In that meditation hardburn says that the right way to run a Perl shop is to have a small team of very good people. Many people have said this, including myself. The idea is to keep the size small enough to avoid problems with communication overhead, while keeping individual productivity up so you don't need a larger team. And I have to admit that I have seen this work well for a number of companies.
However there is a gotcha in this approach that Nicholas Clark pointed out. Namely, where do we get the next generation of good Perl programmers from?
The problem is that teams that are run like this have no room for junior programmers. Therefore it is hard for upcoming programmers to find a situation where they will get mentored to become good Perl programmers. The result is that we don't produce new senior programmers, which means that eventually all of the Perl shops are chasing a small pool of available people, and there aren't more showing up.
This isn't a theoretical problem. It looks like Los Angeles is already running into this problem. We have a cluster of Perl shops, all of whom understand the importance of having good programmers, most of whom have hiring processes that can figure out who is good. The result is that good people all have jobs, but we don't appear to be generating new good people. The shortage is acute enough that not long ago I suggested to someone that Perl just might not be the right language to use in a startup in LA.
So my open-ended question is where good future Perl people are coming from, and what companies should do differently to generate more of them. (While remembering the natural limits on the size of highly productive teams!)
(And yes, I know that many other job markets aren't in as good a shape as ours.)
In reply to Where are future senior programmers coming from? by tilly
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