New Delphi job opportunity

[Berocoder 14]

New job opportunity if you are experienced.

Prefered location is Kokkola Finland but remote work is accepted.

https://attracs.teamtailor.com/jobs/1660578-delphi-developer/45cf12cb-1f96-4e93-94c1-8b96c6a45ade

[David Heffernan 2345]

You will only consider graduates with computing degrees? Seems like that would rule out a lot of good candidates. 

[Berocoder 14]

Internally we didn't agree on that sentence. Anyway a new guy start next week and another one in August.

 

Many complain that there is no jobs for Delphi. At the same time some employers leave Delphi as it is hard to find developers. It don't make sense for me 😊

Edited May 7, 2022 by Berocoder

[Anders Melander 1784]

19 hours ago, Berocoder said:

Many complain that there is no jobs for Delphi. At the same time some employers leave Delphi as it is hard to find developers. It don't make sense for me 😊

Broken eco-system.

On the Danish job-sites I can see the same Delphi jobs being posted again and again and I've had something in the neighborhood of 10 unsolicited Delphi related job offers during the past 12 months. The last one, this past Friday, need 2-3 Delphi developers. "Unfortunately" I'm fully booked, overbooked actually, and there's only one of me 🙂

[Darian Miller 361]

Often times, the currently employed Delphi developers have been on the job for a number of years and are making decent money.  The managers that are attempting to hire replacement Delphi developers seem to offer way too low of starting salaries to get the experienced developers to change positions so it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy that they can't hire Delphi developers.  

 

For example, I just saw a job ad in the U.S. for Delphi developers that is offering $60-80k to start.  I doubt they will even get a single resume.  If they do, it will be from overseas with little or no Delphi knowledge.

 

 

[David Heffernan 2345]

It just seems so weird to me that there is such a thing as a Delphi developer. Are companies really not prepared to teach people? How can it be harder to learn a new language than to learn a new code base? Nothing here computes to me. 

[David Schwartz 426]

On 5/8/2022 at 11:33 AM, David Heffernan said:

It just seems so weird to me that there is such a thing as a Delphi developer. Are companies really not prepared to teach people? How can it be harder to learn a new language than to learn a new code base? Nothing here computes to me. 

I know, it's very odd to me as well.

 

When I graduated from college I got hired by Intel. They tended to hire EEs; my degree was in math / computer science. Everything I worked with there was proprietary. I got caught up in their first layoff 5-1/2 years later. Looking for what was next, people kept telling me, "Well, you've got a CS degree ...  you can learn anything pretty quickly, right?" I ended up getting hired at a Motorola division and they wanted me to learn C and Unix. C++ was just coming to the fore as well. 

 

After the world didn't come to an end on Jan 1, 2000 (Y2K) the market was flooded with about one million excess programmers, most of whom were here on H-1B visas. That changed the entire complexion of hiring practices across the software and IT industry. Jobs that used to get 5-10 job applicants were now getting hundreds. Executive Recruiters who used to have the ear of hiring managers disappeared, and everything was moved to automated systems. Job descriptions became more standardized and HR people didn't really have any clue what any given job entailed. People learned they could "keyword stuff" their resumes to improve their chances of getting a call-back, if not an interview, whether they knew what the jobs were or not.

 

Things have devolved to the point where it hardly matters what your educational background is -- if you don't have 3-5 years immediate experience with whatever platform or stack a project is using, they won't consider you. Nobody wants to pay for on-the-job training any more.

 

I was at the event when Delphi was announced in 1995 and got a free copy of it. I started playing with it and was quite amazed. Unlike VB, you could build Delphi extensions (components) in Delphi itself, you didn't need to use another language. And unlike VB and other things where all "extensions" were DLLs, Delphi's components could be linked into the EXE as normal library code, so there was no run-time penalty to use them. Over the next 5 years, I switched my focus from C++ to Delphi, mainly because Delphi was so much easier to work with, especially for UI-based apps.

 

Since 2005, I've had a bunch of different roles that I got mainly because of my Delphi expertise. Every one of them had fairly complex systems that took many months to learn and were in application domains that were new to me and had very little in common other than they were all built in Delphi. Most of them were, in the words of one colleague, "keeping a comatose patient alive until the new system was built", usually that meant "porting" it over to C#/.NET. I never saw any of those "ports" get completed.

 

The last place I was at, I kept hearing people at all levels of the organization say things like, "Well, you're the Delphi expert, so you understand how all of this stuff works, right?" (IOW, since I knew Windows, I obviously must also know how ALL Windows apps work.) This was an incredibly complex system and it took most of a year to start making sense to me. A guy they hired 8 months after I'd started didn't know much about Delphi but had 10 years of app domain experience, and he was able to come up to speed much faster than I did because of his extensive domain expertise.

 

I discovered that the entire (Delphi) dev team quit in 2011, although very little had changed since 2009. My first day on the job I was told, "Do not touch ANY of the code!" 

 

It has always struck me as odd that hiring managers seem to think there's more relevance in knowing a given programming language / platform versus an application domain. The app domains are usually far more complicated and take a lot longer to learn than a new programming language / platform. I mean ... at some point programming is programming. Every imperative programming language is pretty much the same, and they all tend to have the same structure, so learning one more isn't a big deal. (Actually, they're all easy to read; writing new code takes a little more time.)

 

I'm semi-retired now so I don't have to deal with this crap any more. I can do what I want with my time now.

 

Edited May 9, 2022 by David Schwartz

[Vincent Parrett 750]

I've had zero success recruiting delphi developers in the last few years - devs here in Australia do not want to work with delphi. I have found most devs also only apply for jobs that state the toolset they will be using (or they ask when applying) - advertising a job that doesn't mention that doesn't generally help. I tried doing that once and had people walk out of interviews when I told them we use Delphi - sadly most said they had never heard of it plus the odd "oh is that still around" . Younger devs want to work with what ever is the current flavour of the month (js react, go, rust etc) and I can't really blame them for that.  

 

Unfortunatly delphi suffers from many issues which are a turn off for employers and prospective employees.

Poor quality - this has been an issue for a very long time (since the Inprise era). Each release improves a little, but then bring new issues,  and many issues remain unresolved for years. 
Lack of language evolution - the language has barely changed - where other languages like C# etc have - yes there has been some tinkering around the edges, but apart from generics not much really.
Lack of investment - in the early days Delphi sold like hotcakes - but that income was syphoned off to other "enterprise" products that never went anyway (Inprise era). I don't see any evidence of that ever recovering.
 

Imho the poor quality is what has really turned many people away. TBH I would be embarrassed training a new dev on Delphi, having to explain all the work arounds etc that I use almost without thinking (like restarting the IDE many times each day), it would be just too time consuming and frustrating. Some days the frustration levels have me looking for career change!
 

So is it any wonder that delphi jobs are few and far between. Here in Australia I see one or two a year advertised - and then those usually worded to suggest the job involves migrating their projects to other languages like C#.

 

 

[SwiftExpat 65]

14 hours ago, David Heffernan said:

Are companies really not prepared to teach people?

They are not even planning on having full time trained staff. An MBA will tell you something like, "IT should be 1% of budget".

 

The employer believes (plans) they have 2 options, outsource the project at a fixed price (which is never really fixed) or hire 3-4 low cost developers. 

 

The last developers I worked with in Brazil explained the situation, school is on the first floors of a tall building. Floors 7-8 were for our company, and our competition had floors 11&12. So when they go down for coffee at street level they are recruited, for a small pay increase, so naturally you they jump after 6 months.  I don't blame them, it is better pay.  School is also heavily sponsored by Microsoft and Oracle, so no surprise what they were trained in.

 

The contract negotiators go in a room and promise to provide a complete solution and a fully trained staff at a fixed cost (except travel expenses and ...). And they substitute players whenever they feel like it (see the above, just a different angle).

 

So no it does not compute. If you are the full time company employee, you will be looking for that career change. The circle just continues.

 

 

[Bill Meyer 337]

4 hours ago, SwiftExpat said:

They are not even planning on having full time trained staff. An MBA will tell you something like, "IT should be 1% of budget".

In a software company? That only reinforces my opinion of MBA programs.

[Fr0sT.Brutal 900]

On 5/9/2022 at 8:06 AM, Vincent Parrett said:

I've had zero success recruiting delphi developers in the last few years - devs here in Australia do not want to work with delphi

Uhm, if only you'd been in Austria 😄 Australia scares me too much with all these people walking with their legs up, giant spiders eating cows and rude kangaroos that could beat you when they're drunk and in the mood for fight 😄

Edited May 11, 2022 by Fr0sT.Brutal

[Vincent Parrett 750]

9 hours ago, Fr0sT.Brutal said:

giant spiders eating cows

🤣 it is true there are lots of animals that could kill/injure you ,

 

giant spiders eating cows - not so much
redback spiders  - quite common, but once you know about them not much of an issue - just don't put your hands in places where you can't see without gloves on.

kangaroos - very common, see them all the time while out walking - just give them a wide berth and they will just stare at you or hop away - the most common dangerous encounters are when they jump out in front of your car at the last second.. had several of those, as has my wife, daughter, son and brother (in my car!). Insurance is expensive here.
Snakes (a few of the most venomous in the world) - common in the bush and in some parts of the country they are everywhere - I've not had any close encounters, but I'm always wary when bush walking.
Salt water crocidiles - they live up north - avoid rivers and the sea past certain lattitudes (I live down south so not an issue).

Fresh water crocidiles - mostly in the north/north west - they rarely attack people but can do some serious damage, so best avoided. 
Irukandji jellyfish - mostly in the tropics - don't swim in the sea

 

There are others but in all of the above fatal encountes with them are easily surpassed by vehicle accidents, heart disease, diabetes etc.  

 

[Ian Branch 127]

Don't forget the Drop Bears...  Can be nasty...

https://australian.museum/learn/animals/mammals/drop-bear/

Edited May 12, 2022 by Ian Branch

[Vincent Parrett 750]

Ah the drop bears, those are reserved for hot Swedish tourists - 

 

Edited May 12, 2022 by Vincent Parrett

[tgbs 14]

There are vacancies for a Delphi programmer in my country, but there are low salaries and old versions of Delphi. Mostly version 7, almost no companies using 10.x or 11

[quini 0]

I have a lot experience programming in Delphi, from the 3rd version to the actual 11.2 Alexandria. Some of my projects, including IoT projects, can be found in https://github.com/quini27

 

I am looking for a remote position. Those interested can email me at 

quini.coppe@gmail.com

 

Thanks