What I found most interesting is that he has a successful business but no programmers, other then himself, and this one Ruby/Rails developer (for 2 years but no

What I found most interesting is that he has a successful business but no programmers, other then himself, and this one Ruby/Rails developer (for 2 years but now gone). Yet he has legions of support staff. Having 1 hired person to rewrite your 90,000 lines of code into another language will burn that person out. Hire the expensive professional programmer but also hire a much cheaper 'newbie' and have him train from the ground up to replace the professional who is going to move on to bigger better things. In a few months the newbie should be programming on the main project and will have excitement and passion because he is excited (more excited then the professional hired gun). I am also curious about the "retraining" that would have to happen for the support staff. I thought they were writing more or less a clone of what was there so why the retraining, if it all looks the same, it should interact with the user/employees the same therefore no retraining would be necessary.