Sometimes decisions come from above, and I have to deal with what I have been given. If we had millions in the bank, I'm sure we would pay the right wage, benefits, and more. The problem is, we don't have that kind of money (that I know of). I think with a other year or two of new products/maintaining our old ones, we'll get there. When I started this gig 3+ years ago, I took $30K /year, no benefits. That was a serious drop from my previous $50K + amazing benefits. The issue was, my old job was boring, and this one wasn't. There was a challenge, something new. After 3+ years, I've been given raises, commissions, benefits, etc that now surpass my previous job. But that's because I put my time in. Since finding good developers in such a competitive market place is difficult what do you suggest to attract the right people? Do we just bite the bullet and offer the whole shebang right out the gate, do we offer a probation period, or do we offshore development and not worry about anything other than them doing a bad job.

I have already stepped down as the "main IT guy" and will begin working part-time June 1st. I really like the company though, and want to see them succeed, so I'll be staying here to lead the outsourcing development process, project management, etc. I understand their issues, developers are expensive, and cheap ones produce shoddy code. For the same cost of an out-of-college dev for a year, I can *hopefully* get 2-3 projects done in 6 months time. At least, that's the expectation.

I can understand your point of view, and I whole heatedly agree. However, we are still a "small" company (less than 30 employees), and are experiencing these growing pains. Since so many orders and customers have come in the last 2+ years, our development needs to catch up. We spend time maintaining and enhancing the current applications we have, and have no time to create new ones. Many resumes I get for new developers are either no experience, and $40K+, plus expectations of benefits, PTO, 401K's, etc. Things we simply can't offer. And then there's the developers with experience, maybe 3-10 years+ and they all expect $75K+ with benefits. I think with a staff of 2-5 people we can get all new projects needed done this year. That's $80K - $375K a year, not including all the benefits they expect too. The last 3 developers I hired were in the middle of getting their bachelors in CS, and produced poor code that is difficult to maintain and when they leave documentation is little to none. I can't be too mad, they are learning, but it hinders our progress. How do we attract the right developers?

So far most of them have been in India, but we were looking at Russia/Armenia. We haven't had a project completed yet, we're in the beginning stages of proposals, etc.

The company I work for is going through the same thing (roughly). We've tried to run an in-house development staff, but talented developers who don't expect six figure salaries are few and far in be-tween. In the last 3+ years we've launched 7 in-house applications that have helped us quadruple in size (revenues, profits, and employee size). Within the last few months the owners asked for another 7 projects to be completed, and to start renting out our systems to potential clients. They did not want to hire any more developers, and tasked me with outsourcing our development. They want the work done in 1-2 weeks compared to 1-2 months. So far, our outsourcing replies have all been $10K+ and 2.5 months estimated time, for one of our smaller projects. Looking forward to reading the responses on this one!

As far as I know (and I could be completely wrong I don't own a single Apple product, lol), iPhone's don't allow full Exchange integration with contact/calendar syncing right? I read online that middleman applications like DavMail could simulate that though. When you sync an iPhone to Exchange it just uses IMAP for mail/folder sync but there's no contact/calendar sync. Am I wrong on this? Damn I miss my HPC Windows CE Phone, lol... j/k..... or am I? lol

lol.. I use GMail, and for my side business. Don't think they'd be into it, they seem a little scared of "Big Brother Google"

http://www.untangle.com/ Is a great, free tool to help block, track, and limit web browsing activities. Based off of Debian I think.

Back in highschool, I wrote my own periodic table of elements, and a geometry theories tool that let me pass my tests.. Teachers had no idea I could program the calculator.. lol

This is a great answer. I appreciate the informative reply.

I appreciate the response. You make some very good points, that I have no thought of before. I will take your opinions in consideration, and pass it off to boss man.

I actually had that book in my Amazon cart. I did see the publish date 10+ years ago though.

One of our databases is 5GB in size, and gaining about 1GB every 2 months. I have gotten a few recommendations for the book you referenced, and I think it's only I'll be getting to "study hard"

Exactly! I want to know, that if the business continues to boom for the next five years, my software won't fall apart, because of bad database design.