I am not sure that your remark is totally fair.

Nobody learns in a vacumn. If this monk submits his work to us asking for a review then we have to admire his courage! If you look through the monastery you know why I say that - some monks can be pretty scathing in their comments.

For something like 30 years as an engineer and scientist I figured that every piece of work I did was subjected to peer review. As a young engineer I even had to review work of my seniors, sometimes by boss or his boss. I caught the ocassional error and was very proud when I did. Most of all I learned a huge amount from the process. I hope this monk learns form teh process as well, and should he ever have the ocassion to present himself and his code at an interview it may be a selling point to say that he learns a lot by having others review and comment on his code.

If he faced me for an interview he would get good marks for saying that! He might get even better marks for showing the code as originally presented and the code as cleaned up - showing just what he learned.

jdtoronto

But what is the motivation for peer review in this case? Sure they want to present the best possible code to give the best possible impression and hopefully get the job. But the fact is, the code is being cleaned up in a last minute review process and may not be an accurate reflection of the capabilities of the interviewee. If I were the interviewer and this fact wasn't made clear up front, and I later logged in to perlmonks to see this thread, that person would be out of the running.

Employers generally expect the applicant to submit code that has previously been reviewed, much like they expect the application to have been proofread. Employers are interested in getting a Good Value from the programmers they hire and if those programmers can increase their value by asking questions on PerlMonks.org, then more power to them---it's free training and mentoring. As for the issue of whether this is a real reflection of the programmer's ability, this is precisely the reason employers do technical interviews in which they ask their applicants to spontaneously write code.

--
Allolex

Perl and Linguistics
http://world.std.com/~swmcd/steven/perl/linguistics.html
http://www.linuxjournal.com/article.php?sid=3394
http://www.wall.org/~larry/keynote/keynote.html

If I was changing my code I would agree with you! I don't want someone elses code to talk about anyway. My purpose is to be prepared for critisism and analysis of my code. Personally I don't that having a perfect piece of code perfected by the perl monks would get me a job, it's the talking about it that's the issue. But, yeah I should have been more clear.

Peer reviews can often be filled with dread for the author. Especially if their peers are particularly critical of the material. It doesn't help if you've never had your work reviewed by a group of peers before, either.

I think it's a grand idea to have people review your code -- one to find errors (although that's not the objective here, as noted by the Update). But I think it's more important to be able to be comfortable in a peer review. If I make a mistake in my code, I want to be objective enough to be able to see it. That means not taking offense when someone points something out. For some people that comes naturally, for others it takes practice.

It's just the same as going to mock interviews. It's just the idea of getting used to the process.