[Mpls-pm] Food for Thought, on Perl in the Minneapolis marketplace..

[Chris Prather]

On Wed, Oct 21, 2009 at 4:36 PM, Gypsy Rogers <gypsy at freeq.com> wrote:
>
>
> Really, it's a self for-filling prophecy in some ways.
>
> As someone who was once a perl evangelist as a developer I find myself
> revisiting my position as an employer.
>
> As I try hard to grow my company beyond myself and add talent in hopes of
> getting some low end people to take on my low hanging fruit work and leave
> me to deal with the more heady stuff what I find is everyone who answers to
> the call of "perl" has an ego and demands a high salary. Where as for the
> same jobs in php I can find cheap labor who is easier to direct and work with.

Define "High Salary"? I'm honestly curious what salary expectations
are for Junior Perl people from other employers (I have recently
started a Perl business). Salaries I've looked at are all over the
map. The Perl market up there is also a *much* larger market than the
one in Orlando as far as I can tell. So I'm curious what you're
looking for in a developer and what kind of compensation you expect to
be able to pay.

> I don't know the answer, because I really think perl has been choking on
> it's own culture of snootiness for a very long time. the perception is that
> perl is hard, those who don't know it scream it when it's thrown at them,
> and those who do know it foster this perception because it makes them seem
> superior.

Perl *is* hard, but that's because programming is hard.  I have very
little experience with PHP, but the little exposure I have had
suggests that culturally it has pulled off the copy-and-paste culture
that Perl had in the late 1990s. I'm probably wrong, but that's the
impression that I get. This is a culture the Perl community spent the
better part of this decade trying to get away from (rightly or
wrongly) because people were using it as an excuse to promote
"Enterprise Ready" langauges (Java, C#) vs "just a scripting
language".

> Personally, I think the problem is bigger then any one thing this group can
> do, and it may just be too late.

Sure if you look globally, the problem looks insolvable. The Cities
have a good opportunity to re-build Perl culture. Frozen Perl draws a
lot of talent from around the country to showcase Perl, I have been
trying to replicate this with Perl Oasis personally. Supporting these
efforts and getting young students fresh out of Uni who may not have
*Perl* experience but who do have programming experience and the
willingness to learn is a start ... so I guess I come back to what are
*you* looking for in a Junior developer? Does that line up to what
*others* are looking for? (I suspect it should). What can we as the
Perl community do to help you find that? What can you as a Perl
business owner do to help us help you?

-Chris