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

[Joel Bernstein]

On Thu, Aug 10, 2006 at 11:09:33AM +0100, Jonathan Peterson wrote:
>                       Agencies are fiendishly expensive (20-35% of annual 
> salary), but in the last year and a bit, I've had little luck advertising. 
> I'd say at the moment good people generally a quite hard to find (we're a 
> Java shop).

My experience has been that due to the massive competition in the IT job
market, recruiters are happy with margins nearer 12-15%, especially if
you'll sign an exclusivity deal with their company. Of course, this just
means you get the cowboys rather than the big boys, but I don't know if
(in the most part) that's a bad thing -- they're all doing the same lame
keyword-matching, beyond that it just comes down to the size and
accuracy of their database. But we've already had the "pimps suck and
can't do a decent job for toffee due to knowing sod all about the tech
they're recruiting for" rant elsewhere in this thread.

/joel