The Free Love-, er, Teach-In

[Nicholas Clark]

On Mon, Mar 12, 2007 at 02:16:49PM +0000, Jonathan Stowe wrote:
> On Mon, 2007-03-12 at 13:42 +0000, Denny wrote:
> 
> > Training beginners (to do stuff the way that Learning Perl already says
> > to do it, iirc) doesn't do anything about the shortage of high-end
> > developers that is currently causing various companies severe hiring
> > problems (if anecdotal evidence is to be believed).
> 
> Neither, IMO, does a short training course for "improvers". Infact I'm
> not convinced there actually is a shortage of "high-end developers"
> rather a shortage of skilled developers with lowish salary expectations
> who are interested in working in the kinds of places that want to
> recruit these people. 

You might be being over-specific here. I'd take out the
"lowish salary expectations"

Whilst it is true with some of the employment adverts we've seen (Denny's
employer specifically not being a culprit here), as best I can tell the
problem seems to be that there are quite a few firms attempting to recruit
for

10 MAKE A WEBSITE
20 GOTO 10

where there is not fantastic scope for programming* creativity in the task at
line 10, and sufficient good people (at least whom I talk to in London.pm)
looking for a job that has more long term scope than that tight loop.

(eg internal career progression prospects, non-insane management,
programming challenges that involve program design, rather than working
round needless incompatibilities of various web browsers)

If London wanted a team of really good Perl programmers, I have some idea
of where to poach them from, but I've yet to see a company where they
wouldn't (quite legitimately) get bored or frustrated by the work.

To prove me wrong, I expect to see PERSONAL RECOMMENDATIONS of "come work
here" attached to job adverts.

Nicholas Clark


* design creativity, yes. But if the job wants /\bPerl\b/ && /\bCSS\b/ amongst
  its requirements, it may not be as hard core "programming" as one that wants
  /\bPerl\b/ && /\bC\b/