I would also be EXTREMELY picky about vendor selection. One large computer company, with a substantial consulting practice, once supplied a previous employer with four consultants. Of those, three were unequivocal disasters:

• One of them didn't know how to tee output to a file. Consequently, he kept trying to do Windows NT line printer dumps to a network printing facility that was actually a postscript-input filter on Unix for an otherwise-network-connected laser printer. If that last part doesn't make sense to you, it didn't make sense to us either; it was one of those "Why the H$@$ are you doing that for?" moments.
• The second one actually predated me by a couple months; it was a quick stint to write some administrative scripts for a Unix cluster, so that configuration changes made on one would be propagated. Apparently, nobody taught this particular programmer that path-substitution is a good way to hack poorly-written setuid scripts; there wasn't a single hard-coded path to anything called within them.
• The third one was ostensibly a C programmer in Unix. However, he insisted on editing everything on his Windows laptop; he then had to be trained on how to upload his files (!!) to the servers, and how to use a C-compiler from the commmand line. I have no idea how (or whether) his C code actually worked, but my experience as a sysadmin with him was that he was effectively clueless.

So, YMMV, but I would look for vendors who can supply individual consultants who can demonstrate a pattern of past successful deliveries of e-commerce consulting IN perl ON YOUR PLATFORM. Just because someone is a multi-billion-dollar company doesn't mean they don't have idiots working for them; statistically speaking, they should have n times as many idiots as a company n times smaller.

Spud Zeppelin * spud@spudzeppelin.com

---

---

Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!

Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.

Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.

Please read these before you post! —

• How do I compose an effective node title?
• How do I post a question effectively?
• Markup in the Monastery

Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:

a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr

You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)

	For:		Use:
	&		&
	<		&lt;
	>		&gt;
	[		&#91;
	]		&#93;

Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?

See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.