I had a short discussion with a talented and creative developer who has sometimes leant a hand here at DesignAxiom. Someone we trust and who has delivered for us on a number of occasions. In fact, when the subject of bringing on extra talent or hiring comes up, the staff ask about her directly.

She is one of two people that we try to bring on when we have too much work in the office.

And funny enough, the subject of our discussion was our general disappointment with contractors. She knows that we’ve had many disappointing experiences hiring Flash contractors–many times hiring people who otherwise have great reputations or even an impressive body of work.

My view, and what I told her, is that Flash developers are, by-and-large, mainly multi-media developers with a talent for coding. There are very few who are really good at software engineering, maybe less than 5% of the entire Flash developer population. And when you’re tackling serious interactive applications, you need developers who are at least good in both, and great in one.

The problem is that the number of students who come out of computer science programs with knowledge or ActionScript or Flash is infinitesimal. But the programs that exist in the community colleges that teach multimedia development skills don’t have enough time or the mandate to really teach computer science and software engineering. So the most successful Flash developers tend to be self-taught programmers and software engineers.

Our solution to this problem is to basically count on getting great multimedia developers out of programs like Humber’s Multimedia Design program and then put them through an apprenticeship, starting with their internship, and if we end up hiring them, that goes on for a couple of years.

Why? Because it takes a long time to learn how to be a good programmer. It’s as much of a trade skill as a science. And the only way to get really good at it, is to do a lot of it and work around other people who are great at it. Doesn’t matter if you have a computer science degree or not.

Of course those initial months at DesignAxiom can be a little tough.

“How’s the new guy working out?”

“Mmmm, I don’t know, he had a look of shock on his face all day.”

“Yeah? Well so did you when you started.”

Laughter.