Dries has a post today about the apparent shortage of Drupal coders-for-hire.

I left a long comment on his post, and I’d like to keep it, so I’m reposting here with some additions.

Corporately, we’re following three paths, all of which are productive.

1) Hire talent and let them learn on the job. We simply get the best people we can.

2) Interns, interns, interns. A college student with a free summer can get up to speed with Drupal development. Programs like Summer of Code are proof of this. We recruit whenever possible and always reach out to local students who show an interest in Drupal.

3) Work within your industry to promote Drupal. Groups like http://groups.drupal.org/newspapers-on-drupal can draw talent to your project and the Drupal community.

The only barrier I’ve ever seen to Drupal adoption is from coders (always ones with CS degrees or specific certifications) who disagree with some foundational elements of Drupal for “religous” reasons akin to Mac v. PC v. Linux loyalties. [Example complaint: Drupal isn’t OO, so it can’t be any good. Then the developer never bothers looking.]

Then there’s the infamous attitude: “Open source software is developed by untrained hacker kids in their basements. I’m a professional software developer and my personal project will always be better.”

I like the way Rasmus killed that myth in his Sunnyvale talk on PHP security.

One of the aspects of Drupal that (I suspect) many of us find so appealing is the open collaboration. It is a learning environment for many (myself included), but it can be a real business asset as well.

One possibility that occurs to me is that some projects might not be able to hire developers because, frankly, the project isn’t very good. I’m not sure anyone would willingly take on a Drupal project to produce “a MySpace clone,” yet people ask for that all the time.

I get occasional offers to do small projects, which I turn down for two reasons.

1) I have a day job that keeps me quite busy.

2) If the project is really interesting or useful to the community, I might pick it up anyway.

Of course, I also have the luxury of getting paid to spend part of my time developing my Drupal project.

On a positive note, some of us are thinking of throwing a News and Drupal miniconference some time this year. The goal would be to expose more people to the platform and to exchange best-practice ideas.

It also occurs to me that reviving the “gold standard” concept for contributed modules might be a good way to encourage new developers to learn proper Drupal mojo.