use Perl

• Hiring strategies (Score:1)

  by jsut (8905) on 2008.12.04 10:08 (#66203) Journal

  At my previous, and current company they've run into the same problem, as well at as another largish dev house in toronto. Salaries are getting large, because finding people that already have the skills is getting challenging to impossible.

  The last two hires at my previous employer had little to no perl experience, but were already programmers (ie: had CS degrees of some sort). We then took it upon ourselves to bring them up to speed in perl.

  Obviously that won't work for everyone, but if you hire smart people that don't know perl, they can be turned into excellent perl programmers. As an added bonus you don't have to untrain bad perl habits out of them, and if you're working on 'new' platforms (catalyst, moose, badger, whatever), they aren't as likely to want to go back to what they know.

  Reply to This

  • Re: (Score:1)

    by Chandon (8955)

    This is really the key point. A good programmer who knows a couple programming languages already should be able to train into a new one in about the same amount of time it's going to take them to get used to your code base anyway. For Perl, if you can find someone with both PHP and Java experience or experience in Ruby or Python, you've basically won.
  • Re: (Score:1)

    by mndrix (6388)

    I run a very small consulting company and that's what I did too. I hired a Python programmer and had him learn Perl. He's very smart and picked it up in no time. Soon after he was hired, I sent him a copy of Perl Best Practices and he learned many good habits from the start.

    --
    Michael