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Comment by symkat | Hacker News Reader

I stay away from applying for a lot of Perl jobs because my skillsets don't seem to match what's used in production environments often, though I've been doing it for >5 years.

For instance, my webby experience with Perl is CGI::Fast, POE::Componenet::FastGI, Plack::Request with my own dispatcher, DBI itself. Where often the places are looking for Catylist or mod_perl with DBIx::Class / ORM, and I feel uncomfortable applying for a positon where my current skill set doesn't meet the technologies they use even if I could pick up either quickly.

In general my non-webby Perl experience is sufficient.

Does anyone else run into this, and if so how do you handle it?

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I like it if candidates know about testing and OO. If they don't know Moose yet, that's fine. Catalyst and DBIx::Class are not something I would expect. Not everyone does web/database stuff. I don't, and I wrote a freakin' book about it!

It's a little odd if you know OO Perl but don't use Moose, but not a deal-killer. Honestly, I've found that there is a large faction of Perl programmers that refuse to leave the 1990s behind, and those are the people I don't want to hire. If you just don't know something but are willing to learn, then that's perfect. It's the "I will absolutely not use Moose" that == unemployment :)

I know OO and testing (at least Test::More and general test writing), though I haven't played with Moose more for a lack of time than an aversion to it.

Half the jobs I've taken give deadlines for projects that make it impossible for me to learn more than I know to complete them and the list of things I have to learn in my time (that also competes with lists of projects, blog articles and other things) is growing constantly. I miss having free time.

I am in the same place.

I'm thinking about a couple of months vacation after this job, to do some web hacking and learning the newer frameworks.

I really like the present place, but I almost doesn't touch the web/CPAN. I have managed to drag people here from 1999 to 2005 or so, but that is probably the limit. :-(

(The killer now, is that I seem to be in the worst place in Scandinavia to have a peanut allergy. [Edit: The lack of challenge to learn new things is not good either.])

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