the "no good Perl jobs"/"no good Perl programmers" myth

[Pete Sergeant]

On Mon, Aug 07, 2006 at 02:28:52PM +0100, Nicholas Clark wrote:
> You have? If so, what did you find?

Where 'recently' is about a year ago. We found that most people who
wrote Perl on their CV had no idea whatsoever about Perl, and could't
answer the most basic questions concerning Perl. For a position that
/stressed/ Perl as a requirement.

The CVs looked great tho - if there hadn't been a technical interview,
we'd probably have hired the guy with the 1st in Computer Science from a
well known university, who it turned out had virtually 0 knowledge.

We had 1 (ONE) candidate who was of a vaguely proficient (and in fact,
exceptionally skilled) nature (who I'm sure will make himself known if
he wants), who we jumped on, as he was the only person with a hope in
hell of doing a decent job.

It seems that people put Perl on their CV in much the same way as people
put Javascript on their CV - they once had some interaction with it,
consider it exceptionally similar to previous technologies they've used
and thus consider themselves to be experts.

+Pete