[consulting] Consultant Community

[Fred Jones]

First, as I was one of the persons who posted inappropriate remarks
recently, allow me to apologize both to the parties involved, and to
the entire list. I'm sorry.

Second, in response to a comment made:

> this is not in the sprit of the community that I have been involved in for the last 10 years.

I thought to raise the subject of the nature of this community.
Clearly it's not the same as it was 10 years ago. Back then there were
well under 3K users on d.o. Even 5 years ago there were less than 80K
users. Today there are close to 1.5 million users. These numbers I
obtained just by playing with the user id on d.o. I even graphed it:

http://imageshack.us/f/585/20110823145904.png/

I'm not here for 10 years, not even 5 really--I'm been hanging out for
3 or 4 maybe, so I don't know the history as others do, but aside from
the exponential growth of the overall community, the developers
community has also grown in numbers and in diversity. It was revealed
at a Drupalcon last year (or two years ago) that there are dev shops
charging up to $300 an hour. Now it has been revealed that there are
also resources offering their services for $2 an hour.

I am not intending to make any negative inferences towards outsourcers
(there are American teenagers also working on eLance for a few dollars
an hour, heh heh), but I am trying to get a feel for what people think
about the growth of the community and how much cohesiveness there is.
Or could be.

I think this is quite relevant to this list and I hope at the least it
provides food for thought.

Fred