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

[Uri Guttman]

>>>>> "NC" == Nicholas Clark <nick at ccl4.org> writes:

  >> A graduate is likely to have Java and it is easier to assess their
  >> skills. I will have nothing said against the Java programmers we
  >> have

too many schools teach the most demanded language of the day. it used to
be c, then c++ and now java. large corps and their suits like java since
they know they can hire hundreds of monkeys and somehow corral their
work into something which resembles a working project. even if 30% of
them are super stupid monkeys (a conservative estimate) you can be a
'productive' shop by suit standards. of course the equivilent perl shop
would be massively smaller and more efficient but you do need decent
hackers and that is hard to find in quantity. there are some larger perl
shops out there (we seem them advertise on the jobs list) but they are
few and far between compared to the java shops. i am seeing more smaller
companies go with perl as they are founded by good perl hackers. but
they rarely grow into very large shops.

  NC> That's an interesting observation. How does one assess Perl
  NC> ability correctly, reliably and with minimal risk (as perceived by
  NC> the management)?  I don't have a good answer to that. I'm curious
  NC> what the london.pm hive mind thinks.

that is part of what i will be trying to do. the first step is knowing
how to code well in general and knowing perl reasonably
yourself. competency tests are useless in this area so you have to look
at actual code written by the applicant. you can assess how they think
by their design, how careful they are by their coding and test coverage,
communication skills by their comments and docs, etc. i see jobs where
cpan modules are a plus and i applaud that. not only do you have public
code to look at, you know they are trying to be part of the perl
community.

uri

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Uri Guttman  ------  uri at stemsystems.com  -------- http://www.stemsystems.com
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