in reply to Are Perl and the dynamic languages dead or what ?

Managers never heard anything about perl and such stuff. They hire Java-programmers, cause java is industrial-standard and they know onething: They won't get fired for employing java-programmers (even if their projects go straight to hell).

Let's say that there are a lot of jobs in small to medium sized companies waiting for perl-programmers but didn't know it, they want just someone who gets the job done. If you'll do it in perl they don't care, even if they have employed you as a java-programmer.

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Re^2: Are Perl and the dynamic languages dead or what ?
by brian_d_foy (Abbot) on Jun 25, 2005 at 18:11 UTC

    In fairness to managers, once someone makes the decision to use some particular language, that's the sort of programmer they hire. It's not that they don't get fired for hiring Java programmers, but that somewhere else someone decided to use Java. That's not an a priori bad decision, so I don't sweat that.

    The other interesting note is that .NET and HTML were the big winners in the Dice report (and PHP was curiously absent, and I would really like to see those numbers). Since .NET was up 52% (but hey, going from 1 to 2 will do that), I'm curious about why that is.

    What I'd really like to see from the tech jobs is a breakdown of what the tech workers are actually doing instead of what they are using. Since Microsoft pretty much rules the desktop for corporate workers, I expect that workers supporting those workers and their machines would be much more focused on .NET, Java, Visual Basic, and so on. I don't expect Perl to even be close to dominating that arena (just like I don't expect Linux to).

    Once we segment "the market", I don't think these numbers will be all that surprising, or worrisome. Either way, I don't blame the managers, and I think using them as a scapegoat doesn't help anyone.

    --
    brian d foy <brian@stonehenge.com>
      Of course you're right that it isn't right to blame all of them as I did. But it's my personal opinion that a lot of people in management positions try to go the "safe" way. Nothing wrong about this, but in fact they don't decide they just follow the masses. Thats a general problem not just in programming. They are paid to find good solutions, but they just try to reduce the risk of their decisions and take the average solutions. That can be extremly annoying.
      "In fairness to managers, once someone makes the decision to use some particular language, that's the sort of programmer they hire."

      Not necessarily. I have worked at companies where even though the majority of the work is in Java, the management still hires ASP programmers or vice versa.

      We have requirements for Data Warehouse professionals, and we interview a lot of people who were managers at their last job and haven't touched code in years.