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All the Perl that's Practical to Extract and Report

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Assessing your own Perl skill: everyone's an 8 11 Comments More | Login | Reply /

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    • Has regularly contributed code to the Perl interpreter: NO
    • has contributed at least 5 major CPAN modules with high CPAN ratings/CPANTS score/depended on by other major modules: NO
    • has written well-regarded books and/or articles on Perl: YES
    • has spoken at international conferences on Perl: YES
    • has received grants from The Perl Foundation: NO (contributions from stonehenge don't count - wrong direction)
    • can obtain personal reference from Larry Wall: YES

    Hmm. Pretty high standards. Does anyone ra

    --
    • Randal L. Schwartz
    • Stonehenge
    • I was thinking of Damian when I came up with the list, though I'm not 100% sure he gets every point. The Perl interpreter point is a bit of a dodgy one, now I come to think of it; perhaps I should rephrase with s/interpreter/core/ or something, since I'd include core modules or major documentation or test contributions. But it's all a bit silly anyway, I reckon.
      --
      Kirrily "Skud" Robert perl@infotrope.net http://infotrope.net/
    • I reckon I probably got all of those except for for contributing to the interpreter, because I'm a Perl programmer, not a C programmer.

      (A bit dubious on the reference from Larry, but I'm sure I could conive my way into one).

      Unless you could adding YAML::Tiny to the core... gimme a few weeks for that on.

    • Looks like we're both 9s.

  • seems to be better spent walking in and giving asking direct perl questions. It seems like 95% of people whose resumes look good enuff to get to the interview are people who the interview ends for after about 10 minutes. Stops everyone wasting time wondering how to interpret the question and/or ansa. :)
  • This one isn't actually based on skills, but on community ranking :)

    11 - Is Larry Wall
    10 - Has led a major Perl project (pugs, Perl 5 pumpking, parrot, ...) or subprojects (major patches)
    9 - Has written well selling books
    8 - Has contributed fixes to Perl itself or a few CPAN modules
    7 - Has contributed bug reports to Perl itself or a few major CPAN modules
    6 - Is known in the community for providing useful services, or answering newbie questions (IRC, Perl Monks, usenet, ...)
    5 - Is very good at Perl, but does
  • There are plenty of people who would score highly on your scale but whom I wouldn't hire as a Perl programmer. The quality of code and their ability to work with others has almost nothing to do with anything in that list.

    Some people might even think that the list is artificially weighted to exclude the normal guy who's a good programmer, but isn't part of the cabal. The best workaday programmers I've run into aren't names that you'd recognize, and they don't idolize the Perl community. They just do good wor
  • What you're missing is that there are lots of people who will rate themselves as unqualified 10s. Virtually without exception, you do not want to hire them.

  • If you're on the hiring side and you want to know more about people, you might try breaking it up into multiple questions. I would ask these:

    • How would you rate your coding skill in general?
    • How would you rate your depth of knowledge about Perl?
    • How would you rate your involvement with the Perl community?

    Still a bit dodgy maybe, especially the first one. You really have to know what you're looking for. If you want a person who hash out requirements and talk to non-techies, you'll probably ask differen

  • This sounds like the Dunning-Kruger effect in action [wikipedia.org]!

    Put very simply, a knowledgable person is aware of just how much they don't know, and will under-estimate their ability compared to others. An ignorant person, on the other hand, will tend to over-estimate their skills.

    The end result? Everyone rates themselves at 8/10.

    • Yup, exactly. I waved the D-K study at $boss during our discussion of this at work.
      --
      Kirrily "Skud" Robert perl@infotrope.net http://infotrope.net/
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