Saturday, April 10, 2010
The other day, one of the freelance services I belong to sent notification that an employer wanted a payroll system built. The employer was pretty specific about what he wanted but never provided the environment his new system would run in.
I assumed Microsoft Windows and immediately thought of Access- and a runtime application. I also wondered why he simply did not buy QuickBooks. He needs a complete database application.
My curiosity as to how this small business owner, and others-- are keeping books and billing [I use PayPal for billing]-- led me on a small research task.
One question, what are small business owners requesting in terms of programming help these days.
The graph on the right, uses Freelancer.com data and is a breakdown of the major programming environments [i.e., Java, PHP, etc.]-- offered today, and shows how many requests per programming technology are being sought [literally today].
PHP the clear winner, however in the case of the employer that needed a new payroll system- I am pretty sure he did not need a PHP programmer.
Why is this important to me? I can support PHP, however rarely bid on PHP projects. Why? Opensource. Most believe programmers should charge less for PHP and more for Java. I want to charge less for Java and more for PHP. Source code-- should always be more, in my opinion. By default, PHP is opensource code delivered to clients...
