Three replies in one - hope that's OK.

David Cantrell <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> That said, I suspect that it would be a lot harder to find such people
> who are willing to live and work outside London.

That surprises me.  There seem to be lots of good people living
outside London who really don't want to work inside it with the
overcrowding and the black snot and so on.  I think there could a
London/non-London split - I know people both inside and outside London
and I don't expect many of them to be moving across the boundary any
time soon.

"Paul Makepeace" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> The old idea that a decent programmer can pick up a new language and
> be solidly productive in it in a number of weeks is a hoary old load
> of bollocks if you ask me. Sure they can produce _code_ but it won't
> be very good and it'll take them much longer than someone skilled in
> it, and no programmer I've ever met can start producing complex
> application-class code because [...]

I've met some who can start producing complex application-class code
fairly quickly, but not starting from a blank page.  90%+ of our work
is developing existing applications, so that's not a huge problem.

Even so, I feel it's easy to overlook the need to assign at least one
more experienced programmer to help them get started, through
something like pair programming, or at least close reviews and
feedback.  Maybe companies who don't have worker-learning as part of
their Mission find it harder to justify that level investment in their
workers, so prefer to hire ready-made programmers?

Lyle <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: [...]
> There does seem a big business thing to automatically assume .NET or 
> Java are the best solution. I think a lot of this comes from SUNs and MS 
> massive certification systems. But Perl certification is a whole other 
> argument we'll leave for another day :)

Not just Perl.  Certification entirely is a whole other argument.  I
don't trust many other organisations enough to delegate checking
programmer competence to them.  It surprises me so many do and doesn't
surprise me at all that so many get into pickles.  I guess "no-one got
fired for believing EdExcel/Sun/University of Bottles" is a new
variation on an old meme.

Regards,
-- 
MJ Ray (slef)
Webmaster for hire, statistician and online shop builder for a small
worker cooperative http://www.ttllp.co.uk/ http://mjr.towers.org.uk/
(Notice http://mjr.towers.org.uk/email.html) tel:+44-844-4437-237
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