth into something more hand-built, more challenging and ultimately more satisfying.
In the meantime, we'll be paying a lot more attention to new university graduates who want to learn how to design and engineer software for the web, without relying on crutches.
If you fit into either of these categories, we'd like to hear from you as soon as possible.
Very decent write-up.
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