Critic's Guide to Delphi Exorcist - Part 3 - Delphi Jobs & Jobless Recovery

Implications of Joblessness, Subscriptions and Skills
Does Delphi justify it's high costs?
Your reviewer looked at Dice.com, Monster, JobBankUSA and was interesting to see some nice trends:

• Some Delphi jobs refer to using Delphi Hotel Management System (Hospitality and working at hotels)
• Some Delphi jobs refer to going to the Delphi, the GM subsidiary.
• Some Delphi jobs refer to porting Delphi application to C# (hint: Visual Studio)
• Some Delphi jobs are there from suspiciously looking Indian Outsourcing companies (hint: ABC "Infotech" LLC, some name with "InfoTech", some name whose website states "Outsourcing to India?", some name whose Website states "Chinese Developers wanted")
• Some Delphi jobs requires you speak Hindi or Chinese as a second language.
• Some Delphi jobs, the person who you are asked to call, sounds like a thick burly voice or thick accent you cannot make out if it is actually English or a mix of Hindi-English.

Two years ago, the trend was different. Delphi developers and all other IT workers were in demand. Put the word "SQL" on your resume, you get a job, and so on and so forth (and then try to bullshit your way through the job)

The usual favorite was to put "Delphi, Paradox, Interbase", and then get a free copy of Delphi (the employers won't blink buying it for you) and then Interbase (ditto) and almost every 3rd party component to get the job done... Then spend the whole day chatting away on your ICQ List, MSN List, browse the web and do very little works.

The reality catches up very quickly with these people. Your reviewer remembers hiring plenty of these kind of people.

Language
Most Delphi developers bitch and moan about the last version of Delphi being Delphi 7 (some say Delphi 6 before on-line activation was used, or Delphi 5 when the last good compiler was there). Some say Delphi 2007 (the last good version before the Unicode update), some say Delphi 2009 (because that was the last good version before the nefarious copy-protection caused lot of problem with Delphi).

With the job market being so bad, few or very few employers can catch-up and use the latest version of Delphi. The problem with Delphi (in relation to jobs) are:

1) Cost of Delphi + Third-party.
This is what kills Delphi dead in the water. The people who advocate Delphi are the vendor themselves on the newsgroups. You can usually Google them up, and they charge a pretty penny for their product.

1a) Of what Quality?The quality of the products built with Delphi so poor that the vendors just decided to move on. That means, even with small costs - domain and cheap web-hosting (US$9.95, US$4.95...), some vendors just decided their domains should expire and no-longer pay for the web-hosting.

The former two Delphi Magazines, DelphiMagazine (UK) redirects to a Thumb-Drive buy-now site, DelphiMagazine (USA) redirects to a cyber-squatter site.

The remaining people who are there, developed in during the Delphi 3-7 time when CompuServe, AOL and BBS's ruled the day. When the Internet came, a new and ugly force came out - nasty customer feedback.

CompuServe had this whack-a-mole policy where you can delete nasty feedback and ban that person from the whole CompuServe network. There were a couple of vocal "Delphi Haters" who voiced their opinions and eventually got removed from the former GO:BORL forums. Then came the USENET, where (as of today), Borland still puts hosts a newsgroup server linked to web-based NNTP. They stopped anonymous-posting when Simon Kissel (of Cross-Kylix fame) spammed the former Borland newsgroups and permanently ejected from the CodeGear, Embarcadero newsgroups.

1b) Plagiarism and Fraud.
Why bother work so hard to write your own codes when you can steal it and re-brand it as your own?

• The library EZPDF Library is a rip-off from QuickPDF Library,
  
  
• The former UDC corporation sold rip-off versions of Julian's WpTools,
  
  
• The CNPack "borrowed" some code from Andy J's famous IDE extensions (and then Andy Closed-sourced them to prevent updates from his own extensions going to CNPack),
  
  
• SoftLab Dephi Decompiler for Delphi and C++ Builder is a rip-off of EMS Source Rescuer,
  
• DA Generator includes a copy of Delphi 7 DCC Compiler (check the delphi directory in the program)
  
  
• Grid Plus Plus runs into an interesting licensing problem: It is illegal to use DevExpress, WpTools, TMS, TeeChart (et al) in design-mode in binary form. Their (meaning: WpTools, TMS, DevExpress, TeeChart) EULA prohibits it. The vendor must also be legally-blind since they used to call it "Delphi++" and then got a nice letter from Embarcadero's lawyers.
  
  
• I reviewed DxSock many months ago and gave it a negative review. Other people say the same:
  The complete opposite of what is written on their website.

With people using Delphi doing this, you can imagine why:

It's faster to make money from the sweat of other people, lie about everything and get away with it. Many Delphi developers get away with it because many of them are overseas. Their customers would be from Japan, Germany or Brazil and then they have no legal recourse to get their money back, short of disputing it with MasterCard or Visa.

That's why you see some vendors offering direct money transfer to pay money to them. Good luck if you can get your money back. Then, there is PHP with mostly free, C# with mostly free, Python, Ruby with almost free everything you can take and use. Ditto with Java. For example, Mr. Jolyon Smith uses NetBeans instead. Go figure...

A fool and his money is one big (third) party...

2) Desktop app only, but no Linux, Mac, Web or Andriod or iPad or iPhone apps.The biggest market now is portable apps. The other reason for this is because it is easy to develop and fast to make money because either the Telco (your telephone company such as AT-and-T or Verizon) or iTunes or Google collects money on the developer's behalf.

For example, to activate the product, you would send an SMS (US$5.00) to a certain number and then receive a confirmation code to enter into the small mobile app. Some vendors, like Kaspersky Anti-virus sends the confirmation code to enter to your PC's Kaspersky Security application.

Mac and Linux apps are good money, it seems. Certain vendors make Mac-only applications and earn lots of money. For instance, OmniGroup makes excellent products for Mac OSX.

iTunes, iPhone and iOS is the latest hottest territory for developers. Where's Embarcadero? not here...

3) Software Piracy. This is already affecting many Delphi 3rd party developers.

Ask Mr. Ray N. whether DevExpress would support "Diamond Docking", better looking Ribbon compatibility (as in better looking Ribbon aesthetics and Ribbon UI) or when a Report Writer for VCL would be ready, the answer is that they don't have the money to do it. (or rather - they cannot afford to hire more Delphi developers)

This leads to higher prices or building SAAS products (e.g., TestRails) because there is no piracy or leaks when the customer does not pay-up. Have you seen any SAAS product built with Delphi? Me neither.

Good times are over. DelphiHater's predictions in a jobless recovery and jobless economy
Your reviewer sees many friends who are dying to find a job. Maybe it's time to say this to them:

1) Move on. Delphi won't pay your bills anymore. The reasons are simple. For employers, the costs don't make any sense. The development costs are so expensive, all the profits get eaten-up by the vendors and there's no money left.

If there was money left, it's all gone. Take a look at how many jobs PHP, VB.NET, C# are available. Maybe you'll learn something like learning a new skill towards financial freedom.

But wait - there's more. There's this need to buy, buy and buy third-party components and then realize that most of it is of better quality or requires no payment in C#, PHP, Perl, Java and even in OSX / iOS (iPhone/iPad).

2) Consider flipping burgers in Mc Donalds or working as a store assistant in Wallmart. For some people, that's considered a deep insult, but to be honest, in this kind of economy, maybe these people can see beyond fooling around during office-hours monitoring the newsgroups (like an unpaid employee) or doing work for free for others, or doing work for nothing.

Basic lessons -- like coming early to work, leaving on-time, taking responsibility for a job, doing a good job well done comes with flipping burgers. The saying goes -- the higher the wages before being laid-off and pride, the deeper the fall...

3) Consider going to work as a junior C# or C++ developer. Face the honest facts and realize that all the time you were lied, cheated and there is nothing honest with Delphi. The whole thing is a big house of credit-card debts, one bill after another not paid, nothing worth it. Amazingly, many Delphi developers shun re-learning everything all over again, telling the same nonsense over and over again -- like too hard to learn a new language, too difficult. But what the fact is that these Delphi developers don't want to learn anything except want a big paycheck (that no longer exists).

4) Some female Delphi developers on the newsgroups have become domestic servants or au-pair or cleaner or janitor. It's a damn shame that someone leaves the country (e.g., Philippines, Indonesia) and work as a domestic servant in a richer country (e.g., UK or Ireland or Italy). Your reviewer was surprised to know there was so many Delphi developers who gave up their job and went overseas. Don't be surprised the nanny who takes care of your kids was once a Delphi developer :)

There are always die-hard Delphi software developers. You can read the current article "Lost a Delphi Envagelist" if you feel confident.