in reply to How to measure Perl skills?

Maybe I'm being silly, but do you really want to test for perl skills or programming skills?

Perl is not used much where I am, and so as I require help, I need to get this help from unperlish people. I have found that, generally speaking, the best help I have gotten is that from people who are good at programming (and willing to learn perl) than from people who already have perl skills, but not so good programming skills.

If I had to devise a test, I would not make it a condition that a specific language be used. i.e. here is a problem, solve in any language of your choice... then let's look at it and make sure that all cases are handled, errors are trapped, comments are appropriate, etc. etc.

That's just me.

Sandy

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Re: Re: How to measure Perl skills?
by optimist (Beadle) on Mar 27, 2004 at 01:03 UTC
    Well, it's a reasonable question. And we have talked about considering people with good skills and the right background, even if they don't have a lot of Perl knowledge. The difficulty is, we are a 100% Perl shop (ok, there's SQL, too, and the occasional shell script), so if we hire a good programmer who doesn't know Perl (at least not well), we won't get a lot out of them until they come up to speed. And to compound the problem, right now I'm the only developer here (we used to have another, but he left a few months ago), so all the training would have to come from me, reducing productivity even more. And there's a lot to do.

    But if the new job posting we're putting out next week doesn't get a better response, I guess we'll have to reconsider this decision, reduce or eliminate our Perl experience requirement, and rethink this whole test business.

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