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Date: Tue, 24 Mar 2009 18:00:36 -0400
From: Adam Prime <adam.prime@utoronto.ca>
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Subject: Re: Fw: Re: decline and fall of modperl?
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Mike Bourdon wrote:
>      
> 
>     In my humble opinion the perl community needs to embrace the concept
>     of self propagation. For the most part perl/oo perl/mod_perl
>     developers are self taught. Junior or mid level talent (a majority
>     of the talent pool) is passed over as not enough experience. Perhaps
>     this is because they do not push themselves or the roles they come
>     from are User Interface or system ops, people that did not make it
>     in those roles.  This where as an investment of time and effort can
>     go a long way into building the pool of perl/oo perl/mod_perl
>     developers. Too often everyone is looking for the instant
>     gratification of a senior level skill set.
> 
>     Believe it or not, there is a perception that senior perl/oo
>     perl/mod_perl developers do not play well with others. An active
>     mentoring role played by senior developers and gurus needs to be
>     taken. Reach out and take a junior person under your wing and
>     actively work to raise their level of coding skill set. Perl/oo
>     perl/mod_perl�s community and your future may depend on it.

I completely agree with what you're saying here.  At my previous 
employer (i changed jobs in august) we found it pretty much impossible 
to find entry/mid level perl people, so what we did was hire entry level 
people straight out of school that had maybe a little bit of perl, but 
displayed the chops to be able to learn what we needed them to learn. 
This worked out great for us, and i know it's been the way that at least 
a couple of other small perl shops in Toronto have been building their 
teams.  If you can find a good programmer, it easy to turn them into a 
good perl programmer if they are willing.

Right now, in Toronto if you're looking to hire a senior level perl 
programmer you're looking at 75K plus CAD. There are a couple of well 
funded shops in the city that will throw 6 figures at the right candidate.

The mentoring thing is huge though.  Perl generally isn't taught in 
schools, and if you're building a team from the ground up, you're going 
to have to teach.  Which is in a lot of ways actually a good thing, 
because you can hopefully teach people Modern Perl, instead of the 
formmail.pl style perl ;)

This is part of the reason why i'd love to see more tutorial style 
documentation on perl.apache.org.

Adam