They headhunted me based on my open-source work - much of it on perl or in Perl. I worked 2008-2009 as an SRE in the Dublin office.

The need was for a solid understanding of algorithms, and the ability to pick up a new language quickly. They have quite a few Google-internal languages, and a fast-paced environment.

In principle, employees were charged only with picking the best tool for the job. In practice, there are obviously languages that are in or out of fashion at any given time.

I wrote a bit of Perl code there (as well as Python, C++, shell, and 3-4 Google languages), but Perl was clearly not a favoured language (and my own evangelization was clearly not about to change that). But I also spent some time reviewing a colleague's >10KLOC shell application, during which my most repeated (verbal) review comment was ".. and at what point did you realise that writing this in shell was a really stupid idea?"

In reply to Re: Google considers Perl a useful skill by hv
in thread Google considers Perl a useful skill by reisinge

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