I had a dis­cus­sion with an employer recently who is look­ing for a Cold­Fu­sion devel­oper but not hav­ing much luck. This per­son sug­gested that this was due to the increase in ASP.NET projects — imply­ing that Cold­Fu­sion devel­op­ers were mov­ing to other technologies.

How­ever, this is exactly the oppo­site of what I am see­ing. In over seven years I’ve never seen such demand for Cold­Fu­sion coders — every­one in Perth, it seems, is busy with their own projects, with client work or with out­side con­tracts. Quite a few posi­tions have come up in the past few months, adver­tised salaries are at an all time high, there has been quite a bit of job-hopping and I know there are a few com­pa­nies who are still look­ing for developers.

Part of the rea­son for the upswing is sim­ply that the indus­try is boom­ing all round. If web devel­op­ment is up 25–50%, it stands to rea­son that Cold­Fu­sion demand would be up by a sim­i­lar amount, as well as ASP.NET. But more than that, I’m see­ing more demand for gen­eral CF, for Far­Cry CMS cus­tomi­sa­tion, and also (finally) for Flex devel­op­ment. I’m work­ing on a rea­son­ably large project myself, writ­ing CF ser­vices as the back­end for a Flex-driven appli­ca­tion — some­thing I really think could be a big growth area. Hell, I could quite eas­ily say yes to a cou­ple more projects and be look­ing for an extra devel­oper myself!

It’s sim­ply never been a bet­ter time to have Cold­Fu­sion skills! Is it only in Perth that “busy” has replaced the tra­di­tional “fine thanks” as the most com­mon response to “how are you?” (quote bla­tantly ripped off from BamPi­lot Myles) or is this Aus­tralia or even world-wide?