At Clinic London we recently hired a contractor to help us with the Drupal development on a new project (details as yet undisclosed, but it is an exciting job). Having worked on a very big Drupal based project recently, and at times struggled with way Drupal works compared to our usual bespoke development with PHP, we felt it would be good to get some help and some extra Drupal brain power in the studio, and having an expert in the studio to help raise our knowledge.Hiring a contract developer is always a difficult thing. There’s a bit of luck and timing and a lot of personality involved. We had several CVs from agencies and friends, and a few candidates came to interviews. It seems much of the Drupal talent in town has either been snapped up by a recent surge in demand for Drupal skills by a large magazine publisher, or prefer to work from their villa in France or Sheffield. These are good times for those who know their plumbing – I have since learned that even The White House website has recently been relaunched on a Drupal and OSS platform. It makes it difficult for a small agency like us to find good affordable talent.

One of the biggest problems is finding developers who are comfortable in the creative agency environment. It’s noisy, it’s open plan, it’s unstructured. Many developers prefer to work to tighter processes than we could ever hope to run, and prefer not to think about how to meet the overall project goals, but want meet the narrow detailed requirements spelled out for them in the technical spec. They want to get their headphones on, and get on with code code code. Fortunately it’s not the way we work. We are not a cubicle mentality, or a software development house. We are mostly a bunch of designers and managers with varying technical understandings and abilities. I’ve grown up as a technologist in this fuzzy definition environment, and as a developer I am happy with it.

So we found our guy (it’s always a guy, I look forward to the day we hire a technical gal, but in 3 years far I’ve only seen one CV of a female developer), and so far so good. He’s taking a bit of management from my side and I need to give his work at this early phase more attention than I have had the time for. Watch this space…