Garden City Web developer still hiring

A few years into a miserable economy, some Long Island companies are still not hiring and others are taking on just a few people. But after 18 months in business, Matthew Weitzman's Garden City-based Web development company has not stopped hiring yet.

MJW Media, which Weitzman, 25, started a couple of years after graduating from Queens College in 2008, has 14 employees, most of them software developers -- three full time, the rest part time -- 32 clients and sales in six figures. MJW has contracts to develop social media strategies for health care businesses and developers. No one at the company is over 30.

"I try to undercut every one of our competitors," said Weitzman. "People say to me, 'You're young and your prices are so low. How do you do it'? I tell them we're a group of young people. We have a team in India, Argentina and the Philippines," where coding is outsourced, keeping costs down.

Weitzman is unapologetic about the outsourcing. He has hired locals, he said. "I started a business because I want to [provide] small business quality work at lower costs." The conceptual and architectural Web work is done here, he said.

He began by working for a Manhattan Web company. "I made them hire me," he said. They did not do video production, which Weitzman studied at Queens; he told them they needed to do that, and he got hired.

Now, he said, he's dealing with business executives twice his age who sometimes are unfamiliar with social media. "They come to me with an idea, but they don't know how to do it," Weitzman said. "They don't know the time it takes."

Pearl Kamer, an economist for the Long Island Association, said she is seeing more and more firms like MJW on the Island. "Long Island has an entrepreneurial economy," Kamer said. "You have young people who are basically entrepreneurs who want to start their own business and are knowledgeable about social media."

Weitzman said he just hired three interns, adding that every time he hires some new interns he winds up taking at least one on full-time.