The time has come and I feel that I need to move on to my next job. For a while I have been trying to locate my next Delphi job with little success. I have been trying to get something close to home because my family and I live in the Seattle area – perhaps that is the problem. All I can find locally are C# or C/C++ jobs. Nothing too exciting.
I have been looking everywhere I know where to look: Craigslist, Monster, Dice, NW classifieds, etc…. But nothing has turned up yet. I have even considered to expand my search to other states and even other countries.
Do you experience the same issues when looking for a new Delphi position?
Where do you look? How far would you consider moving for the right job?
What is your experience when searching for a Delphi job?
Would you care to share your experiences and thoughts with us?
Or at least participate on the poll on the top right of the page.
I added this after original post -> And just to make sure I make myself clear: I am looking for my next Delphi job! I will relocate anywhere if the position is right.
When I graduated last year, I could hardly find any good companies here in China hiring Delphi guys. Luckily my Delphi expert project was written in C# following Sharp Builder Tools’ legacy which helps me find a C# position.
Delphi was once dominant here, but now everything changes.
I usually have a few geographic locations that I would be happy to work in, and I look for work in those places. It isn’t a matter how how far I am willing to move, but where I end up and what I end up doing.
I am pretty sure I would have a hard time if I only looked locally (where locally = within 50 km of where I live). For years every time I get a new job meant I had to move. It gets quite tiring after a while but that’s just how it is, at least there are no kids involved. And – at least in the beginning – it had nothing to do with Delphi but with what kind of job and salary I was looking for.
I’ve been pretty lucky. I’ve never gone looking for a Delphi job as such. But have always ended up, wherever I have been, developing in Delphi (which is my prefered development tool).
Each place I have worked have given me projects which I have said could be done ‘this way’ or ‘that way’ simply in Delphi as opposed to more complex ways in other languages. There is always slight opposition and the odd ‘what’s Delphi?’ type comment. But I’ve always been given the chance to prove myself in Delphi and each time, without fail, my bosses have been impressed with what can be developed quickly and professionally and I have continued to develop new products for them in it. I would imagine 90% if what I have written in my career has been in Delphi or Pascal.
Says a lot for Delphi I guess that this has been the case.
Have you thought about going self employed and taking the bespoke software approach? That way you can develop in whatever language you like and be wherever you like while doing it.
C# and Delphi are so close I had no problem changing.
I keep Delphi in the back pocket, perhaps it will come again. For Win32 native, and soon Win64, there is a market with not much competition against Delphi.
Do what you must. Good luck.
For what it’s worth, where I live (Spain) it is relatively easy to get a Delphi job. Particularly in the Balearic Islands you can find a good bunch of companies that program in Delphi, and since most of them create apps for tourism corporations, language may not be a big problem (at least at the beginning). 🙂
Good luck finding your job.
A lot of job openings aren’t listed, and are filled by word of mouth. User groups, colleagues, cold calls to companies that are using Delphi. I’d even consider dropping Developer Relations or your local Embarcadero office a line (if you have one). They might know someone who is looking. You get the idea.
If you don’t find something you like in Delphi, maybe take a look at some of those C# positions. Like Ken said, the language isn’t much of a stretch, and it isn’t bad experience to have in your toolkit.
Good luck.
Outside of US, Western Europe, Delphi should not be a problem. It is Popular in South America, Eastern Europe, Russia and there is quite a bit left in South Africa.
This is funny, but not funny and shows the need: I just got off of LinkedIn where the complaint is that companies can not find any good software engineers with good Delphi experience. The problem maybe that companies and developers can not find each other in the vast domain of software (at least in the USA).
@John E.
I agree with you. There seems to be a big disconnect between Delphi developers and companies.
Moreover, I feel compelled to ask you where are these companies? How come we can connect? Any theories?
I’m from Italy, in order to write delphi code I had to set up a new company from scratch…then the problem became: “how to find customer?”
Anyway IMHO a good Delphi programmer can write good code in any language (VB excluded… :-))
Hi, we have the opposite problem. We are a Delphi house based in Dublin, Ireland and we just can’t find good local Delphi developers. If you know of any good location to find Delphi developers in Ireland do let me know: paulh at ocuco.com
@Marco
I agree with you… the issue is not language as much as the definition of a ‘good’ programmer. Yet companies are locked in on languages and experience with them. Programmers do not have the courage or are lazy to expand to a ‘non mainstream’ language. At least Delphi programmers are not guilty of this. 🙂
VB is King and Java is the sweet bride in Nigeria, but some how I have been able to show our customers how quickly and efficiently an app can be built using Delphi. I had a situation in a company where my client had for over 8 months been trying to develop an Order Approval System in VB.Net. We took over rebuilt the app from scratch using Delphi 6 and Intraweb in less than 3 weeks. The customer was amazed how fast it took us to build the app.
As a bespoke contractor, Delphi is what I use everyday and for every job.
I am new in Delphi, but is it more profitable than Java?