Re: Alternative sources of Perl programmers
On 16/05/2013 19:20, Peter Corlett wrote: The agent added OPUS WILL PAY £300 TO ANYONE WHO CAN RECCOMEND A SUCCESSFUL CANDIDATE in a double-size font, which showed a certain amount of desperation to fill the role, another red flag. Also, it will not help to recruit Perl programmers who are generally spelling pedants. :-) To echo the clamour of the thread so far: If you want to attract Perl programmers, try advertising your job somewhere that Perl programmers who are looking for jobs will see it, rather than using an agent who doesn't seem to know how to find Perl programmers either.
Re: Alternative sources of Perl programmers
On 17.05.2013 06:35, Aaron Trevena wrote: Hi Duncan, On 15 May 2013 22:37, Duncan Garland duncan.garl...@ntlworld.com wrote: I didn't mention the company because I was (and still am) using my personal email and it didn't seem appropriate. Anyway, the company is Motortrak (www.motortrak.com). I visited the site, the jobs page renders really badly in my old brower so I can't read it (FF 3.6). It renders in my browser (Firefox 20.0) but there is no perl job listed, the only tech ones were for PHP and a LAMP DBA. I think Aaron pretty much hit the nail on the head with the rest of his comments.
RE: Alternative sources of Perl programmers
Hi, Thanks for all the replies. Interesting thoughts on telecommuters. Also interesting that nobody sees too much of a problem cross-training into Perl. I didn't mention the company because I was (and still am) using my personal email and it didn't seem appropriate. Anyway, the company is Motortrak (www.motortrak.com). We're located in Thames Ditton and we do websites and backend systems for chains of motor dealers. We've doubled in size to about 70 in the last three years. In the last six months we've opened an office on the west coast of the USA to partner the existing one on the east coast. Earlier this week we bumped up our nominal presence in Australia to a proper office of half a dozen people. We can reasonably claim to be doing quite well. Thames Ditton is a bit difficult to reach from certain directions because of the way the Thames loops. However, the upside of that is that it doesn't feel like the big city. Plenty of greenery, nice riverside pubs etc. Generally a good working environment. The CMS and the inventory management system (IMS) are written in PHP and doing very well. The CMS serves thousands of dealers and we have contracts in place which guarantee that the IMS will do at least a thousand. There are other PHP projects in the offing. Any idea that PHP is a toy or that Perl programmers are automatically worth more than the better PHP programmers has to be justified. The feeds are all written in Perl, as are several other systems. The service-booking system won the Automarket award for Best Digital Initiative earlier this year. It's a Perl system and is the first one on which we've used modern Perl modules such as Catalyst, DBIx::Class, Template::Toolkit and the like. We developed it over three years so there's at least 5 man-years of effort in there. Based on the success of the service-booking system and the general momentum of the company we are almost certain to be doing three or four more similar projects this year. Each will be big enough to keep the interest of an experienced programmer or provide a real challenge to a less experienced one. Hence we need more people (just one ticket signed at the moment). They don't have to be done in Perl, and they won't be done in Perl at any cost, but they sit logically in the Perl camp. As Lead Perl Programmer, I've got to make the case. We haven't been passive in our search. We saw it coming. Perl programmers have been rare for a while. It took some time to find our last Perl programmer whom we picked up from the BBC. We try to be visible in the Perl community. We sponsored the last London PM and I ran a beginner's workshop on TT. I attended most of the London PM tech meetings until they stopped. I contributed to the Catalyst Advent Calendar this year. I offered to mentor one of the students from Rick Deller's Perl Academy. I attend Southampton PM meetings. I contacted Portsmouth University and there is a possibility that we may be going in for beer and sandwiches with their computer club in the autumn. (It's only a possibility because I'm not sure the other mongers are as keen to do it as I am.) I've also tried to contact Kingston University. I didn't get a reply and I confess that I haven't tried again yet. In spite of all that, I've only had five CVs across my desk this time. None were strong candidates. One we rejected outright. A second told me at the end of his telephone interview that he had just started a contract. Numbers three and four weren't present at the appointed times for their telephone interviews and the agency couldn't trace them either. We skipped the telephone interview for number five and rushed him in for a face-to-face with a view to hiring him if he was half-decent. He wasn't. He just wasn't. When we want a PHP programmer, we only have to whistle. Anyway, that's the background. Thanks for all your replies. A fascinating read. Duncan -Original Message- From: london.pm-boun...@london.pm.org [mailto:london.pm-boun...@london.pm.org] On Behalf Of Mark Stringer Sent: 14 May 2013 10:18 To: london.pm@london.pm.org Subject: Re: Alternative sources of Perl programmers We sent out an Intern Wanted posting to heads of careers departments at various colleges and Unis. This was filtered through to the students and we had a number of promising looking applicants contact us. We're a startup, no track record, tiny budget, no benefits and all we had to our credit was wfh and flexitime. We had an intern signed in 4 days, and our pick from a number of decent looking ones. Sure, we're having to train him up a bit, but overall he's proving beneficial. With a decent sized budget for a full time employee, I'd have thought it'd be easy to get a high standard of applicant. They may not be experienced in Perl, but some experienced developers are willing to cross-train IME. Also worth pointing out that now is about the best time to be finding Uni/College leavers... they're all wondering what they're going to be doing
RE: Alternative sources of Perl programmers
Do you want to come out to Thames Ditton? It's a bit of a hike, but if you're interested I'll see what I can do. -Original Message- From: london.pm-boun...@london.pm.org [mailto:london.pm-boun...@london.pm.org] On Behalf Of James Laver Sent: 15 May 2013 23:20 To: London.pm Perl M[ou]ngers Subject: Re: Alternative sources of Perl programmers On 15 May 2013, at 23:04, Tom Hukins t...@eborcom.com wrote: I'm pleased that you enjoy your involvement in our community, but please don't spread the rumour that anything we used to do stopped happening. With a small group of volunteers and a large group of followers and mailing list subscribers, reality sometimes disrupts our aspirations. Indeed, I've been volunteered to organise the next tech meet. Now if we could just find a venue. James
Re: Alternative sources of Perl programmers
On 17 May 2013, at 20:28, Duncan Garland duncan.garl...@ntlworld.com wrote:
Do you want to come out to Thames Ditton? It's a bit of a hike, but if
you're interested I'll see what I can do.
Historically, London.pm events outside of vaguely central london tend to have
poor attendance ('vaguely' here means the BBC and Net-A-Porter are both easy to
get to despite being in zone 2). I think Thames Ditton might be stretching the
definition of 'vaguely central london' a little too far, but thanks for the
offer.
James
Re: Alternative sources of Perl programmers
On Thu, May 16, 2013 at 09:16:15AM +0100, Dave Cross wrote: Quoting Duncan Garland duncan.garl...@ntlworld.com: We sponsored the last London PM and I ran a beginner's workshop on TT. Just to be clear here, I suspect you mean that you sponsored the last London Perl Workshop. As I understand it, the last London Perl Mongers meeting was sponsored by a recruitment company. May's social was indeed sponsored by the lovely Christine Wong from Square One Resources. June's social has yet to be sponsored, but there's still time, hint hint ;)
Re: Alternative sources of Perl programmers
Yes, we were a co-sponsor of the 2012 London Perl Workshop. Sorry for the typo. As far as I know, the last London PM tech meeting was in October 2012. It's great news if they are starting again. On 16 May 2013 09:16, Dave Cross d...@dave.org.uk wrote: Quoting Duncan Garland duncan.garl...@ntlworld.com: We sponsored the last London PM and I ran a beginner's workshop on TT. Just to be clear here, I suspect you mean that you sponsored the last London Perl Workshop. As I understand it, the last London Perl Mongers meeting was sponsored by a recruitment company. Dave...
Re: Alternative sources of Perl programmers
On Wed, May 15, 2013 at 10:37:08PM +0100, Duncan Garland wrote: [...] I didn't mention the company because I was (and still am) using my personal email and it didn't seem appropriate. Anyway, the company is Motortrak (www.motortrak.com). Now I know which role you were referring to, I can follow-up on my previous post where I wrote I don't know if I've even seen your advert as you didn't say who the company is. I've certainly not had my interest piqued by it if I did. I have now seen the job ad, because I've just searched for it. Opus Recruitment Solutions sent it to me on April 30th. They sent it to an tagged email address that I only ever used on CVs submitted to job boards until about 2009, and which I now only glance at infrequently. So they're working from a very old candidate database. I did not have my interest piqued. Thames Ditton is a very inconvenient location, and the salary does not compensate for the longer commute. The advert lists PHP as very desirable which is a red flag. The agent added OPUS WILL PAY £300 TO ANYONE WHO CAN RECCOMEND A SUCCESSFUL CANDIDATE in a double-size font, which showed a certain amount of desperation to fill the role, another red flag. As it happens, Opus Recruitment Solutions send me quite a few job ads. Some of the roles are even in London and correspond to the skills on my CV. But more often they do not. Sometimes they send me the same irrelevant role multiple times. And they all go to that retired address and into email purgatory. So when I wrote I'd consider firing that agent for a start, you might want to take heed. In sharp contrast, Christine Wong of Square One who sponsored our previous social actually reads CVs and makes a proper effort to contact her shortlist of relevant candidates instead of indiscriminately spamming addresses on their database. So instead of dealing with amateurs, why not call in a professional? Square One's number is 020 7208 2828.
Re: Alternative sources of Perl programmers
Hi Duncan, On 15 May 2013 22:37, Duncan Garland duncan.garl...@ntlworld.com wrote: I didn't mention the company because I was (and still am) using my personal email and it didn't seem appropriate. Anyway, the company is Motortrak (www.motortrak.com). I visited the site, the jobs page renders really badly in my old brower so I can't read it (FF 3.6). I searched for motortrak in jobs.perl.org - do you have open job posting on there you can link to? Thames Ditton is a bit difficult to reach from certain directions because of the way the Thames loops. However, the upside of that is that it doesn't feel like the big city. Plenty of greenery, nice riverside pubs etc. Generally a good working environment. Not as difficult to reach as 280 miles west of zone 1 in Cornwall, we still manage to recruit people tho ;) The CMS and the inventory management system (IMS) are written in PHP and doing very well. The CMS serves thousands of dealers and we have contracts in place which guarantee that the IMS will do at least a thousand. There are other PHP projects in the offing. Any idea that PHP is a toy or that Perl programmers are automatically worth more than the better PHP programmers has to be justified. Better programmers cost more, experienced people cost more. The demographics of PHP programmers lean heavily towards novices, the perl ones towards older experts, Java covers both but is still more expensive than either (and according to another list I'm subscribed to, also hard to find decent java developers.. so there you go) We haven't been passive in our search. We saw it coming. Perl programmers have been rare for a while. It took some time to find our last Perl programmer whom we picked up from the BBC. We try to be visible in the Perl community. No - perl programmers haven't been rare, they just haven't been queueing up at your door : The economy has picked up, many employers have got wiser about hiring and recruiting their staff which means if you want to get the right people you have to up your game, the same applies to ruby, python and even java - only PHP really has an abundance of CVs (but probably no more developers that you want to actually hire than any other language) [ .. long list of good community involvement .. ] I attend Southampton PM meetings. I contacted Portsmouth University and there is a possibility that we may be going in for beer and sandwiches with their computer club in the autumn. (It's only a possibility because I'm not sure the other mongers are as keen to do it as I am.) Wow! That really is a lot of community involvement and you definately deserve to have that pay off. I've also tried to contact Kingston University. I didn't get a reply and I confess that I haven't tried again yet. Yes, universities can be really pretty crap about actually talking to industry despite all their hot air. In spite of all that, I've only had five CVs across my desk this time. None were strong candidates. One we rejected outright. A second told me at the end of his telephone interview that he had just started a contract. Numbers three and four weren't present at the appointed times for their telephone interviews and the agency couldn't trace them either. We skipped the telephone interview for number five and rushed him in for a face-to-face with a view to hiring him if he was half-decent. He wasn't. He just wasn't. I think you might be getting the basics wrong, you're certainly doing a lot that others aren't and that should help. There's nothing on jobs.perl.org about this role, nor blogs.perl.org (or any blog picked up by the ironman aggregator), and I haven't seen any mention of it on twitter under the #perl hashtag, and I can't read the jobs page on the website in some browsers. Have you posted to the london.pm jobs list? Hopefully you can fix the basic stuff on advertising the jobs and then your hard work on other stuff will pay off, failing that get one of the tame recruiters london.pm seems to have recently befriended and give them your company's impressive CV. One small thing, I don't think I've yet seen any company that complains about it being hard to recruit perl devs who aren't struggling because they've messed something up, it's not very endearing to any potential candidates, and even acts as a big red flag discouraging them from talking to you. A. -- Aaron J Trevena, BSc Hons http://www.aarontrevena.co.uk LAMP System Integration, Development and Consulting
Re: Alternative sources of Perl programmers
I work in a variety of offices around the world. This year my most frequent office has been Jerusalem, about 12 days there, and a couple more up the road in Ramallah and a bit further in Gaza, but I've been to another 8 or 9 on top of that. I'm almost up to 70,000 miles this year, and on my 51st flight of the year while I write this. When I'm not abroad my commute is down stairs into the study. My effective line manager has an insane schedule. He's in Moscow this week, Delhi next week, Singapore after that then Bangkok. This helps a lot, as my real line manager hasn't got a clue about the stresses of (economy class) travel. I'm hoping to be Europe bound for the next 2 weeks, with just day trips or maybe an single overnight, but Delhi, Joburg, sydney, Jakarta, shanghai, new york, kabul, washington and Singapore all need my attention in the next few months. I'm looking forward to my next long haul day flight as I'll get a change to get my teeth into writing some new code (Perl of course). The lack of distraction from email and phones is really useful, but it makes network development a bit harder, and I get funny looks when I string two laptops together on the plane! On 14 May 2013, at 23:43, Philippe Bruhat (BooK) philippe.bru...@free.fr wrote: On Tue, May 14, 2013 at 03:54:07PM +0100, Aaron Trevena wrote: On 14 May 2013 15:20, Ben Vinnerd b...@vinnerd.com wrote: On 14 May 2013 15:02, Dominic Humphries d...@thermeon.com wrote: 50 miles? Luxury! I have to do sixty! :) Indeed. My previous contract was 223 miles, each way! (I became Travelodge guest of the year during that gig!! lol) 223? Pah! my last contracting gig was 682 miles each way (Threemilestone, Cornwall to Groningen, Netherlands) I sense a contest starting... I've been a full-time employee for 6 years, and the office is (according to Google maps) 932km (579 miles, so I do not win the distance contest) away, in a different country, with no shared borders (yeah, not counting the one in the Pacific). Do I win? And I'm not working from home either, because I can go and sit in a local office (opened last year, full of real (non-dev) people, part of the company network; before that, the company rented one for the two devs working from Lyon), which is about 20 minutes walk from home. Surely there's a badge for I go to the office either by foot or by plane? On the other hand, we've not hired any remote dev since 2009. So I can probably claim the endangered species badge too. ;-) -- Philippe Bruhat (BooK) All life affects us... even that which is far from our gaze. (Moral from Groo The Wanderer #59 (Epic))
Re: Alternative sources of Perl programmers
On Wed, May 15, 2013 at 12:48:50PM +0200, Paul Weaver wrote: I'm looking forward to my next long haul day flight as I'll get a change to get my teeth into writing some new code (Perl of course). The lack of distraction from email and phones is really useful, but it makes network development a bit harder, and I get funny looks when I string two laptops together on the plane! That's one of the reasons my latest laptop has eleventy bazillion gigglebytes of memory, so I can run loads of VMs with a private notwork between them. Of course, since buying it my little networky project has been decidedly on the back burner, due to laziness :-) -- header FROM_DAVID_CANTRELLFrom =~ /david.cantrell/i describe FROM_DAVID_CANTRELLMessage is from David Cantrell scoreFROM_DAVID_CANTRELL15.72 # This figure from experimentation
Re: Alternative sources of Perl programmers
Joel Bernstein j...@fysh.org wrote And if you turned up without your Trema Finance Kit did you have to do it in your underwear? I wear underwear on all my assignments however... I am cycling off road from London to Paris on behalf of the British Heart Foundation at the end of June. I will guarantee to do it commando if I get £100 in sponsorship from this list. All donations will be doubled through matching funds. You can sponsor me here: http://www.justgiving.com/Chris-Jack4 Chris
Re: Alternative sources of Perl programmers
Damian (and Dave cross) disagree with you on that one. A week with them is worth more than a year's actual experience. On 14/05/13 22:10, Uri Guttman wrote: also even a week of training by damian (or dave cross) won't give actual experience. the trainees might do better but still have a steep learning curve in the real world.
Re: Alternative sources of Perl programmers
On 05/15/2013 12:06 PM, AJ Dhaliwal wrote: Damian (and Dave cross) disagree with you on that one. A week with them is worth more than a year's actual experience. On 14/05/13 22:10, Uri Guttman wrote: also even a week of training by damian (or dave cross) won't give actual experience. the trainees might do better but still have a steep learning curve in the real world. real world experience can't be taught in a classroom. i know damian's courses well as i produced a bunch of them in boston. you can only use some of the things you learn in a given shop. house rules, idiot cow-orkers, bad code base and such all conspire to slow down the application of what you learn in classes. in classes you don't work with real code much, you don't have to work around existing code, etc. that is what real world teaches you. as for training these days, o'reilly school of tech has a good set of online perl classes (written by peter scott). you have to code up problems in their sandbox to pass each test/level. they have online people to review and help you out. not saying this is better than a well taught class but it is another way to do it and they do it well. also being online, remote and self paced it has some advantages over a classroom. the real problem is getting shops to PAY for any sort of training. i was producing damian classes successfully for 3 or so years. then the economy bottomed out (this was before the great recession) and training budgets dried up. they still haven't come back yet from what i have seen. i would love to pull together damian training and client sponsorship but that didn't work when i tried it. uri
Re: Alternative sources of Perl programmers
On 15 May 2013 18:28, Uri Guttman u...@stemsystems.com wrote: the real problem is getting shops to PAY for any sort of training. i was producing damian classes successfully for 3 or so years. then the economy bottomed out (this was before the great recession) and training budgets dried up. they still haven't come back yet from what i have seen. i would love to pull together damian training and client sponsorship but that didn't work when i tried it. You mean people are complaining about how hard it is to hire just the right people but nobody ponies up the cash to train anybody? Surely you jest sir! ;) A. -- Aaron J Trevena, BSc Hons http://www.aarontrevena.co.uk LAMP System Integration, Development and Consulting
Re: Alternative sources of Perl programmers
On 15/05/2013 19:42, Abigail wrote: On Thu, May 16, 2013 at 12:06:33AM +0800, AJ Dhaliwal wrote: Damian (and Dave cross) disagree with you on that one. A week with them is worth more than a year's actual experience. Doubtful. There's a lot more to making a good programmer than knowing the language, just like being a spelling bee doesn't make you a good novelist. When I'm looking for a good Perl programmer, whether the candidate knows Perl or not doesn't matter much (of course, if the candidate claims to know Perl, (s)he better shows (s)he knows the language); for a good programmer, learning a new language should not be a problem. Learning a new language shouldn't be, but becoming productive in it is. Being productive isn't much about the language. It's the quirks of the toolchain, learning where to get third party libraries, what The One True Solution is to common problems and how to be productive with those One True libraries, knowing where to ask for help and who to trust (don't ask london.pm, for they will answer yes, no, and buffy), and so on. I'm sure I could pick up python or ruby or javascript or whatever is fashionable in a week, but becoming *productive* in them would take months of constant use, and probably years of constant use to become as productive in them as I am in perl. Which is why I have put little effort into learning them. It's so offputting to have a simple problem, which I know I could solve with twenty or thirty lines of perl in five minutes, and find that because I don't know the tools I get frustrated and give up after half an hour in python. -- David Cantrell | Minister for Arbitrary Justice More people are driven insane through religious hysteria than by drinking alcohol.-- W C Fields
RE: Alternative sources of Perl programmers
Hi, Thanks for all the replies. Interesting thoughts on telecommuters. Also interesting that nobody sees too much of a problem cross-training into Perl. I didn't mention the company because I was (and still am) using my personal email and it didn't seem appropriate. Anyway, the company is Motortrak (www.motortrak.com). We're located in Thames Ditton and we do websites and backend systems for chains of motor dealers. We've doubled in size to about 70 in the last three years. In the last six months we've opened an office on the west coast of the USA to partner the existing one on the east coast. Earlier this week we bumped up our nominal presence in Australia to a proper office of half a dozen people. We can reasonably claim to be doing quite well. Thames Ditton is a bit difficult to reach from certain directions because of the way the Thames loops. However, the upside of that is that it doesn't feel like the big city. Plenty of greenery, nice riverside pubs etc. Generally a good working environment. The CMS and the inventory management system (IMS) are written in PHP and doing very well. The CMS serves thousands of dealers and we have contracts in place which guarantee that the IMS will do at least a thousand. There are other PHP projects in the offing. Any idea that PHP is a toy or that Perl programmers are automatically worth more than the better PHP programmers has to be justified. The feeds are all written in Perl, as are several other systems. The service-booking system won the Automarket award for Best Digital Initiative earlier this year. It's a Perl system and is the first one on which we've used modern Perl modules such as Catalyst, DBIx::Class, Template::Toolkit and the like. We developed it over three years so there's at least 5 man-years of effort in there. Based on the success of the service-booking system and the general momentum of the company we are almost certain to be doing three or four more similar projects this year. Each will be big enough to keep the interest of an experienced programmer or provide a real challenge to a less experienced one. Hence we need more people (just one ticket signed at the moment). They don't have to be done in Perl, and they won't be done in Perl at any cost, but they sit logically in the Perl camp. As Lead Perl Programmer, I've got to make the case. We haven't been passive in our search. We saw it coming. Perl programmers have been rare for a while. It took some time to find our last Perl programmer whom we picked up from the BBC. We try to be visible in the Perl community. We sponsored the last London PM and I ran a beginner's workshop on TT. I attended most of the London PM tech meetings until they stopped. I contributed to the Catalyst Advent Calendar this year. I offered to mentor one of the students from Rick Deller's Perl Academy. I attend Southampton PM meetings. I contacted Portsmouth University and there is a possibility that we may be going in for beer and sandwiches with their computer club in the autumn. (It's only a possibility because I'm not sure the other mongers are as keen to do it as I am.) I've also tried to contact Kingston University. I didn't get a reply and I confess that I haven't tried again yet. In spite of all that, I've only had five CVs across my desk this time. None were strong candidates. One we rejected outright. A second told me at the end of his telephone interview that he had just started a contract. Numbers three and four weren't present at the appointed times for their telephone interviews and the agency couldn't trace them either. We skipped the telephone interview for number five and rushed him in for a face-to-face with a view to hiring him if he was half-decent. He wasn't. He just wasn't. When we want a PHP programmer, we only have to whistle. Anyway, that's the background. Thanks for all your replies. A fascinating read. Duncan -Original Message- From: london.pm-boun...@london.pm.org [mailto:london.pm-boun...@london.pm.org] On Behalf Of Mark Stringer Sent: 14 May 2013 10:18 To: london.pm@london.pm.org Subject: Re: Alternative sources of Perl programmers We sent out an Intern Wanted posting to heads of careers departments at various colleges and Unis. This was filtered through to the students and we had a number of promising looking applicants contact us. We're a startup, no track record, tiny budget, no benefits and all we had to our credit was wfh and flexitime. We had an intern signed in 4 days, and our pick from a number of decent looking ones. Sure, we're having to train him up a bit, but overall he's proving beneficial. With a decent sized budget for a full time employee, I'd have thought it'd be easy to get a high standard of applicant. They may not be experienced in Perl, but some experienced developers are willing to cross-train IME. Also worth pointing out that now is about the best time to be finding Uni/College leavers... they're all wondering what they're going to be doing
Re: Alternative sources of Perl programmers
On Wed, May 15, 2013 at 10:37:08PM +0100, Duncan Garland wrote: I attended most of the London PM tech meetings until they stopped. I'm pleased that you enjoy your involvement in our community, but please don't spread the rumour that anything we used to do stopped happening. With a small group of volunteers and a large group of followers and mailing list subscribers, reality sometimes disrupts our aspirations. We get distracted and occasionally overwhelmed, but we don't stop. Tom
Re: Alternative sources of Perl programmers
On 15 May 2013, at 23:04, Tom Hukins t...@eborcom.com wrote: I'm pleased that you enjoy your involvement in our community, but please don't spread the rumour that anything we used to do stopped happening. With a small group of volunteers and a large group of followers and mailing list subscribers, reality sometimes disrupts our aspirations. Indeed, I've been volunteered to organise the next tech meet. Now if we could just find a venue… James
Re: Alternative sources of Perl programmers
Hi Uri, Yeah, I guess my brush was a bit broad there, I herewith send out my apologies to all the good agents, and the bad ones can suck :) So, what happened was that the agency contacted me and said they had this on-site role in CH, and I said I'd be able to work 50/50 on/off-site, and they said that I should talk to the client about that. The client and I had a telephone interview where they were happy for me to start on-site and gradually move off-site. Then the agent called me and said that's not going to happen. And I never heard from them again... The agents motivation, I imagine, was to keep people under their umbrella of control as far as possible. In general terms I'm happy to work though an agent so long as my cut is reasonable as I don't want the hassle of dealing chasing up new roles. Sometimes dealing directly works very well indeed, and sometimes working through an agent works very well indeed, too. I have good and bad stories for both scenarios. What we all want, (whoever is involved), is to be content with the arrangement. -- Ciao Richard Foley http://www.rfi.net/books.html On Tue, May 14, 2013 at 12:45:09AM -0400, Uri Guttman wrote: On 05/14/2013 12:09 AM, Richard Foley wrote: I had a contract role in Switzerland where the client was happy for me to come on board in a (largely) remote capacity. That meant some on-site work to familiarize me with the team and the project and then shift off-site for the majority of the work. This suited both parties. The agency stepped in, (they'd been unavailable during the telephone interview), and said there was no way I was going to work remotely for this client, and scotched the deal. Both the client and the contractor were screwed, and this had nothing to do with the practicalities of remote working, or problem solving of any kind. This was simply a power broking intervention. how did the agent scotch it? what motivation did they have (other than no ethics and lots of stupidity)? it may sound sappy but i am very happy when i place a perl hacker and all three parties (candidate, client and me) win. it does happen quite a bit IMO. my first placement was a grad student in germany and he moved to nyc for this job and he still has it 8 years later. that makes me happy. :) and i can't scotch things as i like c_ognac better! uri _
Re: Alternative sources of Perl programmers
The issue is that there is a number of Perl Developer roles out there at the moment , I'm working on a number at present but competition is very high. I say to all my clients if you see a candidate you like , you must interview quickly and then if you like them offer as often someone will have a couple of offers on the table. There is a limited number of junior developers out there going into Perl we have launched the Perl Academy to counter act this and hopefully this will help. But I agree companies allowing telecommute will be a massive benefit to sourcing developers. Kindest regards Rick Deller Perl Specialist Recruitment Consultant DL: 0208 944 4187 / Mob: 0772 984 595 / SW: 0208 944 4180 / F: 0208 946 6299 Barry House, 20/22 Worple Road, Wimbledon, London, SW19 4DH r...@eligo.co.uk| www.eligo.co.uk | https://twitter.com/PerlRick Proud to be a Sponsor of The Perl QA Hackathon 2013 Proud to be a Sponsor of YAPC::2013 Proud Sponsors of The London Perl Workshop 2012 Please consider the environment before printing this e-mail CLIENT NOTICE - By accepting details of, interviewing or engaging an applicant introduced by us in the position offered or any other position, the client is agreeing to be bound by our standard Terms of Business unless otherwise agreed in writing. DISCLAIMER NOTICE - The information contained in this e-mail and any attachments is confidential. It is intended only for the named addressee(s) and may not be disclosed to anyone else without the consent of Eligo Recruitment Ltd. If you are not the named addressee you must not use, disclose, distribute, copy, print or rely on the contents of the e-mail and should destroy it immediately. Eligo Recruitment Ltd has taken every reasonable precaution to ensure that any attachment to this e-mail is free of all known viruses. However, Eligo Recruitment Ltd cannot accept liability for any damage sustained as a result of viruses and would advise that you carry out your own virus scanning. -Original Message- From: london.pm-boun...@london.pm.org [mailto:london.pm-boun...@london.pm.org] On Behalf Of london.pm-requ...@london.pm.org Sent: 14 May 2013 05:48 To: london.pm@london.pm.org Subject: london.pm Digest, Vol 91, Issue 11 Send london.pm mailing list submissions to london.pm@london.pm.org To subscribe or unsubscribe via the World Wide Web, visit http://london.pm.org/mailman/listinfo/london.pm or, via email, send a message with subject or body 'help' to london.pm-requ...@london.pm.org You can reach the person managing the list at london.pm-ow...@london.pm.org When replying, please edit your Subject line so it is more specific than Re: Contents of london.pm digest... Today's Topics: 1. Re: Alternative sources of Perl programmers (Avleen Vig) 2. Re: Alternative sources of Perl programmers (Kieren Diment) 3. Working from home (was: Re: Alternative sources of Perl programmers) (Sam Kington) 4. Re: Working from home (was: Re: Alternative sources of Perl programmers) (Kieren Diment) 5. Re: Alternative sources of Perl programmers (Richard Foley) 6. Re: Alternative sources of Perl programmers (Richard Foley) 7. Re: Alternative sources of Perl programmers (Uri Guttman) -- Message: 1 Date: Mon, 13 May 2013 20:49:13 -0500 From: Avleen Vig avl...@gmail.com Subject: Re: Alternative sources of Perl programmers To: London.pm Perl M[ou]ngers london.pm@london.pm.org Message-ID: CAMjP1KmLkEL6hu9kscUWyNUPbJeWpBUANxM=5yg3l95_zzh...@mail.gmail.com Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 You're not alone in facing this, and as a rule it isn't a perl-specific issue. Perl's just at the leading edge of this. 1. There are fewer perl programmers than PHP programmers. There are many reasons for this, they really don't matter that much. In the end, perl doesn't get as much exposure and it becomes a vicious circle where fewer and fewer people learn perl. 2. There are fewer programmers than there is demand. This is only going to get worse. If you think it's bad now, wait 5 years. 3. The telecommute issue, which has already been brought up. The biggest blockers to this are general fear of the unknown, and a poor understanding of how to manage remote employees. It's really very different to managing local ones. Have you considered hiring existing programmers and teaching them, or giving them time to learn perl? You should. Or you'll have to massively up the price you're willing to pay for someone (either an existing perl dev, or someone who will be able to learn enough perl quickly and well). Simple supply and demand. Again, it'll only get worse. I'd encourage every company to hire more junior people and give them a lot of training. Go ask your HR / recruiting departments how much it costs to hire someone. Don't be shocked when they come back and tell you
Re: Alternative sources of Perl programmers
One thing to bear in mind is that remote-working does NOT suit everybody. It's not about lounging around watching TV or mowing the lawn. It is about being able to organize your day so ALL your jobs get done, without having the hassle of the commute. On the negative side, some people find having their work at home means they are unable to separate their work/private time, others miss the colleague contact. It's not all roses. On the plus side, being able to mow the lawn in the time you used to commute is a bonus. Working in a (presumably) comfortable environment is nice. Having more time to be around your kids, if you have a young family, is a plus too. Having a dedicated work room/office space where you can shut the door, if only metaphorically, is almost essential for separating work and play though. And of course, as Dilbert found out after 4 days of remote-working, if you go to work naked nobody cares ;) -- Ciao Richard Foley http://www.rfi.net/books.html On Tue, May 14, 2013 at 08:08:40AM +0100, Gareth Kirwan wrote: On 13-05-13 10:48 PM, Mark Fowler wrote: On Monday, May 13, 2013, Duncan Garland wrote: We're advertising for a Perl programmer again, and once again we are struggling. The question I ask anyone who has problems hiring for any IT position is have you considered telecommute? We've had a mix of teleworkers and onsite staff, going back over the past decade. Last year I started to consider the issues of hiring good programmers locally, and concluded that there isn't really a choice. So we embraced teleworking completely when hiring new programmers recently. It's made a world of difference. The CVs from agents trickled in. I would have thought that meant that the perl programmers weren't out there. But the response to our jobs.perl.org advert was enormous, and very good quality indeed. I'm still open to anything through agents, because if I find the right candidate then I wouldn't care where they came from. I'd suggest opening yourself up to telecommuting. Make sure you actually hire for it as a skill, though. Assuming You're a good dev, you can work from home, surely? can be disastrous. Watch for signs of demotivation, and ensure that there's some telecommuting best practices available.
Re: Alternative sources of Perl programmers
We sent out an Intern Wanted posting to heads of careers departments at various colleges and Unis. This was filtered through to the students and we had a number of promising looking applicants contact us. We're a startup, no track record, tiny budget, no benefits and all we had to our credit was wfh and flexitime. We had an intern signed in 4 days, and our pick from a number of decent looking ones. Sure, we're having to train him up a bit, but overall he's proving beneficial. With a decent sized budget for a full time employee, I'd have thought it'd be easy to get a high standard of applicant. They may not be experienced in Perl, but some experienced developers are willing to cross-train IME. Also worth pointing out that now is about the best time to be finding Uni/College leavers... they're all wondering what they're going to be doing come June/July. As for wfh, I've done it for about 10 years now. One previous employer operated solely on this basis. Staff turnover was minimal. It occasionally didn't work out due to distractions/it not being a suitable environment for some, but by and large, it seems to work IME. Cheers Mark On 05/13/2013 10:22 PM, Duncan Garland wrote: Hi, We're advertising for a Perl programmer again, and once again we are struggling. It's a shame because we've got quite a lot of development work in the offing, mostly using Catalyst, DBIx::Class, Moose and the like. I spoke to the agent today and asked why so few people are coming forward. His view was that there aren't many Perl vacancies about at the moment, and even fewer people are interested in them. What are other companies doing about this? We've got several PHP projects on the go as well. It's easier to get local PHP programmers and when we can't, there seems to be a constant supply of good Eastern European programmers. Why isn't there the same stream of Eastern European Perl programmers? A second possibility is to cross-train experienced programmers from other languages into Perl. However, Perl has got itself such a reputation for being difficult to learn that the CTO winces whenever I suggest the idea. How have other companies got on when they've said that they will take experience in Python/Django or Ruby/Rails or whatever in lieu of experience in Perl/Catalyst? Was anybody interested and did they succeed? The third possibility is just to move some of the projects ear-marked for Perl into the PHP camp. I don't really believe that they can't be done in PHP, but it's a pity because they sit nicely with similar successful projects we've done in Perl. (A Catalyst-based system of ours won an industry-wide prize for Best Digital Initiative a couple of months ago.) All the best. Duncan
Re: Alternative sources of Perl programmers
On 13 May 2013 22:22, Duncan Garland duncan.garl...@ntlworld.com wrote: We're advertising for a Perl programmer again, and once again we are struggling. It's a shame because we've got quite a lot of development work in the offing, mostly using Catalyst, DBIx::Class, Moose and the like. That's a good start but not much to go on... Where and how are you advertising? What sort of role is it, and how does the salary (presumably you're advertising a salary range) stack up against the market for your industry/area? I spoke to the agent today and asked why so few people are coming forward. His view was that there aren't many Perl vacancies about at the moment, and even fewer people are interested in them. The agent is talking bollocks, find another - some actually specialise in Perl so they must be confident that there are both enough candidates and vacancies to make a living from. The number of perl vacancies and developers are both increasing based on all the data available. What are other companies doing about this? Lots of different things, telecommute, offering salaries that match or beat what you'd get with the same experience with Java, offering flexitime and other decent benefit packages that make it worth taking the job and sticking with it. We've got several PHP projects on the go as well. It's easier to get local PHP programmers and when we can't, there seems to be a constant supply of good Eastern European programmers. Why isn't there the same stream of Eastern European Perl programmers? I've never found that a problem myself - both my current and previous employers have recruited developers from eastern europe, they're not 10 a penny, but good developers aren't 10 a penny for any tech in any country. A second possibility is to cross-train experienced programmers from other languages into Perl. However, Perl has got itself such a reputation for being difficult to learn that the CTO winces whenever I suggest the idea. At headforwards we've cross-trained maybe a quarter of the development team from C++ and other tech, it was very successful, to the point where some have been promoted into very senior roles within 2 years. That was without formal perl training - of which there is plenty available like Dave Cross' courses and perl academy. How have other companies got on when they've said that they will take experience in Python/Django or Ruby/Rails or whatever in lieu of experience in Perl/Catalyst? Was anybody interested and did they succeed? That should work fine, the only problem I can forsee is the problem widely seen with python developers with a big chip on their shoulders about perl, they can and should be weeded out at interviews tho. I don't believe you've linked to the ad yet, I'm guessing you've already advertised on jobs.perl.org, and your local LUG. Other places you can use social networking to advertise are twitter (I got my current job via a twitter tip), coderwall (which is a really nice way to showcase your company and team), by sending your team to conferences and workshops to talk about your projects (a 5 second oh, and we're hiring at the end is usually acceptable, at least from what I've seen). You can also look at your recruitment process and advertising copy itself - does your ad stand out, does it meet the basic criteria of what a developer needs or wants to know (pay, location, will this company be in business in 18 months or fold, will I learn or work with new things, is there a career path/training/etc, is there a package as a whole including benefits, working hours, holiday, etc that will give me a better quality of life, etc) Hiring perl developers isn't *that* difficult, we've managed to recruit a large number over the last 2 years - despite our office location in Cornwall (which is also a selling point but to a much smaller pool of people), and despite all roles being on-site. Cheers, A -- Aaron J Trevena, BSc Hons http://www.aarontrevena.co.uk LAMP System Integration, Development and Consulting
Re: Alternative sources of Perl programmers
I'm actually giving a talk at the MK PM tech meet Up on Monday , so it interesting hearing people's thoughts Kindest regards Rick Deller Perl Specialist Recruitment Consultant DL: 0208 944 4187 / Mob: 0772 984 595 / SW: 0208 944 4180 / F: 0208 946 6299 Barry House, 20/22 Worple Road, Wimbledon, London, SW19 4DH r...@eligo.co.uk| www.eligo.co.uk | https://twitter.com/PerlRick Proud to be a Sponsor of The Perl QA Hackathon 2013 Proud to be a Sponsor of YAPC::2013 Proud Sponsors of The London Perl Workshop 2012 Please consider the environment before printing this e-mail CLIENT NOTICE - By accepting details of, interviewing or engaging an applicant introduced by us in the position offered or any other position, the client is agreeing to be bound by our standard Terms of Business unless otherwise agreed in writing. DISCLAIMER NOTICE - The information contained in this e-mail and any attachments is confidential. It is intended only for the named addressee(s) and may not be disclosed to anyone else without the consent of Eligo Recruitment Ltd. If you are not the named addressee you must not use, disclose, distribute, copy, print or rely on the contents of the e-mail and should destroy it immediately. Eligo Recruitment Ltd has taken every reasonable precaution to ensure that any attachment to this e-mail is free of all known viruses. However, Eligo Recruitment Ltd cannot accept liability for any damage sustained as a result of viruses and would advise that you carry out your own virus scanning. -Original Message- From: london.pm-boun...@london.pm.org [mailto:london.pm-boun...@london.pm.org] On Behalf Of london.pm-requ...@london.pm.org Sent: 14 May 2013 12:00 To: london.pm@london.pm.org Subject: london.pm Digest, Vol 91, Issue 13 Send london.pm mailing list submissions to london.pm@london.pm.org To subscribe or unsubscribe via the World Wide Web, visit http://london.pm.org/mailman/listinfo/london.pm or, via email, send a message with subject or body 'help' to london.pm-requ...@london.pm.org You can reach the person managing the list at london.pm-ow...@london.pm.org When replying, please edit your Subject line so it is more specific than Re: Contents of london.pm digest... Today's Topics: 1. Re: Alternative sources of Perl programmers (James Laver) 2. Re: Alternative sources of Perl programmers (Gareth Kirwan) 3. Re: Alternative sources of Perl programmers (Lyle) 4. Re: Alternative sources of Perl programmers (Richard Foley) 5. Re: Alternative sources of Perl programmers (Mark Stringer) 6. Re: Alternative sources of Perl programmers (Aaron Trevena) -- Message: 1 Date: Tue, 14 May 2013 07:48:43 +0100 From: James Laver james.la...@gmail.com Subject: Re: Alternative sources of Perl programmers To: London.pm Perl M[ou]ngers london.pm@london.pm.org Message-ID: c2889b02-6e90-4ddf-b1db-3cba04c27...@gmail.com Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii On 13 May 2013, at 23:27, Kieren Diment dim...@gmail.com wrote: The management challenges for telecommute jobs are different to those for on site. But it does increase the pool of potential candidates a lot. Does anyone have any useful experience about managing mixed on-site/offsite staff? I managed such a team once. The hard part is time zones, but luckily they all agreed to keep UK time (they were pretty nocturnal anyway). Pick a lightweight ticketing system (I'm currently a huge trello fan) so everything is visible to everyone. Assign tickets yourself and don't standup, actually have a chat for a few minutes on IM with each team member individually and see if they need some help with things. And make yourself available in case it happens during the day. Then the usual thing with in office staff goes - different people respond well to different management styles. One worked great if you outlined things and left them to it. Another worked brilliant if you broke things down massively and kept checking up. Honestly, it's no harder to manage than in-office staff. And I wouldn't hesitate to do it again. James -- Message: 2 Date: Tue, 14 May 2013 08:08:40 +0100 From: Gareth Kirwan g...@thermeon.com Subject: Re: Alternative sources of Perl programmers To: London.pm Perl M[ou]ngers london.pm@london.pm.org Message-ID: 5191e2f8.4010...@thermeon.com Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed On 13-05-13 10:48 PM, Mark Fowler wrote: On Monday, May 13, 2013, Duncan Garland wrote: We're advertising for a Perl programmer again, and once again we are struggling. The question I ask anyone who has problems hiring for any IT position is have you considered telecommute? We've had a mix of teleworkers and onsite staff, going back over the past decade. Last year I started to consider the issues of hiring good programmers locally
Re: Alternative sources of Perl programmers
On Mon, May 13, 2013 at 11:22 PM, Duncan Garland duncan.garl...@ntlworld.com wrote: ... We've got several PHP projects on the go as well. It's easier to get local PHP programmers and when we can't, there seems to be a constant supply of good Eastern European programmers. Why isn't there the same stream of Eastern European Perl programmers? There is a Polish Perl Workshop next week :) I am sure the organizers would not mind if you sponsored a beer round to advertise your vacancies. Cheers, Z.
Re: Alternative sources of Perl programmers
On 13 May 2013 23:18, Lyle webmas...@cosmicperl.com wrote: Have you considered training graduates? I hear there are a lot of them out of work. I see a lot of Perl jobs wanting and expecting nothing less than very experienced Perl programmers. If there aren't enough companies willing to give fresh programmers the experience, how are they supposed to get there? If you cut the roots off an apple tree, don't expect to harvest many apples. +1 There are lots of companies complaining of a skills gap (not just within perl, look at newspaper or magazine article about it and you'll hear the same old lines trotted out), they all seem to expect somebody else to foot the bill for training and developing staff so they can reap the benefits. It's as if they expect a magic skills fairy to somehow sprinkle developers with 5 years of perl experience, on the ground before them, obviously that doesn't happen any industry or with any language, but there is a lot of training available out there if you actually want to grow a team and train or cross-train them, rather than just poach them from somebody else. You don't even need to train them youselves to start with - there are plenty of training courses available to get them started, or you could get a trainer onsite. A. -- Aaron J Trevena, BSc Hons http://www.aarontrevena.co.uk LAMP System Integration, Development and Consulting
Re: Alternative sources of Perl programmers
Quoting Aaron Trevena aaron.trev...@gmail.com: or you could get a trainer onsite. That sounds like a *fabulous* idea :-)
Re: Alternative sources of Perl programmers
+1 (partly because this is the first thing I would have responded with) On 14 May 2013 14:10, Dave Cross d...@dave.org.uk wrote: Quoting Aaron Trevena aaron.trev...@gmail.com: or you could get a trainer onsite. That sounds like a *fabulous* idea :-)
Re: Alternative sources of Perl programmers
On 14 May 2013 14:10, Dave Cross d...@dave.org.uk wrote: Quoting Aaron Trevena aaron.trev...@gmail.com: or you could get a trainer onsite. That sounds like a *fabulous* idea :-) bbcOther perl trainers are available/bbc ;) A -- Aaron J Trevena, BSc Hons http://www.aarontrevena.co.uk LAMP System Integration, Development and Consulting
Re: Alternative sources of Perl programmers
As others have said, re: WFH. I'm a Perl contractor (about to finish a contract in a few weeks time), and it amazes me of the number of clients who do not like WFH. I have to travel 50 miles per day to get to my clients office (and back) - the overwhelming majority of the time I can do exactly the same work at home compared to on-site. I live in the North West and recently I saw a contract at Jobsite in Hampshire (i.e. a long way away). I spoke to the agent and they don't allow WFH (is this the agent not allowing me? Or Jobsite?). It would be nice if I could speak to Jobsite directly and offer a lower rate for WFH, but the agent is only interested in maximising his/her commision, so wants to charge the maximum rate, so client must think, we're paying a bigger amount, we demand on-site work. Just my thoughts there. It's disappointing when I look at the job/contract websites and I see very little at present in the way of Perl development contracts. I have a plan B that I need to start work on, of course it will be written in Perl :) If plan B works out then i'll be able to WFH all the time. If I need employees/contractors in the future, you bet your life WFH will be mandatory! :) Ben On 13 May 2013 22:22, Duncan Garland duncan.garl...@ntlworld.com wrote: Hi, We're advertising for a Perl programmer again, and once again we are struggling. It's a shame because we've got quite a lot of development work in the offing, mostly using Catalyst, DBIx::Class, Moose and the like. I spoke to the agent today and asked why so few people are coming forward. His view was that there aren't many Perl vacancies about at the moment, and even fewer people are interested in them. What are other companies doing about this? We've got several PHP projects on the go as well. It's easier to get local PHP programmers and when we can't, there seems to be a constant supply of good Eastern European programmers. Why isn't there the same stream of Eastern European Perl programmers? A second possibility is to cross-train experienced programmers from other languages into Perl. However, Perl has got itself such a reputation for being difficult to learn that the CTO winces whenever I suggest the idea. How have other companies got on when they've said that they will take experience in Python/Django or Ruby/Rails or whatever in lieu of experience in Perl/Catalyst? Was anybody interested and did they succeed? The third possibility is just to move some of the projects ear-marked for Perl into the PHP camp. I don't really believe that they can't be done in PHP, but it's a pity because they sit nicely with similar successful projects we've done in Perl. (A Catalyst-based system of ours won an industry-wide prize for Best Digital Initiative a couple of months ago.) All the best. Duncan
Re: Alternative sources of Perl programmers
Quoting Aaron Trevena aaron.trev...@gmail.com: On 14 May 2013 14:10, Dave Cross d...@dave.org.uk wrote: Quoting Aaron Trevena aaron.trev...@gmail.com: or you could get a trainer onsite. That sounds like a *fabulous* idea :-) bbcOther perl trainers are available/bbc ;) Yebbut Who ya gonna call?
Re: Alternative sources of Perl programmers
On 14 May 2013, at 14:34, Aaron Trevena wrote: On 14 May 2013 14:10, Dave Cross d...@dave.org.uk wrote: Quoting Aaron Trevena aaron.trev...@gmail.com: or you could get a trainer onsite. That sounds like a *fabulous* idea :-) bbcOther perl trainers are available/bbc ;) I don't think training is the answer always here, i think what you need is decent mentoring. And the funny thing is i think that could almost come better from outside the company. I sort of suspect it might even be better served from outside the company so people get a different perspective than 'the one true way'. G.
Re: Alternative sources of Perl programmers
On 14 May 2013 14:37, Dave Cross d...@dave.org.uk wrote: Quoting Aaron Trevena aaron.trev...@gmail.com: bbcOther perl trainers are available/bbc ;) Yebbut Who ya gonna call? The Ghostbusters are doing perl training now? -- Unde venistis vos manebit, donec completa est. -- Tenax D.
Re: Alternative sources of Perl programmers
On Tue, 2013-05-14 at 14:43 +0100, Ben Vinnerd wrote: I have to travel 50 miles per day to get to my clients office (and back) 50 miles? Luxury! I have to do sixty! :) I live in the North West and recently I saw a contract at Jobsite in Hampshire (i.e. a long way away). I spoke to the agent and they don't allow WFH (is this the agent not allowing me? Or Jobsite?). I got offered that last year - at the time, at least, Jobsite themselves were very definite about it not being WFH. djh
Re: Alternative sources of Perl programmers
Jobsite have been very definite for over a year that the job is not WFH. They are still plaintively asking for someone to come and work in their offices somewhere[0] just East of Portsmouth. Presumably they're soon either going to crack and hire a telecommuter, outsource the damn work entirely, or rewrite in Java. /joel [0]: technically more like nowhere (particularly the arse end) On 14 May 2013 16:02, Dominic Humphries d...@thermeon.com wrote: On Tue, 2013-05-14 at 14:43 +0100, Ben Vinnerd wrote: I have to travel 50 miles per day to get to my clients office (and back) 50 miles? Luxury! I have to do sixty! :) I live in the North West and recently I saw a contract at Jobsite in Hampshire (i.e. a long way away). I spoke to the agent and they don't allow WFH (is this the agent not allowing me? Or Jobsite?). I got offered that last year - at the time, at least, Jobsite themselves were very definite about it not being WFH. djh
Re: Alternative sources of Perl programmers
On 05/14/2013 09:05 AM, Aaron Trevena wrote: You don't even need to train them youselves to start with - there are plenty of training courses available to get them started, or you could get a trainer onsite. i tried something like that a few years ago with damian conway. it was an offer to employers to fund a group training and then they could hire from the students. the problem is no one shop needs to train and hire 10 people at one time. and few (really none) of the potential clients went for such a farsighted concept. also even a week of training by damian (or dave cross) won't give actual experience. the trainees might do better but still have a steep learning curve in the real world. it is more like they need a year of apprenticeship to get the experience they need. and no one is going to do that these days. uri
Re: Alternative sources of Perl programmers
On 14 May 2013 15:02, Dominic Humphries d...@thermeon.com wrote: 50 miles? Luxury! I have to do sixty! :) Indeed. My previous contract was 223 miles, each way! (I became Travelodge guest of the year during that gig!! lol)
Re: Alternative sources of Perl programmers
On 14/05/13 15:09, Joel Bernstein wrote: Jobsite have been very definite for over a year that the job is not WFH. They are still plaintively asking for someone to come and work in their offices somewhere[0] just East of Portsmouth. Presumably they're soon either going to crack and hire a telecommuter, outsource the damn work entirely, or rewrite in Java. Not on their website though, so it can't be that plaintive... Dirk
Re: Alternative sources of Perl programmers
On 14 May 2013, at 14:43, Ben Vinnerd wrote: I live in the North West and recently I saw a contract at Jobsite in Hampshire (i.e. a long way away). I spoke to the agent and they don't allow WFH (is this the agent not allowing me? Or Jobsite?). I don't want to unleash the dogs of war and also the hyena of paranoia but this could be related to IR35 and the differences between the control/tax/etc in a services contract and a contractor employment for the agency. G.
Re: Alternative sources of Perl programmers
On 14 May 2013 16:20, Ben Vinnerd b...@vinnerd.com wrote: Indeed. My previous contract was 223 miles, each way! (I became Travelodge guest of the year during that gig!! lol) Aha! Do you have any opinion on the pedestrianisation of Norwich city centre? I'll be honest, I'm dead against it.
Re: Alternative sources of Perl programmers
On 14 May 2013 15:20, Ben Vinnerd b...@vinnerd.com wrote: On 14 May 2013 15:02, Dominic Humphries d...@thermeon.com wrote: 50 miles? Luxury! I have to do sixty! :) Indeed. My previous contract was 223 miles, each way! (I became Travelodge guest of the year during that gig!! lol) 223? Pah! my last contracting gig was 682 miles each way (Threemilestone, Cornwall to Groningen, Netherlands) A. -- Aaron J Trevena, BSc Hons http://www.aarontrevena.co.uk LAMP System Integration, Development and Consulting
Re: Alternative sources of Perl programmers
On Tue, May 14, 2013 at 04:09:23PM +0200, Joel Bernstein wrote: Jobsite have been very definite for over a year that the job is not WFH. They are still plaintively asking for someone to come and work in their offices somewhere[0] just East of Portsmouth. Presumably they're soon either going to crack and hire a telecommuter, outsource the damn work entirely, or rewrite in Java. I've had several recruiters approach me with this role over the last few months. Each time, I've had to patiently explain to them that it's the arse end of nowhere and if they want me to do the role, it's either telecommute[1] or they pay my travelling to the arse end of nowhere rate[2], neither of which were acceptable to them. The most recent recruiter mentioned that Jobsite are finally considering relaxing the on-site requirement in the face of everybody saying Havant? You must be joking! and he'd get back to me, but of course he never did. [0]: technically more like nowhere (particularly the arse end) It's Havant, as in We Havant much chance of finding anybody prepared to commute here for what we're offering. [1] For which I'll even offer a discount over my on-site in London price! [2] Which was nearly double my discount WFH rate. Which seems fair, since the 5-6 hour round-trip commute is practically a second job in itself.
Re: Alternative sources of Perl programmers
On 14/05/13 15:36, Joel Bernstein wrote: Aha! Do you have any opinion on the pedestrianisation of Norwich city centre? I'll be honest, I'm dead against it. Yar a bit late for tha' Bor...
Re: Alternative sources of Perl programmers
On Tue, May 14, 2013 at 03:31:52PM +0100, Greg McCarroll wrote: On 14 May 2013, at 14:43, Ben Vinnerd wrote: [...] I live in the North West and recently I saw a contract at Jobsite in Hampshire (i.e. a long way away). I spoke to the agent and they don't allow WFH (is this the agent not allowing me? Or Jobsite?). I don't want to unleash the dogs of war and also the hyena of paranoia but this could be related to IR35 and the differences between the control/tax/etc in a services contract and a contractor employment for the agency. Is that not bass-ackwards? What looks most like disguised employment falling under IR35 to you: a) Somebody working in their own office, using their own equipment, and working whenever the hell they like so long as the job gets done; or b) Somebody going to a company's premises, using the company's equipment, and doing so every day, nine-to-five?
Re: Alternative sources of Perl programmers
On Tue, May 14, 2013 at 03:54:07PM +0100, Aaron Trevena wrote: On 14 May 2013 15:20, Ben Vinnerd b...@vinnerd.com wrote: On 14 May 2013 15:02, Dominic Humphries d...@thermeon.com wrote: 50 miles? Luxury! I have to do sixty! :) Indeed. My previous contract was 223 miles, each way! (I became Travelodge guest of the year during that gig!! lol) 223? Pah! my last contracting gig was 682 miles each way (Threemilestone, Cornwall to Groningen, Netherlands) I can just about better that with 707 miles (Zurich to Bristol) a few years ago. But to echo what has been said before, work from home, decent money and mail to jobs.perl.org. Yes, there are caveats, some of which are different to the caveats for onsite hiring, but it's a good solution for some people and for some companies. And I think I'm quite safe in saying for more companies than are currently working that way. -- Paul Johnson - p...@pjcj.net http://www.pjcj.net
Re: Alternative sources of Perl programmers
On 14 May 2013 16:40, Paul Johnson p...@pjcj.net wrote: On Tue, May 14, 2013 at 03:54:07PM +0100, Aaron Trevena wrote: On 14 May 2013 15:20, Ben Vinnerd b...@vinnerd.com wrote: On 14 May 2013 15:02, Dominic Humphries d...@thermeon.com wrote: 50 miles? Luxury! I have to do sixty! :) Indeed. My previous contract was 223 miles, each way! (I became Travelodge guest of the year during that gig!! lol) 223? Pah! my last contracting gig was 682 miles each way (Threemilestone, Cornwall to Groningen, Netherlands) I can just about better that with 707 miles (Zurich to Bristol) a few years ago. A colleague of mine travels to London (on a weekly basis) from Copenhagen, Denmark. He's been doing that for quite a few years now. He takes a flight, and that seems to be about 593 miles ATCF (estimating Zurich to Bristol as 574 miles ATCF). Gaz
Re: Alternative sources of Perl programmers
On Mon, May 13, 2013 at 10:22:05PM +0100, Duncan Garland wrote: We're advertising for a Perl programmer again, and once again we are struggling. It's a shame because we've got quite a lot of development work in the offing, mostly using Catalyst, DBIx::Class, Moose and the like. It seems that every Perl job advert lists a collection of Modern Perl modules, a database, and a Linux distribution, and asks for expertise in them all, and none of them stand out from the crowd. I don't know if I've even seen your advert as you didn't say who the company is. I've certainly not had my interest piqued by it if I did. I spoke to the agent today and asked why so few people are coming forward. His view was that there aren't many Perl vacancies about at the moment, and even fewer people are interested in them. What are other companies doing about this? Well... I'd consider firing that agent for a start, as it almost sounds as if he's passively waiting for candidates to turn up rather than aggressively hunting them, or perhaps he has such a poor reputation in the community that people are refusing to deal with him. Another problem is that more or less all of the good Perl hackers are already working on things they love, or at least don't despise enough, that they're disinclined to jump ship based on a bland description that doesn't sound better than what they've got already. Offering more money is the obvious motivator, but not necessarily the best. Working from home, an unusually large amount of annual leave, seven hour days, foreign travel, training, conference visits, career advancement, that sort of thing. If that's not in the job description, we'll just have to assume the job is unappreciated code monkey, sat in a horrible open-plan office eight hours a day, 232 days a year.
Re: Alternative sources of Perl programmers
Your estimates are wonky, the relevant distance is a (section of a) great circle, not ATCF: http://www.gcmap.com/dist?P=LHR-CPH,+BRS-ZRH *From* *To* Initial *Heading* *Distance* LHR http://www.gcmap.com/airport/LHR (51°28'39N 0°27'41W)CPH http://www.gcmap.com/airport/CPH (55°37'05N 12°39'21E) 56.9° (NE)610 miBRS http://www.gcmap.com/airport/BRS (51°22'58N 2°43'09W)ZRH http://www.gcmap.com/airport/ZRH (47°27'53N 8°32'57E) 113.7° (SE)575 mi /joel On 14 May 2013 17:56, Schmoo schmoos...@gmail.com wrote: On 14 May 2013 16:40, Paul Johnson p...@pjcj.net wrote: On Tue, May 14, 2013 at 03:54:07PM +0100, Aaron Trevena wrote: On 14 May 2013 15:20, Ben Vinnerd b...@vinnerd.com wrote: On 14 May 2013 15:02, Dominic Humphries d...@thermeon.com wrote: 50 miles? Luxury! I have to do sixty! :) Indeed. My previous contract was 223 miles, each way! (I became Travelodge guest of the year during that gig!! lol) 223? Pah! my last contracting gig was 682 miles each way (Threemilestone, Cornwall to Groningen, Netherlands) I can just about better that with 707 miles (Zurich to Bristol) a few years ago. A colleague of mine travels to London (on a weekly basis) from Copenhagen, Denmark. He's been doing that for quite a few years now. He takes a flight, and that seems to be about 593 miles ATCF (estimating Zurich to Bristol as 574 miles ATCF). Gaz
Re: Alternative sources of Perl programmers
On 14 May 2013 16:20, Ben Vinnerd b...@vinnerd.com wrote: Indeed. My previous contract was 223 miles, each way! (I became Travelodge guest of the year during that gig!! lol) I commuted from England to Finland (around 1200 miles each way) on a weekly basis for about a year back in my Trema Finance Kit consultancy days. And yes, it involved Perl programming. I win. Chris
Re: Alternative sources of Perl programmers
And if you turned up without your Trema Finance Kit did you have to do it in your underwear? On 14 May 2013 18:18, Chris Jack chris_j...@msn.com wrote: On 14 May 2013 16:20, Ben Vinnerd b...@vinnerd.com wrote: Indeed. My previous contract was 223 miles, each way! (I became Travelodge guest of the year during that gig!! lol) I commuted from England to Finland (around 1200 miles each way) on a weekly basis for about a year back in my Trema Finance Kit consultancy days. And yes, it involved Perl programming. I win. Chris
Re: Alternative sources of Perl programmers
On 14/05/13 17:04, Joel Bernstein wrote: Your estimates are wonky, the relevant distance is a (section of a) great circle, not ATCF: http://www.gcmap.com/dist?P=LHR-CPH,+BRS-ZRH *From* *To* Initial *Heading* *Distance* LHR http://www.gcmap.com/airport/LHR (51°28'39N 0°27'41W)CPH http://www.gcmap.com/airport/CPH (55°37'05N 12°39'21E) 56.9° (NE)610 miBRS http://www.gcmap.com/airport/BRS (51°22'58N 2°43'09W)ZRH http://www.gcmap.com/airport/ZRH (47°27'53N 8°32'57E) 113.7° (SE)575 mi /joel Cough, I think you will find that most of this will be on airways and not GC. Sadly RNAV has yet to catch on in a big way, largely thanks to the inertia in the various air traffic services that such a flight would traverse. Dirk
RE: Alternative sources of Perl programmers
Hi Duncan I'm a Perl specialist recruiter. The candidate market is very tough. Over the last 3-6 months there hasn't been many new candidates making themselves available or open to new opportunities, therefore I can probably understand why your agent might be struggling. Your agent needs to think outside the box a little, just advertising and searching Job boards, just doesn't work at the moment. I disagree with your agent about there aren't many Perl vacancies. There are plenty of Perl roles out there; they are just slightly tricky to fill. Finding PHP Developers is fairly straight forward and offering to cross-train would be appealing to many candidates. However if depends on timescales, can you afford to spend time training someone? I forgot to ask is this a permanent or contract role? If you're considering contractors, then remote workers should definitely be considered! I work with quite a few guys based in Poland, Romania, Germany and Sweden. My clients tell me that the work is brilliant and they can keep track on what's being produced. The other benefit of remote workers is that sometimes they can be cheaper on a day rate, because there aren't any commuting costs involved etc. Don't just rely on the recruitment agency to find you people. Direct advertising and networking can work just as well. Regards Graham Feegan Consultant IT Executive Group Ltd Direct Line: 0845 250 8634 Mobile: 07787 227 079 Office Line: 01908 506506 LinkedIn IT Executive - Twitter IT Executive - Facebook -Original Message- From: london.pm-boun...@london.pm.org [mailto:london.pm-boun...@london.pm.org] On Behalf Of Duncan Garland Sent: 13 May 2013 22:22 To: 'London.pm Perl M[ou]ngers' Subject: Alternative sources of Perl programmers Hi, We're advertising for a Perl programmer again, and once again we are struggling. It's a shame because we've got quite a lot of development work in the offing, mostly using Catalyst, DBIx::Class, Moose and the like. I spoke to the agent today and asked why so few people are coming forward. His view was that there aren't many Perl vacancies about at the moment, and even fewer people are interested in them. What are other companies doing about this? We've got several PHP projects on the go as well. It's easier to get local PHP programmers and when we can't, there seems to be a constant supply of good Eastern European programmers. Why isn't there the same stream of Eastern European Perl programmers? A second possibility is to cross-train experienced programmers from other languages into Perl. However, Perl has got itself such a reputation for being difficult to learn that the CTO winces whenever I suggest the idea. How have other companies got on when they've said that they will take experience in Python/Django or Ruby/Rails or whatever in lieu of experience in Perl/Catalyst? Was anybody interested and did they succeed? The third possibility is just to move some of the projects ear-marked for Perl into the PHP camp. I don't really believe that they can't be done in PHP, but it's a pity because they sit nicely with similar successful projects we've done in Perl. (A Catalyst-based system of ours won an industry-wide prize for Best Digital Initiative a couple of months ago.) All the best. Duncan
Re: Alternative sources of Perl programmers
Yeah, I realised this (and discussed on IRC) almost as soon as I posted it. Still, I managed to be a smartarse, and that's the main thing. On 14 May 2013 18:26, Dirk Koopman d...@tobit.co.uk wrote: On 14/05/13 17:04, Joel Bernstein wrote: Your estimates are wonky, the relevant distance is a (section of a) great circle, not ATCF: http://www.gcmap.com/dist?P=**LHR-CPH,+BRS-ZRHhttp://www.gcmap.com/dist?P=LHR-CPH,+BRS-ZRH *From* *To* Initial *Heading* *Distance* LHR http://www.gcmap.com/airport/**LHRhttp://www.gcmap.com/airport/LHR (51°28'39N 0°27'41W)CPH http://www.gcmap.com/airport/**CPHhttp://www.gcmap.com/airport/CPH (55°37'05N 12°39'21E) 56.9° (NE)610 miBRS http://www.gcmap.com/airport/**BRShttp://www.gcmap.com/airport/BRS (51°22'58N 2°43'09W)ZRH http://www.gcmap.com/airport/**ZRHhttp://www.gcmap.com/airport/ZRH (47°27'53N 8°32'57E) 113.7° (SE)575 mi /joel Cough, I think you will find that most of this will be on airways and not GC. Sadly RNAV has yet to catch on in a big way, largely thanks to the inertia in the various air traffic services that such a flight would traverse. Dirk
Re: Alternative sources of Perl programmers
On 14 May 2013 09:23, Graham Feegan graham.fee...@it-executive.com wrote: The candidate market is very tough. Over the last 3-6 months there hasn't been many new candidates making themselves available or open to new opportunities, therefore I can probably understand why your agent might be struggling. Your agent needs to think outside the box a little, just advertising and searching Job boards, just doesn't work at the moment. Indeed that's why you have headhunters like perlhunter and shoeless who know how to reach perl talent. I disagree with your agent about there aren't many Perl vacancies. There are plenty of Perl roles out there; they are just slightly tricky to fill. From the new hires I've seen in both London and in Cornwall at my current and new employer, I wouldn't it's that tricky. Finding PHP Developers is fairly straight forward and offering to cross-train would be appealing to many candidates. However if depends on timescales, can you afford to spend time training someone? Compared to how long it takes to recruit somebody with just the right skills and years of experience - sometimes training is both quicker and cheaper, and the right person is more important than the right skill set - we've found C++ developers with a few years commercial experience can transition to perl pretty quickly. Don't just rely on the recruitment agency to find you people. Direct advertising and networking can work just as well. +1 ..but -10 for top posting without trimming ;p A. -- Aaron J Trevena, BSc Hons http://www.aarontrevena.co.uk LAMP System Integration, Development and Consulting
Re: Alternative sources of Perl programmers
On Tue, May 14, 2013 at 03:54:07PM +0100, Aaron Trevena wrote: On 14 May 2013 15:20, Ben Vinnerd b...@vinnerd.com wrote: On 14 May 2013 15:02, Dominic Humphries d...@thermeon.com wrote: 50 miles? Luxury! I have to do sixty! :) Indeed. My previous contract was 223 miles, each way! (I became Travelodge guest of the year during that gig!! lol) 223? Pah! my last contracting gig was 682 miles each way (Threemilestone, Cornwall to Groningen, Netherlands) I sense a contest starting... I've been a full-time employee for 6 years, and the office is (according to Google maps) 932km (579 miles, so I do not win the distance contest) away, in a different country, with no shared borders (yeah, not counting the one in the Pacific). Do I win? And I'm not working from home either, because I can go and sit in a local office (opened last year, full of real (non-dev) people, part of the company network; before that, the company rented one for the two devs working from Lyon), which is about 20 minutes walk from home. Surely there's a badge for I go to the office either by foot or by plane? On the other hand, we've not hired any remote dev since 2009. So I can probably claim the endangered species badge too. ;-) -- Philippe Bruhat (BooK) All life affects us... even that which is far from our gaze. (Moral from Groo The Wanderer #59 (Epic))
Alternative sources of Perl programmers
Hi, We're advertising for a Perl programmer again, and once again we are struggling. It's a shame because we've got quite a lot of development work in the offing, mostly using Catalyst, DBIx::Class, Moose and the like. I spoke to the agent today and asked why so few people are coming forward. His view was that there aren't many Perl vacancies about at the moment, and even fewer people are interested in them. What are other companies doing about this? We've got several PHP projects on the go as well. It's easier to get local PHP programmers and when we can't, there seems to be a constant supply of good Eastern European programmers. Why isn't there the same stream of Eastern European Perl programmers? A second possibility is to cross-train experienced programmers from other languages into Perl. However, Perl has got itself such a reputation for being difficult to learn that the CTO winces whenever I suggest the idea. How have other companies got on when they've said that they will take experience in Python/Django or Ruby/Rails or whatever in lieu of experience in Perl/Catalyst? Was anybody interested and did they succeed? The third possibility is just to move some of the projects ear-marked for Perl into the PHP camp. I don't really believe that they can't be done in PHP, but it's a pity because they sit nicely with similar successful projects we've done in Perl. (A Catalyst-based system of ours won an industry-wide prize for Best Digital Initiative a couple of months ago.) All the best. Duncan
Re: Alternative sources of Perl programmers
On Monday, May 13, 2013, Duncan Garland wrote: We're advertising for a Perl programmer again, and once again we are struggling. The question I ask anyone who has problems hiring for any IT position is have you considered telecommute? Mark
Re: Alternative sources of Perl programmers
I second this. Every YAPC::EU I chat with the sponsors there but none of them are particularly welcome to telecommuters. Is there a pattern in responses to that question, Mark? I find that it's mostly wanting to have an in-office representation, especially when it comes to meetings. Job On Monday, May 13, 2013, Duncan Garland wrote: We're advertising for a Perl programmer again, and once again we are struggling. The question I ask anyone who has problems hiring for any IT position is have you considered telecommute? Mark
Re: Alternative sources of Perl programmers
The management challenges for telecommute jobs are different to those for on site. But it does increase the pool of potential candidates a lot. Does anyone have any useful experience about managing mixed on-site/offsite staff? On 14/05/2013, at 8:13 AM, Job van Achterberg wrote: I second this. Every YAPC::EU I chat with the sponsors there but none of them are particularly welcome to telecommuters. Is there a pattern in responses to that question, Mark? I find that it's mostly wanting to have an in-office representation, especially when it comes to meetings. Job On Monday, May 13, 2013, Duncan Garland wrote: We're advertising for a Perl programmer again, and once again we are struggling. The question I ask anyone who has problems hiring for any IT position is have you considered telecommute? Mark
Re: Alternative sources of Perl programmers
Telepresence robots are all the rage these days... On 13 May 2013 23:27, Kieren Diment dim...@gmail.com wrote: The management challenges for telecommute jobs are different to those for on site. But it does increase the pool of potential candidates a lot. Does anyone have any useful experience about managing mixed on-site/offsite staff? On 14/05/2013, at 8:13 AM, Job van Achterberg wrote: I second this. Every YAPC::EU I chat with the sponsors there but none of them are particularly welcome to telecommuters. Is there a pattern in responses to that question, Mark? I find that it's mostly wanting to have an in-office representation, especially when it comes to meetings. Job On Monday, May 13, 2013, Duncan Garland wrote: We're advertising for a Perl programmer again, and once again we are struggling. The question I ask anyone who has problems hiring for any IT position is have you considered telecommute? Mark
Re: Alternative sources of Perl programmers
We're advertising for a Perl programmer again, and once again we are struggling. It's a shame because we've got quite a lot of development work in the offing, mostly using Catalyst, DBIx::Class, Moose and the like. Are you certain that the agency or agencies you are using are actually talking to perl developers and others who could be perl developers? Has the job been posted to places like jobs.perl.org? Jason Clifford
Re: Alternative sources of Perl programmers
You're not alone in facing this, and as a rule it isn't a perl-specific issue. Perl's just at the leading edge of this. 1. There are fewer perl programmers than PHP programmers. There are many reasons for this, they really don't matter that much. In the end, perl doesn't get as much exposure and it becomes a vicious circle where fewer and fewer people learn perl. 2. There are fewer programmers than there is demand. This is only going to get worse. If you think it's bad now, wait 5 years. 3. The telecommute issue, which has already been brought up. The biggest blockers to this are general fear of the unknown, and a poor understanding of how to manage remote employees. It's really very different to managing local ones. Have you considered hiring existing programmers and teaching them, or giving them time to learn perl? You should. Or you'll have to massively up the price you're willing to pay for someone (either an existing perl dev, or someone who will be able to learn enough perl quickly and well). Simple supply and demand. Again, it'll only get worse. I'd encourage every company to hire more junior people and give them a lot of training. Go ask your HR / recruiting departments how much it costs to hire someone. Don't be shocked when they come back and tell you the number is over £20,000 *just to find someone*. Spend that time and money on training instead - you'll help yourself and everyone around you. On Mon, May 13, 2013 at 4:22 PM, Duncan Garland duncan.garl...@ntlworld.com wrote: Hi, We're advertising for a Perl programmer again, and once again we are struggling. It's a shame because we've got quite a lot of development work in the offing, mostly using Catalyst, DBIx::Class, Moose and the like. I spoke to the agent today and asked why so few people are coming forward. His view was that there aren't many Perl vacancies about at the moment, and even fewer people are interested in them. What are other companies doing about this? We've got several PHP projects on the go as well. It's easier to get local PHP programmers and when we can't, there seems to be a constant supply of good Eastern European programmers. Why isn't there the same stream of Eastern European Perl programmers? A second possibility is to cross-train experienced programmers from other languages into Perl. However, Perl has got itself such a reputation for being difficult to learn that the CTO winces whenever I suggest the idea. How have other companies got on when they've said that they will take experience in Python/Django or Ruby/Rails or whatever in lieu of experience in Perl/Catalyst? Was anybody interested and did they succeed? The third possibility is just to move some of the projects ear-marked for Perl into the PHP camp. I don't really believe that they can't be done in PHP, but it's a pity because they sit nicely with similar successful projects we've done in Perl. (A Catalyst-based system of ours won an industry-wide prize for Best Digital Initiative a couple of months ago.) All the best. Duncan
Re: Alternative sources of Perl programmers
When you're employing a builder, if the house is steel framed, you might want to employ someone with experience with the framing system. If you're building a steel framed housing estate, you will need to familiarise your crews with the technology, but that's a small amount of overhead compared to the effort of delivering the project. On 14/05/2013, at 11:49 AM, Avleen Vig wrote: You're not alone in facing this, and as a rule it isn't a perl-specific issue. Perl's just at the leading edge of this. 1. There are fewer perl programmers than PHP programmers. There are many reasons for this, they really don't matter that much. In the end, perl doesn't get as much exposure and it becomes a vicious circle where fewer and fewer people learn perl. 2. There are fewer programmers than there is demand. This is only going to get worse. If you think it's bad now, wait 5 years. 3. The telecommute issue, which has already been brought up. The biggest blockers to this are general fear of the unknown, and a poor understanding of how to manage remote employees. It's really very different to managing local ones. Have you considered hiring existing programmers and teaching them, or giving them time to learn perl? You should. Or you'll have to massively up the price you're willing to pay for someone (either an existing perl dev, or someone who will be able to learn enough perl quickly and well). Simple supply and demand. Again, it'll only get worse. I'd encourage every company to hire more junior people and give them a lot of training. Go ask your HR / recruiting departments how much it costs to hire someone. Don't be shocked when they come back and tell you the number is over £20,000 *just to find someone*. Spend that time and money on training instead - you'll help yourself and everyone around you. On Mon, May 13, 2013 at 4:22 PM, Duncan Garland duncan.garl...@ntlworld.com wrote: Hi, We're advertising for a Perl programmer again, and once again we are struggling. It's a shame because we've got quite a lot of development work in the offing, mostly using Catalyst, DBIx::Class, Moose and the like. I spoke to the agent today and asked why so few people are coming forward. His view was that there aren't many Perl vacancies about at the moment, and even fewer people are interested in them. What are other companies doing about this? We've got several PHP projects on the go as well. It's easier to get local PHP programmers and when we can't, there seems to be a constant supply of good Eastern European programmers. Why isn't there the same stream of Eastern European Perl programmers? A second possibility is to cross-train experienced programmers from other languages into Perl. However, Perl has got itself such a reputation for being difficult to learn that the CTO winces whenever I suggest the idea. How have other companies got on when they've said that they will take experience in Python/Django or Ruby/Rails or whatever in lieu of experience in Perl/Catalyst? Was anybody interested and did they succeed? The third possibility is just to move some of the projects ear-marked for Perl into the PHP camp. I don't really believe that they can't be done in PHP, but it's a pity because they sit nicely with similar successful projects we've done in Perl. (A Catalyst-based system of ours won an industry-wide prize for Best Digital Initiative a couple of months ago.) All the best. Duncan
Working from home (was: Re: Alternative sources of Perl programmers)
On 13 May 2013, at 23:27, Kieren Diment dim...@gmail.com wrote: The management challenges for telecommute jobs are different to those for on site. But it does increase the pool of potential candidates a lot. Does anyone have any useful experience about managing mixed on-site/offsite staff? Can't speak about management per se, but I can talk about how a team with off-site developers can work. In a nutshell: as soon as even one member of the dev team is, or could be, out of the office, you need to do everything important off-line. Otherwise you'll end up discriminating against the off-site people, wittingly or unwittingly. At UK2 we've historically had a mixture of off- and on-site developers - me in Glasgow, and some guys on-site in London. I come down to London once a month for three days to get face time with the other devs, but otherwise things get done over IRC, email or GitHub pull requests depending on what's most appropriate. We've had the occasional tele-conference via Google Hangouts to discuss upcoming projects and releases, but I'm not sure whether they were that useful. (That might be more useful for one-to-few discussions, rather than manglement + entire dev team.) We started ramping up hiring a couple of years ago, and while we found a few people in the Greater London area, after a while we hit a brick wall. Because we already had some people working from home, and the group as a whole had developers in Ukraine already, it wasn't a massive cultural shift to hire people from Foreignstan - currently we have a handful of people in Ukraine, a guy who's effectively a Senior Developer in Russia, some people in India or somewhere (I'm not entirely sure where they are - I only know them from their online handles, and I've never met them), and another developer in Australia. One interesting thing about this whole process is that a number of the guys in the London area started working from home as well. After all, if the important stuff is done via IRC and email, and we don't expect people to work 9-5 because they live in different time zones, then why should you struggle through rush-hour commuter traffic to go to an office with electricity, wifi, a desk and a chair if you have perfectly good electricity, wifi, a desk and a chair at home? (I think we might actually not have enough desks in the office any more, because we don't expect the entire team to be in on any given day.) As a general rule, most of the London developers only come into the office once a week. On weeks when I'm down, we try to schedule everyone on the same day so we can go to the pub; some of our best ideas have come from there. Obviously, there are caveats and exceptions. Some people prefer to work in an office, probably so there's a clear demarcation between work and not-work (living close to the office is a contributing factor for this). Others may think they can work from home, but end up procrastinating instead, so while you'll have a much larger pool to hire from, be aware that some of them might not work out. Employment contracts may need a bit of sprucing up - one of mine told me the company provided me a place to work, but reserved the right to search my desk and personal possessions, which I thought remarkably keen. A decent union will tell you that if you work from home, your employer should make sure your equipment is ergonomic and up to standard; if you live alone or your spouse works, you're entitled to claim a fraction of your utility bills, on the basis that your home wouldn't be heated otherwise. And so on - I suspect most telecommuters don't press such matters because, after all, they're no longer paying for their weekly season ticket, but it's something to bear in mind. The people in HR might be concerned about how easy it would be to enforce penalty clauses against employees in distant lands also. We have a guy in Russia who is socially a Senior Developer, but legally is a contractor, presumably because we can't legally employ non-resident non-EU citizens. Finally, if you want regular face-to-face meetings (which are absolutely useful), you need to budget for the expense of moving remote employees around. Having said all of this, one of the reasons I've stuck with UK2 during bad times and good is that, if you can cope with working from home, it's bloody marvellous. Working from home effectively means flexitime, which is a big plus for me (look at the timestamp on this email ;-) ); it lets people say I need to take the dog to the vet or knocking off early, I have a bunch of Russian people around and I need to barbecue things and drink vodka with them. or brb, kid's vomiting. And it means that you don't have to worry about an employee saying things like hey, I have a house in France now, I'm going to spend a couple of months there every summer or I'm thinking about moving to Mexico, is that OK? - as long as they have an Internet connection,
Re: Working from home (was: Re: Alternative sources of Perl programmers)
Very similar to my experience except I work as a contractor with a bunch of other contractors across three or more continents to develop and support a reasonably high profile high value product in it's domain. I meet a subset of the people I work with face to face once every couple of years (but was doing that before this work started anyway), and I've never met the principal in person. We talk on the phone up to 4 times a year, but generally it all happens through IRC, bug tracker, wiki and git repo. For big companies where slacking or low value staff are a problem I don't think telecommuting is a great option (hence Marissa Miller's recent proclamations), but could be solved with an organisational culture turnaround. The very nice thing about perl from my experience is it seems to attract people from a greater diversity of social and educational backgrounds than other programming communities (in my experience), but you've got to make the working conditions good to take full advantage of that. On 14/05/2013, at 12:40 PM, Sam Kington wrote: On 13 May 2013, at 23:27, Kieren Diment dim...@gmail.com wrote: The management challenges for telecommute jobs are different to those for on site. But it does increase the pool of potential candidates a lot. Does anyone have any useful experience about managing mixed on-site/offsite staff? Can't speak about management per se, but I can talk about how a team with off-site developers can work. [snip]
Re: Alternative sources of Perl programmers
Indeed. -- Ciao Richard Foley http://www.rfi.net/books.html On Mon, May 13, 2013 at 05:48:39PM -0400, Mark Fowler wrote: On Monday, May 13, 2013, Duncan Garland wrote: We're advertising for a Perl programmer again, and once again we are struggling. The question I ask anyone who has problems hiring for any IT position is have you considered telecommute? Mark
Re: Alternative sources of Perl programmers
I had a contract role in Switzerland where the client was happy for me to come on board in a (largely) remote capacity. That meant some on-site work to familiarize me with the team and the project and then shift off-site for the majority of the work. This suited both parties. The agency stepped in, (they'd been unavailable during the telephone interview), and said there was no way I was going to work remotely for this client, and scotched the deal. Both the client and the contractor were screwed, and this had nothing to do with the practicalities of remote working, or problem solving of any kind. This was simply a power broking intervention. Solution-1: ditch the agent, work directly with the client/contractor, save everyone some grief, and some money at the same time. Solution-2: look at how some groups of people are trying to raise the current and future profile of the Perl programming language instead of resting on dusty laurels. Yes we you can learn another language, but would you really want to ?) Solution-3: do both solution-1 and solution-2. -- Ciao Richard Foley http://www.rfi.net/books.html On Mon, May 13, 2013 at 10:22:05PM +0100, Duncan Garland wrote: Hi, We're advertising for a Perl programmer again, and once again we are struggling. It's a shame because we've got quite a lot of development work in the offing, mostly using Catalyst, DBIx::Class, Moose and the like. I spoke to the agent today and asked why so few people are coming forward. His view was that there aren't many Perl vacancies about at the moment, and even fewer people are interested in them.
Re: Alternative sources of Perl programmers
On 05/14/2013 12:09 AM, Richard Foley wrote: I had a contract role in Switzerland where the client was happy for me to come on board in a (largely) remote capacity. That meant some on-site work to familiarize me with the team and the project and then shift off-site for the majority of the work. This suited both parties. The agency stepped in, (they'd been unavailable during the telephone interview), and said there was no way I was going to work remotely for this client, and scotched the deal. Both the client and the contractor were screwed, and this had nothing to do with the practicalities of remote working, or problem solving of any kind. This was simply a power broking intervention. how did the agent scotch it? what motivation did they have (other than no ethics and lots of stupidity)? it may sound sappy but i am very happy when i place a perl hacker and all three parties (candidate, client and me) win. it does happen quite a bit IMO. my first placement was a grad student in germany and he moved to nyc for this job and he still has it 8 years later. that makes me happy. :) and i can't scotch things as i like c_ognac better! uri _
