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Can't fill Perl/Web vacancies in London

nicholas on 2007-01-08T21:17:10

There have been recent discussions on the deliberately unarchived london.pm jobs discuss list about the difficulty of filling Perl/Web development jobs in London. Part of the problem seems to be that @other_languages [unspecificed] can provide developers at lower price (possibly due to more self taught hackers dabbling in them), but a big part of the problem seems to be simply that there aren't that many people with the skills sought full stop, contacting them is hard, and finding ones that are unhappy in their current job is harder.

So I wondered, does the current source for builders and plumbers also supply programmers? Do the people of .pl know .pl? :-)

(It's not the first london.pm thread about jobs - there was the big one in August that started here and continued on into the next week.)

Poles

Smylers on 2007-01-09T07:49:50

Do the people of .pl know .pl? :-)

We've got a CV from a Polish Perl programmer who's only just moved to the UK (all his previous employers are in Poland) and we're interviewing him next week. On paper it certainly looks like he knows Perl.

I'm afraid not

migo on 2007-01-09T08:12:34

Situation here (in .pl) seems to be the same - there are not many perl programmers and most of them are not looking for a job. Our company has been struggling to hire perl developers (in .pl) for a long time now (without much success recently).

Of course some people have left the country to seek their fortune in GB, but I do not think that he have much more perl developers to provide... :-)

less talk, more action

TeeJay on 2007-01-09T14:23:50

Given the large number of employers who need perl skills, rely on and benefit from it, you'd think they would talk to each other about how to solve the problem.

We have a huge number of computer science students who will graduate having never heard of or thought about perl, if only some big employers evangelised about how great it was to beyond the perl monger choir.

I don't employ any perl people, but am involved in finding the occasional contractor and have helped people fill gaps, but I've also organised local perl monger meetings where we've had students and all kinds of people who are neither perl mongers nor part of what we see as the perl community. I never saw any perl employers approaching Uni's when I was at uni, and I don't see any now.

I don't see the people complaining about how hard it is to recruit doing anything useful to bring more decent people into the job market, instead fighting to poach the same people or making unreasonable requirements.

Re:less talk, more action

mpeters on 2007-01-09T16:35:39

I agree. The Perl community needs to reach out better to new programmers (and it's easy to find them at universities). I was first introduced to Perl when I was still in college by a small local business and if I hadn't been, I probably would have continued with the C/C++/Java/C# stuff that the university was teaching with.

Maybe each YAPC should take this into consideration and "donate" a certain number of tickets to local universities to attract new and interested parties. Maybe talk to the CS programs at those Universities to offer extra credit of some kind?