Re: Where are future senior programmers coming from?

Some really good ideas have been put forward here, and I think many of us will take a lot away from this dicussion.

But in the end we will only generate new programmers if the companies that hire have a commitment to do so. You can't go seeking 'experienced' or 'knowledgable' people all the time and expect someone else to do the training for you. Somewhere, somehow, it has to be paid for. I think we should work to encourage companies to add promising non-Perl coders to Perl teams. As has been said here, it is not what you know that counts, it is how you use what you know. Once somebody has some good knowledge in teh fundamentals of programming, they can move to other languages. Not always easilly, we dont need to write FORTRAN in Perl, for example.

The issue then becomes how do we retain these newly minted Perl programmers? In the LA scenario you paint tilly they would likely be hired away pretty quickly. So we also need to figure out how to devise a package that keeps them aro8nd once you have trained them - at least for a while so you can recover some investment!

jdtoronto

Comment on Re: Where are future senior programmers coming from?

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Re^2: Where are future senior programmers coming from? by tilly (Archbishop) on Sep 07, 2006 at 18:39 UTC
One solution is that you don't retain them. You resign yourself to the fact that you'll constantly be hiring junior people, training them, putting them to work while underpaying them, then losing them. This is the principle behind "churn and burn consultancies" and while they are no fun to work for, they can be a good stepping stone to a better job. For the record, my first programming job was a churn and burn consultancy. While I hated it at the time, it turned out well in the long run. I was there 10 months and my salary went from $33,000/year to $45,000/year. My next job paid me $70,000/year.	[reply]

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Re^2: Where are future senior programmers coming from?
by tilly (Archbishop) on Sep 07, 2006 at 18:39 UTC

For the record, my first programming job was a churn and burn consultancy. While I hated it at the time, it turned out well in the long run. I was there 10 months and my salary went from $33,000/year to $45,000/year. My next job paid me $70,000/year.

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