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

[Gypsy Rogers]

The short answer to the one question of definitions in my email is that if I
have a simple thing that needs to be developed for a web site that task can
at this time (in this culture) be accomplished cheaper by hiring a php
programmer then by hiring a perl programmer 9 times out of 10.



On Wed, 21 Oct 2009 17:03:25 -0400, Chris Prather <perigrin at gmail.com> wrote :

> 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
> 
> 
>