This is a funny story that happened in real life
Unfortunately, this story was heartwrenching for me.
I had a great programmer. He worked for a company that I had hired for many years. He knew my sites well, and there was another programmer who knew the site well too. In any case, these two software developers both knew ASP Classic. I thought that lots of people knew this language and that there was no problem. I was wrong.
He started with 2 years of experience
At the time one of the programmers was hired, he had only two years of experience. His salary was modest. He was a fast learner and accumulated up to eight years experience during the time I knew him. His salary went up, but not that high. The boss was a very sharp guy (I know him well). However, the boss didn’t scour the market looking for ASP Classic Developers (Programmers). He already had his two programmers and that was all he needed. The boss didn’t realize that the market value for someone as capable as his head programmer was a lot higher than what he was paying. We both didn’t realize this — until the programmer got offered DOUBLE his salary and promptly quit.
5 programmers later
That left me in a bind. I didn’t know who to hire for programming. I went through five different programmers until I found someone really acceptable (not perfect, but quite good). So, the plot thickens.
Translation to PHP or .NET?
As the head programmer announced his departure, he gave me some good tips. He said that I needed to recode my site into .NET because very few programmers knew ASP Classic these days. In just a few years, the world’s supply of ASP Classic Programmers had dried up. The boss couldn’t find anyone good to replace the leaving employee. One suggestion I got was to translate the entire site into PHP — the reason being that there are far more PHP programmers than .NET, and also far more .NET developers than ASP Classic.
Later I learned, that it is easier to translate the site to .NET, since you can do this little by little, module by module — and there are many modules. Imagine the complication of tranlating the site to PHP and launching the new version all at once. There would be 100+ bugs that would take half a year to build.
So, I decided NOT to translate the site. I voted for .NET programming simply so I could do the work gradually. I wanted to rebuild each module to much better specifications than before. I had learned that my old way of running the site had much room for improvement. Some of the older modules didn’t need to be used anymore, and there were many new functions that needed to be built.
The irony
After much shopping around for programmers, I found that not only is there a bad shortage of Classic ASP programmers, but in America, you can no longer get any programmer who has good skills and availability. You have to go to India or offshore no matter what the language is if you want more than a handful of hours per week of actual work. What I learned is that there are many Classic ASP Developers in India. The trick is finding them, and finding ones that I like. So, I didn’t need to rebuild anything — yet. Although, I eventually would have had to rebuild anyway, because even India’s supply of developers who know Classic ASP is a diminishing pool