Where are the Access Developers?

[TC]

I'd like to open a discussion about the state of the industry. For the
past year, I've been unable to find competent Access developers
available for hire. I'm worried about that.

I think there's great demand right now, and that's keeping the good
developers busy, but that's not enough to explain the situation.
Whenever I post an Access job, I get lots of responses from .NET
developers, back-end database people, and web developers. They all have
the attitude that "I don't really do Access application development,
but Access is easy, so I can handle your job." (No!) The message I'm
getting is that people are choosing to build their skills in .NET, in
back-end database work, and in web development, even though the market
is well-served in those fields, but they aren't building their skills
in Access fast enough to keep up with the demand.

If that is indeed what is happening, I can't find a good explanation
why. Sure, Access has a lightweight reputation, and people don't see it
as a career-maker -- but that has always been the case, yet somehow
there have always been plenty of Access developers in the past. What
has changed now? I can't help but wonder if Access's star has faded to
the point where job seekers eschew it as old technology. That would be
a shame, because I think it will be a very long time before Access
loses its market niche.

Anyway, those are my comments. I wonder if other Access professionals
have made similar (or conflicting) observations.
-TC

[Steve]

Throughout my courses in computer information systems my instructors
seemed to have a fairly low opinion of Access. We were taught just
enough VBA to do some extremely basic things. Instead of learning more
about Access, we were taught in-depth .NET concepts and did a lot of
..NET coding. Access classes had a heavy emphasis on relational design.
Before going to college I'd messed with Access before, making small,
uncomplicated databases for myself and others, so I went through those
courses without a hitch. However, there was very little offered for
learning.

Regardless of that, though, I was hired as an Access developer. Even
with the minimal VBA skills taught at the college I was able to jump
right in to Access programming because of the program design taught
through the .NET classes. It seems to me that fewer people are calling
themselves Access developers although they have the skills necessary to
accomplish the tasks you may give them. Some skills are the same no
matter what product or language you work with, and Access makes it easy
to capitalize on those skills. VBA is so easy to learn that even if I
hadn't worked with VB6 prior to working as an Access developer, I would
have still picked it up within a couple weeks.

Therefore, it is my opinion that some of the .NET people you have
turned down may in fact be completely qualified for working on your
Access databases, and that they simply call themselves something
different than "Access developer".

[Randy Harris]

"TC" <go*********@ya hoo.com> wrote in message
news:11******** **************@ g47g2000cwa.goo glegroups.com.. .

I'd like to open a discussion about the state of the industry. For the
past year, I've been unable to find competent Access developers
available for hire. I'm worried about that.

I think there's great demand right now, and that's keeping the good
developers busy, but that's not enough to explain the situation.
Whenever I post an Access job, I get lots of responses from .NET
developers, back-end database people, and web developers. They all have
the attitude that "I don't really do Access application development,
but Access is easy, so I can handle your job." (No!) The message I'm
getting is that people are choosing to build their skills in .NET, in
back-end database work, and in web development, even though the market
is well-served in those fields, but they aren't building their skills
in Access fast enough to keep up with the demand.

If that is indeed what is happening, I can't find a good explanation
why. Sure, Access has a lightweight reputation, and people don't see it
as a career-maker -- but that has always been the case, yet somehow
there have always been plenty of Access developers in the past. What
has changed now? I can't help but wonder if Access's star has faded to
the point where job seekers eschew it as old technology. That would be
a shame, because I think it will be a very long time before Access
loses its market niche.

Anyway, those are my comments. I wonder if other Access professionals
have made similar (or conflicting) observations.
-TC

TC,

I don't have a base of HR knowledge or experience upon which to draw to
answer your questions. I can't help wondering, nonetheless, if the change
that you are describing might not be more indicative of an increase in your
demand for skilled people than any sort of reduction in the supply. My
impression, from perusing job postings, is that there is indeed a lot more
demand for "glamour" skills such as .NET. I don't see a lot of companies
looking for Access coders.

--
Randy Harris
tech at promail dot com
I'm pretty sure I know everything that I can remember.

[Ted]

I've been using Access since the first week verion 1.0 was released for
$89.00. For years I only dabled in it, making applications for work as
needed, but I was involved and even led an Access Developer's Special
Interest Group (SIG) in the greater Seattle area for several years. In
the past couple of years I have really taken it up seriously and I have
even created applications that read emails from the Outlook Inbox and
import those emails and respond to the data found in the emails as well
as automation data transfer between Access, Excel and Word. I'm really
proud of my latest accomplishment which is creating an application that
retrieves data from an accounting program's data files and communicates
with that program's COM application to export sales order information
from the Access application and imports that data into the accounting
program thus eliminating the dual entry that client had to do before.

I read in this discussion thread that other professionals consider
Access to be a lighweight application. I've taken a look at the VB .NET
that came with my Visual Studio Tools for the Microsoft Office System
(I got so I can create run-time distributions of my Access
applications) and it seem to have a lot more limitations on its
abilities than Access does. The only thing I can see that VB .NET has
going for it is that it can create .exe files. But my mde files from
Access along with the runtime version of Access does just fine.
I see a long future yet for Access. Remember back when the rumour mill
said that Access and FoxPro would eventually merge? I see a Visual Fox
Pro out there, in fact my Access application connects to VFP tables
using ODBC, but I don't see the two merging.

Being a casual member of an Access SIG these days I don't make it to a
lot of meetings, but I still see plenty of Access developers out there.
Perhaps they are shy?
I'm contually learning new things with Access and I'm continually
amazed at its abilities such as creating XML files using the Write #
statement.
Ted
Access Developer and proud of it.

[Lyle Fairfield]

IMO, MS has enhanced its promotion of Access as a route through which
non-professionals can develop professional-like applications and, again
IMO, it seems that more and more non-professionals are taking this
route.
In Comp.Databases. Ms-Access the great majority of their (the
non-professionals) questions betray poor manners, incompetence,
laziness, stupidity and lack of education. Many are quite unwilling to
be clear, to explain, or to listen.
What capable and self-respecting person would want to join such a
group?

I became a member of the group (Access Developers) when there were many
bright, capable and proud Access Developers, and when there was pride
in new ideas. I think the number of such persons is, perhaps, less than
twenty per cent of its peak, and the pride is almost non-existent. Many
of those remaining have little to contribute except the same tired
ideas they have repeated over and over again, since they learned them
from someone else who has moved on, and some persons here with the
strongest reputations have never contributed an original idea to the
Access community.
What capable and self-respecting person would want to join such a
group?

I consider myself an Access Developer. But the last Access application
I sold was delivered more than three years ago and I wouldn't consider
seeking Access work today. Today I am working with Classic ASP, HTA,
MS-SQL, ADO, JavaScript and Dynamic HTML. Perhaps, my days with Access
are numbered, or already over.

Where did Dev, Keri, Pete, Rebecca, Dimitri, Clive, John, Radu, Gary,
George, Chris, Paul, Vanderghast go? Was their collective brilliance
ever replaced?

[David W. Fenton]

"Steve" <th*********@gm ail.com> wrote in
news:11******** **************@ g44g2000cwa.goo glegroups.com:

Therefore, it is my opinion that some of the .NET people you have
turned down may in fact be completely qualified for working on
your Access databases, and that they simply call themselves
something different than "Access developer".

I can't imagine that .NET developers would have an understanding of
using Access the way it is intended, with bound data.

They are likely to be looking for complicated data grids, and want
to do things mostly unbound and avoiding Jet because they have
prejudices built up from working in a different environment.

--
David W. Fenton http://www.dfenton.com/
usenet at dfenton dot com http://www.dfenton.com/DFA/

[Jack Withenshaw]

"Lyle Fairfield" <ly***********@ aim.com> wrote in message
news:11******** **************@ g43g2000cwa.goo glegroups.com.. .

IMO, MS has enhanced its promotion of Access as a route through which
non-professionals can develop professional-like applications and, again
IMO, it seems that more and more non-professionals are taking this
route.
In Comp.Databases. Ms-Access the great majority of their (the
non-professionals) questions betray poor manners, incompetence,
laziness, stupidity and lack of education. Many are quite unwilling to
be clear, to explain, or to listen.
What capable and self-respecting person would want to join such a
group?

I became a member of the group (Access Developers) when there were many
bright, capable and proud Access Developers, and when there was pride
in new ideas. I think the number of such persons is, perhaps, less than
twenty per cent of its peak, and the pride is almost non-existent. Many
of those remaining have little to contribute except the same tired
ideas they have repeated over and over again, since they learned them
from someone else who has moved on, and some persons here with the
strongest reputations have never contributed an original idea to the
Access community.
What capable and self-respecting person would want to join such a
group?

I consider myself an Access Developer. But the last Access application
I sold was delivered more than three years ago and I wouldn't consider
seeking Access work today. Today I am working with Classic ASP, HTA,
MS-SQL, ADO, JavaScript and Dynamic HTML. Perhaps, my days with Access
are numbered, or already over.

Where did Dev, Keri, Pete, Rebecca, Dimitri, Clive, John, Radu, Gary,
George, Chris, Paul, Vanderghast go? Was their collective brilliance
ever replaced?

Lyle,
Many of your postings are cryptic or weird and your sense of humour and
political leanings are hard to understand. Sometimes, I guess, you post
after a drink or two and don't find your own postings so funny in the
morning. However, part of what you say here rings sad but true.

[Confirm]

Per TC:

I'd like to open a discussion about the state of the industry. For the
past year, I've been unable to find competent Access developers
available for hire. I'm worried about that.

I've been doing 100% MS Access development for about 12 years now.

10 years with Vanguard, the mutual fund.

Couple years for various hospitals in the New Jersey/Pennsylvania area.

Currently, a little over a year with another financial outfit called SEI.

My clients ran out of money late last November. They *say* they'll have a few
projects for me soon - but nothing's happening.

What kind of jobs are you looking to fill?
--
PeteCresswell

[Rick Brandt]

Lyle Fairfield wrote:
[snip]

Where did Dev, Keri, Pete, Rebecca, Dimitri, Clive, John, Radu, Gary,
George, Chris, Paul, Vanderghast go?

[snip]

Perhaps they got new ideas that didn't involve Access.
--
I don't check the Email account attached
to this message. Send instead to...
RBrandt at Hunter dot com

[Linda Burnside]

Access is such a great tool, that many small/medium size business (or bigger
ones too) develop their own application. They depend upon that
application. Their business would be lost without it. It may not work all
that well because they didn't think of everything that someone with more
overall knowledge of the subject could have helped them with.

At some point, they want to improve on the database they are using, but they
are reluctant to move entirely to something else. After all, even if it
could work better, what they have is sort of functional. These are the
people who eventually start looking for some consultant to improve the
Access database or develop a new one. A more high tech, sophisticated user
might have selected a different tool to start off with.

Don't get me wrong. I love Access. It's what I do. I stumbled into it
though. I was a really good Access user who could manipulate macros, and
then a need arose to learn some VBA code. Once the employer found out I
could to this a little, more demands were put on me in that area. I
eventually worked my way into a small business that I operate from my home.
I got experience by doing, but I didn't set out to become an Access
programmer. People who set out to become programmers usually study things
which are know to be "real" programming languages.

So that's why I think you're having trouble finding 'em.

Linda

"TC" <go*********@ya hoo.com> wrote in message
news:11******** **************@ g47g2000cwa.goo glegroups.com.. .

I'd like to open a discussion about the state of the industry. For the
past year, I've been unable to find competent Access developers
available for hire. I'm worried about that.

I think there's great demand right now, and that's keeping the good
developers busy, but that's not enough to explain the situation.
Whenever I post an Access job, I get lots of responses from .NET
developers, back-end database people, and web developers. They all have
the attitude that "I don't really do Access application development,
but Access is easy, so I can handle your job." (No!) The message I'm
getting is that people are choosing to build their skills in .NET, in
back-end database work, and in web development, even though the market
is well-served in those fields, but they aren't building their skills
in Access fast enough to keep up with the demand.

If that is indeed what is happening, I can't find a good explanation
why. Sure, Access has a lightweight reputation, and people don't see it
as a career-maker -- but that has always been the case, yet somehow
there have always been plenty of Access developers in the past. What
has changed now? I can't help but wonder if Access's star has faded to
the point where job seekers eschew it as old technology. That would be
a shame, because I think it will be a very long time before Access
loses its market niche.

Anyway, those are my comments. I wonder if other Access professionals
have made similar (or conflicting) observations.
-TC