Although I’m pretty happy in my current job, the big problem has always been the location – the office is 44 miles of mainly country B-roads away. As a result I do have a fairly specific search running on one of the major IT recruitment sites for anything with my particular skillset in the local area.

Last weekend, in amongst the usual mix of regular programming jobs was one that caught my eye. The advert was looking for a pretty wide range of skills, but unlike many was specifically looking for a senior Visual Basic 6 developer for research and development, and significantly made no mention of .Net. Alongside that, it was pretty close to home, and money-wise was offering significantly above the going rate for the kind of job. Although I have been doing a lot of .Net work over the past couple of years, and ideally would like a good .Net role, I still do a lot of work with existing VB6 systems, and to be honest the money and the good location appealed. Whilst there was a bit of a question over why it was paying over the odds, I e-mailed off a copy of my CV to the recruitment consultant – it may look too good to be true, but I was sure I’d find out why pretty soon.

I had to wait a couple of days to find out, but on Wednesday I got a phone call from the consultant. Bearing in mind that a lot of times recruitment consultants seem to tell everyone that they are ideal for a particular job, she did seem pretty genuinely excited, saying that she thought my skills looked like a good match, and sending me more details of the company involved. The actual job details were more detailed, and definitely showed that the requirements on the job advert had been watered down a bit. Key among the requirements was that they described the VB requirement as wanting a ‘hardcore’ VB6 developer. Other key requirements were flexibility, and a broad knowledge, the emphasis being on finding the right tools to solve a problem, rather than being limited. There was also much more weight given to having worked with Windows API. Again, the .Net platform was not mentioned at all. The company involved was a software house, with their major product written in VB6, with Windows API to supplement the areas where VB6 can’t do what is required.

Having seen the details, I had a chat with a couple of friends, and decided that I may as well allow my CV to go forward. I didn’t have to wait long for a reply, when early on Thursday, the previously excited consultant phoned me to say that my CV had been rejected with the one line ‘nothing of interest’. She was somewhat surprised, as like me, she thought that I had the range and flexibility that was needed, and also a good amount of VB6 work to boot. After chatting with me she went back to the company for more detail, to which the company had said that they thought a lot of my CV was just CV speak, and that they didn’t think a trading system was overly complicated, so they weren’t interested. When the consultant came back to me with those comments, I pretty well decided that it wasn’t worth pursuing further, although I did have a more general chat with the consultant over the role.

This conversation was perhaps the most interesting part of the whole process. Firstly I established what I had already suspected, that they were planning to move to .Net. Frankly with the advent of 64 bit windows, which VB6 can’t target, and three releases of mainstream .Net it would be a brave software house indeed who didn’t have some sort of plan to move away from VB6. I also asked about how they had been doing trying to fill the role in general. The impression I got was that they were finding it particularly frustrating. The advert I had seen, hadn’t been the first time it had been posted, and although they had managed to get people previously they had all been rejected, either being long term VB6 developers who had tended to be rejected over lack of flexibility, or people like me with more flexible looking CV’s, who had been rejected for lack of VB knowledge. Of course there had also been developers who pretty well fitted the requirement, but hadn’t fitted personally. However, she did say that they were having real trouble getting the volume of applications they would usually wish, she thought that the problem was the VB6 and no .Net on the advert.

I have to say that I agree. It’s purely unscientific, but the kind of VB6 programmers they are looking for were the ones who, when they hit a wall with VB6, would dig down into the Windows API to get around the problem. Now I know several people who were like that, and without fail, they all changed to .Net as soon as possible, some even when there were only beta releases of .Net, and several of them deliberately now remove VB from their CV, and refuse to do any classic VB work at all. The question is whether there are any of this breed of ‘hardcore’ VB programmers left, or have they all jumped ship and moved on to .Net? (Incidentally, if there are any such programmers left, I’ve got the phone number of a recruitment consultant who would love to hear from you. 😀 )