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

[Hildo Biersma]

On Tue, Aug 08, 2006 at 09:55:24PM +0100, Dirk Koopman wrote:
> 
> What they mean is: too expensive.
> 
> It seems to me that everybody wants really good perl people, but nobody
> wants to pay for them. And that, sadly, is why perl is dying...
> 
> If there are no decent jobs, then there really isn't any incentive to
> spend the time learning the language - and let's face it: to do it some
> justice, one requires a fair amount of time writing stuff. 

At the danger of sounding like a recruiter, let me just say that I work
for a firm that is seriously looking for good perl programmers, pays
decent salaries, has offices in London and New York, but is in the
Financial Services industry so sadly not interesting to people like
Nick.

The problem we're seeming to have is that the resumes of the good perl
candidates never get through HR, as our HR monkeys are trained to look
for things like "CS degree", "Java experience" etc, and toss out resumes
that don't have that.  So most of the hiring of the techie teams I work
is not from resumes that we get out of the cold (only HR sees those),
but through friends of friends, word of mouth, etc.

Hence I'd like to argue the problem is not just the populairy of perl or
the lack of jobs, but the poor job that recruiters and HR intermediaries
seem to be doing.  Which is why folks like Uri are so important...

Hildo