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I didn't get a chance to go to MAX this year, unfortunately. But since my husband did make it, and he is both a Community Expert and a User Group Manager, you can probably imagine that I got an earful when he got home. One thing that stood out was that Adobe is still committed to growing its user community.
And I started to think about what it would be like for us as developers if the community does grow significantly. First, I have to state that I'm not exactly sure what Adobe means when they say "the community," so let me hazard a guess that they mean serious users who are inspired to reach out and discuss Adobe products online or in person at least occasionally. For the purposes of this article, I'm going to focus on the RIA community, i.e. Flash Platform, and to some extent AJAX.
It seems to me that if you're going to become and stay a serious user of Adobe's RIA products, that means that you're either employed to be using them or you have a goal to be employed to be using them. I say this because it's not trivial to pick up these skills, and I find it hard to believe that someone would be willing and able to put effort into becoming skilled without the prospect that this would lead to gainful employment. There are Flash and AJAX hobbyists, but I'm not sure they fall into the definition of "the community."
So it makes sense to me that for the community to grow, there need to be jobs out there for newly skilled RIA developers to take up. In other words, entry level jobs. A cursory search of Dice and Careerbuilder shows that there's no shortage of Flash and Flex jobs, but most of these are looking for at least some experience, and a significant percentage are looking for senior level developers.
The economy is hurting generally, so I suspect that even the most junior-level positions are going to have plenty of applicants that have experience. I think that this may have a couple of effects that might hurt Adobe's initiative to attract new users to the community.
First, we may lose several years' worth of entry-level developers will be forced to go elsewhere to find a job that will enable them to make the payments on the thousands of dollars of student loans they find themselves with. They may come back when the jobs come back, but they may find themselves quite happy wherever they landed (and with a gap in their resumes where they haven't done any RIA work).
Second, all of these more experienced developers going for more junior positions are likely to push salaries for experienced developers down. Once salaries in the field go down, it might be difficult to get them back up.
These two phenomena combined mean that when people are choosing what skills to invest their limited time in, they may choose something else because
- They've heard from recent graduates that it's hard/impossible to get a job.
- The salary they could have aspired to is dropping anyway.
This leads to the conclusion that Adobe's focus should be in encouraging the creation of jobs that use their products. Adobe has been criticized in the past because the focus of MAX has been more on corporations and managers rather than the developers in the trenches. But we need to wake up and realize that Adobe needs to do business development just like any community looking to encourage employers to come in and provide jobs, and we should support them in this effort. Because if they don't, it won't matter what cool stuff we can do with their tools...there won't be enough people paying us to do it that we can make a living.
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Adobe needs to be balance of what they are doing. Otherwise, they might end up losing than winning huge amount. Though, it isn't bad to improve your community. You must only know how to work on it.
Michael Frost
When I graduated, it so happened that the economy went into a recession (in 1994). It was very frustrating for a graduate who can't get his foot in the door. So thankfully, I happened to get hired into a startup company using Authorware. (I think you know about that Amy. :) ) The advice that we give to those we interview is to develop their own apps and portfolio to show companies what they do. Then they have a better idea at what level they are. Though I like tutorial sites, it does not match the kind of experience when we get in developping our own apps.
Another aspect is where students, and professionals alike jump from the basics of AS3 to the realm of advanced RIA development. There is not that much material as far as I know that helps us to make that jump. Perhaps it is better that these types of community events with a hands on bring your own laptop sessions is ideal.
I also have to give kudos to Adobe also has been promoting Flash Builder for free for unemployed people during these times. So I have to give kudos for Adobe for doing that. (I am not so sure about the student community though, but they do offer education discounts.)
Also networking with Adobe users was a great boon to motivate me to keep on using Adobe products. It would be great if Adobe could send reps into universities and colleges to learn about the great potential of the kind of amazing work they can do with their products.
Okay I have to get back to work. Cheers!
In order to drive the Adobe RIA community forward, there needs to be a more strategic and long-term push for the enterprise via Adobe community and the corporation itself. At the moment, RIA in Flash/Silverlight makes up around 5% of the world developer base (give or take), where as AJAX / HTML carries the rest, so in a sense the plug-in debates as educational as they are, tend to actually put downward pressure on the concept around RIA for plug-in as its taken less seriously than say AJAX, that and AJAX invokes a more democratic design approach to in-house problems.
The other problem with Adobe RIA in general is it doesn't socket into existing IT environments easily, it requires a strategic trusted advisor to help navigate through the various hurdles placed before them and a lot of ignorance towards Microsoft technology really doesn't bode well for the long term viability of the Adobe RIA community. As whilst many Adobe flex/flash developers may dislike the M$ corporation, the reality is that there is millions of dollars of infrastructure work tied up in Enterprise that has taken bets on the said technology, so a passive approach to these situations from Adobe community and corporation can stimulate more awareness and acquisition of Adobe based technology.
The worst place for Adobe Community is to be tied ONLY into the consumer facing space, as this is less infrastructure and more strategic, resulting in shorter project scopes and timelines *thus their own supply/demand ripple effects* and less maturity.
There also needs to be a more united front, everyone really has to break away from the "Oh I just do Adobe stuff only" mindset, and immerse themselves in all aspects of RIA as the days of picking a tribe and sticking it out are long behind us, and to not embrace a hybird approach to Flash/AJAX for example is a classic mistake, one that competing solutions (desktop etc) will capitalize on eventually ( a lot of research points to this as well).
It’s a time for humility the reality is maybe folks should consider themselves RIA Architects and less "Flash/Flex Developers/Designers".
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Scott Barnes
UX Specialist.
Former Product Manager Silverlight.
While there's a role for the so called RIA Architects, I think technologies such a Flex and Silverlight are deep enough for someone to specialize in just one technologies and have a really great career. Those who specialize are always going to have a lot more advanced knowledge of the subject to provide clients or employees than the generalist. That said it's still obviously a good idea to understand the strengths and weaknesses of different technologies.
As for the original post, I don't know if it's just the Toronto area, where I'm most aware of the job market, but despite the recession there seems to be a very strong demand for Flex and Flash developers. It seems the demand of Flash/Flex developers seems to constantly outstrip the supply.
As for entry roles, to me there seems to be some, although a lot less in the Flex side of things, where they want experience to deal with more complex applications. Also employers often will take someone new to Flex or Flash if they have experience programming something else (lots of Java programmers in the Flex community). However, there seems to be a lot of Flash entry level developer roles from building mini-sites to widgets to just banner ads. It might be a low place to start, but everyone has to start somewhere. Once again, from the Toronto area going to the Flash and Flex user groups and talking to college professors who teach Flash, it seems that the majority of students seem to find jobs quickly enough. However, my local view might not reflect what's happening in the rest of Canada and the US.