in reply to Evaluating Perl skills set

Certification is largely pointless, imho. The only thing it proves is that you were willing to spend some time and money to get certified, which means you're serious about getting a job and not just a casual programmer. It says very little about actual knowledge - tests can be studied for and passed in a week and the material totally forgotten in another month or two.

The important question is not so much whether the candidate knows the exact right techniques for the job already (rare and expensive), but rather how good he is at learning new things. Assign all the candidates something typical but complicated to program and pick your employee based on who comes up with the most creative / elegant solution, regardless of how that solution was arrived at.

Note however - anyone who codes a solution without use strict / use warnings / modules should be automatically rejected, unless his code is simply too brilliant to pass up (he writes your entire search engine in five lines of code).

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Re^2: Evaluating Perl skills set
by jhourcle (Prior) on Jun 01, 2005 at 12:46 UTC

    I agree with you completely, and yet I'm still for acredidation (however, I'm not for strictly test based, I'd like to see some form of apprenticing)

    Besides the ability to learn, I find that personality plays a large role -- how well they work with others, how much they believe in the goals and objectives of the organization, etc.

    There may be people who are very good programmers and have the ability to learn a lot, but are rude to everyone they deal with, and care nothing past the appearance of actually doing work, and not the work itself. Others are trying to make themselves look good, rather than making the organization look good.

    Finding someone who enjoys, and is passionate about what they do is also useful. (provided that passion doesn't reach the point where they push their values more than the values of the organization).

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Re^2: Evaluating Perl skills set
by abhinavvaid (Acolyte) on Jun 23, 2005 at 12:05 UTC
    I love the last Note that you have written. And the overall response has also been awsome. Thanks a lot guys. Abhinav Vaid
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