You wrote "contract perl coder". At least where I'm from, that means someone who does temp work instead of getting a proper job. And anyway, I wasn't replying to you. I was replying to someone who talked about setting up a section for contractors.

I don't feel strongly either way about having a section for discussing perl at work, although I doubt I'd use it myself unless interesting discussions about the practice of programming come up, such as discussing how to create and enforce coding standards, how to convince management that Testing Is Good. Of course, we've already had lots of discussions about those topics in other sections of the site.

If you want to talk about useful contract clauses, the state of the perl job market and so on, every single thing you say will be locale-specific. That won't stop people from other locales chiming in and confusing matters though, nor will it prevent people from assuming that you're talking about their locale. Just as I did when I wrote "tax-dodging slimeballs" (that was crossed out to indicate it was what we call in English a "joke"). *Here* people go contracting either because they are incapable of getting a proper job or because it can be a way of evading certain taxes.

That's Mr Tax-Dodging Slimeball to you ;-)

I suspect you're a decade or two out of date to say that people in the UK go contracting to avoid taxes (there's a world of legal difference between 'evading' and 'avoiding' taxes, starting with the fact that the latter is legal and the former isn't). Those of us who choose to work as contractors also usually avoid job security, company pensions, redundancy payments, and many other benefits. Some of us contract because we like to move around, or because we prefer the customer/supplier relationship to the employer/peonemployee relationship, or for any of a number of other reasons. There are some contractors who might as well be permanent employees, contracted in the same place year after year, but a) they're usually subject to IR35 these days, and b) that's usually because their employer imposed those conditions on them to avoid future redundancy liability.

As to 'incapable of getting a proper job' in theory it's possible to conceal a lack of competence by skipping from contract to contract. In practice, interview processes usually (OK, not always, but usually) stop that from happening.

Update: But all that's way OT. I do agree that there is no sense in having a 'Perl Contracting' section on the site - it's way too specific.

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"If there is such a phenomenon as absolute evil, it consists in treating another human being as a thing."
John Brunner, "The Shockwave Rider".

I believe there's an adage, that goes something like: "Tax evasion is a crime. Tax avoidance is just common sense".