I've got a heck of a recruiting assignment on my hands, one of my clients needs extremely bright JAVA developers to join their Enterprise Content Management solutions team. I'm talking about folks who have worked with Java 6 for the past few years, who get excited about design patterns, TreeMaps and maybe even Open Source. My client wants to train them to become Alfresco developers.
"What a great opportunity," those in the ECM space tell me.
"I'm interested," say the Documentum developers I speak to.
But my client isn't interested in most of them. "Documentum people don't know Java, they know Documentum JAVA," is what the say when I present them.
"Your client may be right," say some of the Documentum gurus I mention this to. "The API does a lot of the JAVA work for you."
So that leaves me recruiting well employed, well paid JAVA developers who have barely heard of ECM, WCM, Alfresco, Documentum, Open Text, and explaining to them that there's an exciting future in the ECM/Alfresco space.
Now let me be clear, I'm not complaining and I'm not lazy. I get paid for identifying top talent and helping them see that my clients have better opportunities for them than their current employers. And I almost never work with a client companies who aren't growing rapidly, who don't offer attractive compensation packages, and who aren't doing exciting things.
My challenge is illustrating why a future with Alfresco (which is an Open Source ECM technology)is brighter than sticking with just plain JAVA.
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