I recently (within the last 4 months) accepted a position sheparding/mentoring a team of new Perl programmers. I have been doing Perl development for around 5 years and I would consider myself competent, but by no means an expert in all matters. My team of 5 consists for the most part of Cobol programmers and business analysts, and have been developing very well over the last 4 months. We do have one individual who seems to be having difficulty.

This person came up the ranks as an operator and has been working with computers (mostly MVS systems) for the better part of 20 years, but they seem to be having problems grasping the basics of Perl programming, and of programming in general. They have done some Cobol programming, however when I assigned them a simple data conversion project, they were a bit overwhelmed. Even after sitting down with them and explaining a basic "divide and conquer" type of algortithm (to the point of open the input/output files, read in each line, unpack the line into its elements...) they were still very confused and overwhelmed.

I know that this person is trying very hard, but it just doesn't seem to be clicking yet. I have purchased a copy of the book Elements of Programming with Perl and I hope that this will help them achieve some sort of "Ah-ha" reaction, however I am looking for some sort of further advice/strategies that I can take to help them out.

Any advice would be more than welcome.

Thanks - Mike

In reply to I need a bit of mentoring advice by mpennucci

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