Actually, the original question was solely "senior developer", which, and here's my hubris again, yes, I think I should be applying for - since that is really what I am right now (over 10 years with C/C++ should qualify, and more soft-skills on my resume which I won't get in to). Even before I started with perl, I was already pretty close to calling myself a "senior" developer (at least, relative to the team I'm on, I already was the senior developer, which may say more about the team than about me, but I'll cling to the term "hubris" again for this).

Sure, I may not be in a position to train people in Java. But it would likely take me about a year to be at the point of calling myself a "senior" Java developer for most projects. It's just a language.

Same thing here. What is more important - length of time in perl, or simply real amount of knowledge of programming principles? I've known some contractors with significant amounts of perl experience whom I would probably avoid for long-term permanent hiring. On the other hand, there is one student who I want back badly, and would have every confidence that he would pick up Perl in no time, and be extremely productive at it.

Training someone in a language is easy, if they have the skills in programming that you need. The other way around is much more difficult (and thus expensive).

At least in the company I work for, this is delineated by the ways we hire contractors (based largely on language skills: "we want to transform this spec to this language, do it.") and students/permanent hires (based largely on general experience and ability to learn).

In reply to Re^4: Interview Questions by Tanktalus
in thread Interview Questions by Anonymous Monk

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