Fwd: er... tonight? and a test (from the AnnArbor.pm list)

[Joel Meulenberg]

A while back I had an email exchange with Kevin McGowan of AnnArbor.pm
and asked to be on their mailing list.  Since then I've been on the
list and reading most of its messages.  I thought this message from
Kevin had some interesting commentary and an interesting idea, so I
thought I'd forward it to the local list.  Check it out...

+Joel

--- Kevin McGowan <clunis at umich.edu> wrote:
> To: perlmongers at umich.edu
> Subject: er... tonight?  and a test
> Date: Thu, 26 Aug 1999 15:51:32 -0400
> From: Kevin McGowan <clunis at umich.edu>
> 
> So the votes are split evenly between meeting tonight and putting it
> off to next thursday.
> 
> Despite Monger Sarah's significant efforts to wrangle us a room at
> the
> School of Information I think we should go ahead and put this off to
> next week. (thanks, sarah -- sorry)
> 
> Hopefully there will be a big pile of students back in town to come
> next week... it could happen.
> 
> actual fun stuff:
> 
> One of the topics at the Perl town meeting (which I blew off to go
> look
> at otters) was the idea of perl certification.  A few folks were, I
> hear, arguing that perl would be more marketable if people could show
> their "perl 5 inside" tattoo to potential employers.
> 
> Larry's response was roughly "um... no.  sit down."
> 
> and Tom Christiansen's reply was "so design a test and test them"
> 
> which is perfectly in keeping with the Tom Christiansen Rules for
> employers:
> 
>     rule #1:  assume competence.
>     rule #2:  train the ignorant.
>     rule #3:  fire the stupid.
> 
> In that vein I would like to recommend that *we* the AnnArbor
> perlmongers design an "are you fit to work here" perl competence
> test.
> My thought is that it should be general enough that employers could
> modify it simply, but tricky enough to be fun.  If you are new to
> perl
> you could ask things you don't know yet, or ask things that were
> difficult for you to figure out. 
> 
> If everyone were to submit a few questions we could compile them into
> a
> test (as a group) and make it available from our web site.  which,
> frankly, is aching for content.  I set up a guestbook for this:
> 
>     http://www.umich.edu/~clunis/perlmongers/test/
> 
> I also think this is nice because it would help us figure out topics
> for the free perl classes several of us want to teach.
> 
> lemme know what a you think,
> 
> Kevin

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