[Melbourne-pm] Meeting tomorrow night: Wednesday 9th May

Andrew Stuart andrew.stuart at flatraterecruitment.com.au
Wed May 9 02:04:08 PDT 2007


It's easy to find "programmers" of  any kind - Java, Perl, PHP, C#, 
whatever.

It's hard to find programmers who know what they are doing, are experienced, 
communicate well, have coding skills, solid theoretical computer science 
knowledge, passion, a desire to learn, a desire to know how to do things 
better, a curiosity about the technologies that they work with, and get 
along well with others.

The problem with recruiting Perl programmers is that Perl programmers tend 
to have become a Perl programmer because of their passion and enthusiasm and 
interest in the technology - there's only a finite (and small) pool of those 
people.  There isn't a flow of graduates expanding the pool because the 
formal training tends not to be in Perl but in C# or Java.  There's an ever 
growing army of Java programmers (the challenge there is just as great to 
find people who are really good at what they do and who feel the passion).

Another problem is that Perl is a mature technology and no longer at the 
cutting edge of sexy, so the passionate first mover techies who move like a 
wave onto the latest technologies are prodding and poking Ruby On Rails and 
Adobe Flex.  Perl isn't a legacy technology but it doesn't have the mind 
share of other, more "exciting/new" technologies.

In a skills crisis, the availability of development resource becomes (or 
should become) a serious consideration for companies that need to get their 
development work done and get software projects built.  But most companies 
stick to their languages extremely tightly and would rather wait a very long 
time to get people than consider bringing new languages into their 
technology environment.  If you've bet your technology strategy on Perl then 
your growth is going to be constrained by the small pool of people who know 
how to drive your technology.

Training graduates in Perl programming is expensive and time consuming and 
distracting to the experienced programmers, so I'm guessing there's not too 
many companies taking a long term view by training up their own Perl people.

End result is that for the foreseeable future (good) Perl people will 
probably be somewhat hard to find.

Andrew Stuart

Managing Director
Flat Rate Recruitment
Head Office:
68 -72 York St
South Melbourne, Victoria 3205
Phone: 1300 55 91 92
Phone 03 9696 1616
Mobile: 0417 034 241
Email:  andrew.stuart at FlatRateRecruitment.com.au
Web: http://www.FlatRateRecruitment.com.au





----- Original Message ----- 
From: "peter renshaw" <goonmail at netspace.net.au>
To: <leif.eriksen at hpa.com.au>
Cc: <melbourne-pm at pm.org>
Sent: Wednesday, May 09, 2007 6:15 PM
Subject: Re: [Melbourne-pm] Meeting tomorrow night: Wednesday 9th May


On Wed, 2007-05-09 at 13:40 +1000, leif.eriksen at hpa.com.au wrote:
> Just a heads up - a recruiter contacted me yesterday and wants to come
> to the meeting.  Which is remarkable
>

Maybe it has more to do with supply/demand of perl programmers? ~
http://www.oreillynet.com/onlamp/blog/2007/05/the_perl_job_market_blues.html

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