"Let people do interesting work, and they stick around. Make them mindlessly monitor that Windows machine, and they'll bolt."
What a concept. Who would have thought that building good systems in competent languages was better than languishing in buggy half-capable proprietary languages running on black box Enterprisey software back-ends?
Before I read the article, I was assuming it was talking about how developers who are producers in the open source ecosystem deserve a premium. But, the article is about how tools/technologies that are open sourced are hot skills. I think that is a shill piece for a recruiting firm to attract potential candidates. Most of the developers I know like open source because they're free and in many instances better than what you can pay for. The article mentions AIR being one of those hot open source technologies. AIR was open sourced just recently (if you do the paternity test, Adobe gave birth to it as a proprietary and expensive technology)
I love the part about "LAMP is everywhere now--these types of technologies no one heard of 18 months ago are all the sudden becoming a hot commodity."
I have an old newspaper clipping from 2000 with a full-page photo of Linus on the front page of the business section from Canada's Globe & Mail (the country's largest newspaper).
Perhaps that will inspire the clueless recruiters to only look for < 18 months of LAMP experience?
Indeed. I chortled when I saw that line, and mumbled to myself "I used LAMP in 2000..."
I've only slowly realized how trivial it is to stay several years ahead of the "enterprise". Stuff people at Hacker News consider old hat by now (Rails, say, or Django) will be big news in the enterprise a couple years from now. Then a few years after that will come excitement about Erlang, and Scala, and Seaside...
What a concept. Who would have thought that building good systems in competent languages was better than languishing in buggy half-capable proprietary languages running on black box Enterprisey software back-ends?