in reply to Where are all the Perl programmers?

If you're having trouble finding good people, it's because you're not paying enough. There's always someone willing to do the job for enough money.

Now, if the money is more than you can afford, you need to rethink your business plan.

-- Randal L. Schwartz, Perl hacker
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Re^2: Where are all the Perl programmers?
by jasonk (Parson) on Feb 01, 2006 at 03:47 UTC

    And related to that, you may be trying too hard to hide what you are paying. I'm tired of people calling me up with great job offers and wasting a lot of time before I find out that the most they are willing to pay is about $20k less than I'm currently making... At least tell me that up front and don't waste both our time

    We're not surrounded, we're in a target-rich environment!
[reply]
Re^2: Where are all the Perl programmers?
by adrianh (Chancellor) on Feb 01, 2006 at 11:16 UTC
    If you're having trouble finding good people, it's because you're not paying enough. There's always someone willing to do the job for enough money.

    I like to think of it as the combination of two factors:.

    • You are not paying enough
    • You are doing boring work

    :-)

[reply]

      More generally, the job is not rewarding enough, through pay, satisfaction, location, etc.

      This is all basic micro-economics of supply and demand. If demand for "good" Perl programmers is high and the supply low, "prices" (i.e. rewards) must rise. Alternatively, employers will need to find a substitute, either lower-quality programmers or switching their projects (if they can) to a language with a higher supply of programmers and thus lower costs.

      (Which may not prevent them from miscalculating what is really lower cost over the long term -- paying a lot for good Perl programmers or paying very little for crappy programmers in language X. Economics says that people are rational -- but not that they are good at math.)

      -xdg

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