Good afternoon,
I am really not sure it is the right place to post this question but I would like to know if it exists a place (maybe on Slack ?) where companies can look for candidates having Node-RED development skills and Engineers/Developers who are looking for missions can register to be contacted.
That could be great for both companies and engineers who contribute to make the node-red community growing up.
I am happy to get your feedback as it is a need for us as a company to get some talented Node-RED developer to help us on our development.
I don't have an answer to your question, but your post did inspire this question: What would distinguish a Node-RED developer from a Javascript developer?
In my experience, I use Node-RED to create the big outlines of a process. I use it for standardized use of other people's shared development (i.e. the many high quality shared nodes). But I also end up building function nodes to do some of the more complex logic that could be done with a large number of standard nodes, but that can be more efficiently built into a single function.
Further, it seems likely that I could if I choose do everything via Javascript alone substituting open source libraries for many of the nodes I use or developing that myself if it didn't exist.
So while I love Node-RED and find it vastly superior to a pure code environment, it seems like it would be fairly straightforward for anyone skilled with Javascript to become equally effective with Node-RED.
What would distinguish a Node-RED developer from a Javascript developer?
Similarly what would differentiate a JAVA engineer from a Tridium (Honeywell) Niagara engineer just to take an example. Well the knowledge about the APIs, documentation, programming patterns, testing units, permission management, architecture design, toolchain, workflow etc..
Even so, Node-RED is not such a specialized framework and I guess an experienced Javascript developer can handle it but for the specifics about Node-RED a specialized developer will probably handle faster the job and provide better quality designed nodes I assume.
Also as Node-RED is gaining traction for the industrial / services company that need may increase and a marketplace may also help to identify the developers with such experience rather than "generic" Javascript developers.
As another business field who managed that well I am thinking of the bug bounty platforms.
If such developers can differentiate and monetize such expertise that would also be beneficial for the whole community.
Thanks for the thoughtful reply. I am sorry if my question prevented you from getting a reply to your question. I was interested in any answer you might have gotten.
Personally, I think there should be a place for Node-RED related job posting/seeking.
In our case, we have allocated engineers and resources working on Node-RED based development. More and more people will get familiar with Node-RED due to its easy usage. Some of our clients are interested in this too.
We do have a debate on how much we need to open to the clients.
antoine-em I have had a few approaches via Linkedin. A few things to consider.
If your looking for Devs to do Business Process/Logic/Enterprise/Cloud apps then any good developer can learn Node-RED (NR).
However you mention JACE/JAVA which implies building automation (BA) so when considering for BA or industrial automation IA then there are some challenges.
In my experience trad Devs have little or no experience of fieldbus protocols needed for integration e.g. BACnet/KNX/Modbus and find them archaic all those bytes/endians/ two's complement etc. If it's control or orchestration of the physical world then your really need a control Eng. But a Niagara wireframe/PLC FBP Eng. will struggle with NR and JS developer will struggle with the control domain.
Also another thing to consider is where you are deploying NR Edge or Cloud. The former is often a resource constrained device which requires you to be lot more thoughtful in your design & code. As said above there are many ways to skin NR. I've seen "No code" flow-M-geddon and well coded "Low Code" function node solutions.
So a Dev profile you may want to look for a is a node.js or AWS-IoT lambda one the issue though their day rates. NR has been used in IA automation controllers for a number of years so you might want to look in PLC/SCADA forums. There are a few BA devices that have NR and my experience is there are not many of us using NR in BA edge devices though quite few IoT platforms use NR.
Best of luck in your endeavour it's good sign when recruiters are looking for Devs with NR skills
This is a very key question I think as for what I could see I don't see the Node-RED expertise valued the same way as for some other frameworks. Maybe the market need is not big enough for developers to really take advantage of it..
Yes, it is what I have mainly seen from the companies I met at the Node-RED conference in Tokyo too.
They have internal engineers that skill up to become enough "expert" with the framework to do the necessary development.
But for shorter missions where companies need to scale on a project basis such place for related job posting/seeking as you say is missing and I think it could be great to find consultants/developers to provide more professional support.
For the development of custom nodes in general for Node-RED probably Javascript/NodeJS developers are most well suited profiles I think.
But for the Node-RED flow programming it surely depends on the project needs and some other kind of engineering may be required.
That said I am not sure the need here is the same and probably companies using Node-RED to build their business logic are doing this using, for the major cases, internal resources. But I may be wrong, just my impression.
That said it would not hurt if such job posting/seeking place would exists for the Node-RED community to also have the possibility to identify such specialists either
If I recall right, this spring @knolleary announced Flowforge, a company that would create/is creating a product based on Node-RED. @knolleary, please clarify here, but is Flowforge a service company that would do this kind of work?
antoine-em@echoix makes a good point. One of the aims I believe of FlowForge is to take NodeRED further into the Enterprise space.
So with the investment backing FlowForge has and a growing dev team I would expect to see more demand. BTW I note that Ericsson is the latest to add NR to it's cloud IoT platform joining Siemens, Hitachi and others.
