Re^2: Is PerlMonks relevant for one's Perl marketability?

Well, recruiters don’t look at PerlMonks, but most Perl programmers do with some frequency. Being a participant may emphasize that you do (or do not) know what you’re talking about, but really it is your work that speaks for you or against you most clearly. No matter what else you do in a workplace, don’t piss anyone else off. You need a body of work that you can demonstrate, and you need good co-worker references. And none of that is ever going to do your selling for you.

Marketability is strictly determined by your skills of self-promotion; that is to say, marketing. I have a friend who is an excellent sysadmin, but, bless him, he couldn’t promote himself out of a paper bag. Talks about amazing stuff that he routinely does, and it really is amazing stuff ... but put him into an interview and you can almost hear the blam!! as the bullet hits the foot. Again. So, participation in a forum is definitely something that you can use in self-marketing efforts, but your success is largely going to depend on your abilities of self-marketing in general. It’s a skill that must be learned.

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Re^3: Is PerlMonks relevant for one's Perl marketability? by Your Mother (Archbishop) on Sep 07, 2012 at 22:29 UTC
`s/most Perl programmers/something like 2‰ of Perl programmers/`	[reply] [d/l]
Re^4: Is PerlMonks relevant for one's Perl marketability? by locked_user sundialsvc4 (Abbot) on Sep 10, 2012 at 04:14 UTC
If that is a true metric, Mom, it sure-as-heck surprises me to hear it. Although the user group of Perl is huge ... Nevertheless ... one more thing must be said about PerlMonks: I have never been around any group of software professionals who knew more about so many things, and were instantly willing and able to help. You can just put your ear to the ground and listen to some of the conversations that pass through here every week and learn a lot. You won’t encounter any fanboi’s around here ... they know their stuff. You can ask a question and get a thorough answer to it in, like, fifteen minutes or so.
Re^6: Is PerlMonks relevant for one's Perl marketability? by Your Mother (Archbishop) on Sep 10, 2012 at 13:15 UTC
I agree about the value of the site, or I wouldn't be here. There is at least a million hackers/sysadmins of whatever variety that sling Perl at least some of the time. This site is something like 120,000^th most visited site in the world right now (and this is a big gain over what it was a few months ago; not sure where the spike originates though the historical traffic is pretty spiky overall). I've worked with a couple dozen Perl hackers in the last decade and only one of them is a current/active monk and many were unaware of the site's existence. Update: HURRRR… meant to reply to Re^4: Is PerlMonks relevant for one's Perl marketability?	[reply]
Re^7: Is PerlMonks relevant for one's Perl marketability? by BrowserUk (Patriarch) on Sep 10, 2012 at 13:44 UTC
Re^8: Is PerlMonks relevant for one's Perl marketability? by Your Mother (Archbishop) on Sep 10, 2012 at 18:10 UTC
Re^5: Is PerlMonks relevant for one's Perl marketability? by DrHyde (Prior) on Sep 10, 2012 at 10:33 UTC
There's an interesting sequence in this presentation that Michael Schwern gave at YAPC::NA 2012, starting at 16:55, showing that "the community" is only a small proportion of even the users that the community knows about (of the people I've worked with well under half are in the community, and well under half of those use perlmonks), and that the users that we know about are only a small proportion of actual users.	[reply]