…sometimes it is depressing to watch the hawkers … I now ask the Monks for what is your perspective here?

My perspective is you encountered too much of a mirror for comfort.

Given Hawker eq Salesman and these recent musings of yours–

Never assume that you don’t have business-value that is highly prized. The key is, as always, “selling it.”

Craft your entire marketing message to sell the Brush, not you.

Re: Perl Job Marketability Question - very important for me!

Your advice, whether you will stick by it or not, is that business value is secondary to sales pitch.

Took awhile with a properly polite sleep between requests but here are some metrics from this site I just compiled with a couple dozen lines of perl–

  sundialsvc4
                 Code in posts ->  7.6%
   Links to external resources -> 15.2%
        One or t’other or both -> 21.6%

  Your Mother
                 Code in posts -> 38.4%
   Links to external resources -> 31.5%
        One or t’other or both -> 56.1%

Eight times out of ten you post nothing but opinion. Of those eight, some are objectively, spectacularly wrong. This would not be an issue for a beginner but it is a real problem for industry veterans to be putting bad info online because the beginner cannot tell the difference and will listen to anyone who seems to have authority. I cite the recent Re: Check randomly generated numbers have not been used before. This one rankled me particularly because of several heated arguments I had at work with a dev who thought that random numbers were as secure as GUIDs for session IDs and a boss who thought that dev the smartest person in the group.

My Golden Ticket, as you put it, was *this* place. I learned more here just trying to answer questions with code and research than I did in all my Perl books and classes combined. Please participate with that in mind and consider content before you post pure opinion editorial. Either give code to solve a problem or point to a resource that might do the same. No one loves to hear the sound of one’s own clacking away on the keyboard more than I. Please consider the growth you would undergo providing real answers and not just water-cooler BSing.