Last month in my article, "Contractors' job search toolkit" at http://www.dominopower.com/issues/issue200105/contractors001.html, I examined the Lotus Notes hiring landscape and offered tools for contractors working to line up their next assignments. The piece also examined the outlook for Lotus contractors, and I concluded by asking you all to write me with information concerning your respective employment opportunities.

The responses I received offer a snapshot of the Lotus hiring scene, right from the developers' mouths. The good news is the sky is not falling. But clouds are indeed on the horizon, according to the numerous responses from the field.

The slowing economy has put a host of developers on the bench, as expressed by the fairly typical sentiments from this developer from a prominent firm:

I have been with [name of company withheld] and the firms it acquired for a lot of years. The last few months have hit all our Wall Street clients, causing a whole lot of us to be on the bench. This time most of us were laid off, including me.

I am, however, their only Lotus/Domino professional. The others ranged from mainframe COBOL to Java. I can't say that they discriminate against anyone in particular. It was more like a fire sale! I wonder what they will use for personnel when the economy restarts...

All my Notes work was pretty much on my own, from servers to Web pages. I just finished up at Citibank (which is throwing out all consultants except the ones from their Indian subsidiary); I had some management intranet Web sites running R5 on Windows NT and Linux. I also did some Oracle, Java, and Visual Basic there, among other things. It was great fun while it lasted. Just before they laid me off, I created some really fancy documentation for two projects. It probably is time to move on.