David Pollak says...
Oct. 5th, 2011 07:22 am" It's easy to find good Scala developers. It is hard, however, to find large swaths of Scala developers. I can put together a great team of 10 Scala and/or Lift developers next week to drop on a project. They won't be cheap (average cost $250/hr plus whatever markup I add.) They won't be local. But they will be excellent.
Foursquare and Twitter and others are hiring excellent developers of all stripes and generally making them excellent Scala developers.
What is difficult is to find an outsourcing team of 25 Scala developers at $40/hr fully loaded. You can find plenty of PHP and Ruby and Java developers at that price, but few Scala developers at that price.
It's a supply and demand issue. The supply is small because the demand is small. There's a positive virtuous cycle in terms of more Scala developers becoming available. But the quantity of available Scala developers is in the hundreds, not the tens of thousands. Unless Scala reaches the mainstream (like Python and Ruby and PHP and Java and C#), there's no economic incentives for the body shops to retain Scala talent or sell Scala projects."
Foursquare and Twitter and others are hiring excellent developers of all stripes and generally making them excellent Scala developers.
What is difficult is to find an outsourcing team of 25 Scala developers at $40/hr fully loaded. You can find plenty of PHP and Ruby and Java developers at that price, but few Scala developers at that price.
It's a supply and demand issue. The supply is small because the demand is small. There's a positive virtuous cycle in terms of more Scala developers becoming available. But the quantity of available Scala developers is in the hundreds, not the tens of thousands. Unless Scala reaches the mainstream (like Python and Ruby and PHP and Java and C#), there's no economic incentives for the body shops to retain Scala talent or sell Scala projects."