System Development for Individuals (Part 3)

In this mini-series, I have been challenging the notion that System Development exists as an objective discipline applicable to a widespread audience of traders.  Understanding system development as a wholly individualistic pursuit makes me better understand why past attempts to organize a system development group have failed.

Of the limited number of people who trade, I was looking for people with a significant amount of time to devote to system development.  This may exclude people with separate full-time jobs.  I was then looking for people in/near my city.

By now, the field of potential collaborators was probably narrowed to a handful and many selection criteria still remained.  How can I find these people?  I tried www.meetup.com without success.  Are they on Craigslist, Facebook, or LinkedIn?  Each of these is a different avenue.  It’s probable that some candidates were ill-suited to work with me because I demanded a degree of open-mindedness, willingness to suspend judgment, and substantial freedom from commercial influence (e.g. trader education companies, affiliate programs, etc.).  I also demanded they use my preferred software package since I had already spent 18 months arduously working to learn it.

Additional selection criteria make this seem like another instance of the knowledge-specificity monster where at the end of the road, nothing remains (see http://www.optionfanatic.com/2012/12/17/system-development-for-individuals-part-1).  Candidates would have needed to use the same or comparable brokerage platform (else one or more of us might have to change), shared desired markets and time frames to trade, perhaps shared attitudes toward fundamentals or other potential means to generate trading candidates, etc.  The greater the number of selection criteria, the more restrictive the overall requirements and the fewer people available to meet them all.