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

[Zach Vonler]

On 8/7/06, Peter Corlett <abuse at cabal.org.uk> wrote:
> Well, in theory, every other candidate would be above average, but
> the average is just so damn low that you want more than just "above
> average".

Not true, the arithmetic mean does not give any information about the
distribution of the data points.  I'm not just being a math pedant, I
happen to agree with some of Joel's [0] thoughts on the matter, which
say basically that the distribution is such that good programmers are
so much better than below-average programmers as to be different
animals entirely.

Later,
Zach

0: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/