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

[Adam Turoff]

On Mon, Aug 07, 2006 at 03:15:02PM +0100, Nicholas Clark wrote:
> How does one assess Perl ability correctly, reliably and with minimal
> risk (as perceived by the management)?  I don't have a good answer to
> that. 

First two questions:
  1) What does this piece of code do?
  2) Tell me something wrong with it.

  (repeat as necessary, with increasing difficulty)

When I was programming in C for a living, "Write strcpy()" weeded
out 90+% of the applicants that made it through the resume screening.
The second question was "Write strstr()".  Boyer-Moore was *not* a
requirement.

It's *not* hard finding out if an applicant is unqualified, or a bad
match.  It *is* hard finding the above average ones.  I don't know why
anyone expects to find an above average hire every 2-3 candidates.

-- Adam