Mike Bourdon wrote:
In my humble opinion the perl community needs to embrace the concept of self propagation. For the most part perl/oo perl/mod_perl developers are self taught. Junior or mid level talent (a majority of the talent pool) is passed over as not enough experience. Perhaps this is because they do not push themselves or the roles they come from are User Interface or system ops, people that did not make it in those roles. This where as an investment of time and effort can go a long way into building the pool of perl/oo perl/mod_perl developers. Too often everyone is looking for the instant gratification of a senior level skill set.Believe it or not, there is a perception that senior perl/oo perl/mod_perl developers do not play well with others. An active mentoring role played by senior developers and gurus needs to be taken. Reach out and take a junior person under your wing and actively work to raise their level of coding skill set. Perl/oo perl/mod_perl’s community and your future may depend on it.
I completely agree with what you're saying here. At my previous employer (i changed jobs in august) we found it pretty much impossible to find entry/mid level perl people, so what we did was hire entry level people straight out of school that had maybe a little bit of perl, but displayed the chops to be able to learn what we needed them to learn. This worked out great for us, and i know it's been the way that at least a couple of other small perl shops in Toronto have been building their teams. If you can find a good programmer, it easy to turn them into a good perl programmer if they are willing.
Right now, in Toronto if you're looking to hire a senior level perl programmer you're looking at 75K plus CAD. There are a couple of well funded shops in the city that will throw 6 figures at the right candidate.
The mentoring thing is huge though. Perl generally isn't taught in schools, and if you're building a team from the ground up, you're going to have to teach. Which is in a lot of ways actually a good thing, because you can hopefully teach people Modern Perl, instead of the formmail.pl style perl ;)
This is part of the reason why i'd love to see more tutorial style documentation on perl.apache.org.
Adam
