Job Requirements
Who cares?
petdance on 2003-12-04T14:43:27
Who cares about what the blathering multitude say? People say all sorts of stuff that they know nothing about. I would guess that most of the people complaining about your hiring requirements have never hired someone before.
Releasing to CPAN is good, whiners are bad
brian_d_foy on 2003-12-04T17:29:55
At least all of the complaining lets you know who you do not need to consider for the job. If they do not want the job, especially with so many people carping about being unemployed, they can stay unemployed.
When I starting reading the essay, I thought you required releases to CPAN so you could see code samples or something like that, but your reason was much better than that.
- You detach yourself far enough from the code to let strangers look at it.
- You realize that other people might want to use your code. You know your code will not be hidden in the bowels if your internal project, safe from prying eyes and criticism.
- You probably did a lot of non-coding work to get the distribution ready (POD, tests, etc.). A lot of people ignore all that.
- You get to receive mail from CPAN testers, and realize that if your stuff fails you get a big red mark on your CPAN page. You also get the chance to fix your code to work on platforms you do not have.
- Now you have to deal with a lot of people complaining to you about things that do not (or do) work. You get to deal with people complaining about you in public (and may learn to handle that well---a valuable skill!)
- To get your module registered, you probably had to deal with the Perl Module List folks, who you might not even know personally.
- Even if your code is complete crap and has been done before in some other module, at least you gave something back to the world. The next module you release will be better.
Re:Releasing to CPAN is good, whiners are bad
rafael on 2003-12-04T19:01:31
There are more reasons to put such a requirement in a job posting : this gives to the potential candidate a grasp of what the company is about. As said James, this is all about team building. A candidate which feels bad about this requirement, for example because he doesn't see the interest of contributing to CPAN, won't probably be a good Fotangoer. At the contrary, someone who has released nothing to CPAN due to external constraints, or who has released only a few cheap hacks like me, but who is willing to try to have this job because he knows he will enjoy working with people with CPAN ids, will fit the team better. What a shame I can't move to London :-(
