Judging by the number of calls and emails that I’m getting recently, the demand for Perl programmers in London is going through one of its periodic increases. Hopefully recruitment agents who are desperately googling for “perl programmer london” will find this entry and save themselves a little time.
The Perl community likes to do what it can to help people to get the most out of Perl. And that includes finding Perl people for Perl jobs (and Perl jobs for Perl people). There are a couple of specific initiatives that help people looking for Perl programmers in London.
Firstly, there’s the Perl jobs site. This is an international site which allows employers (and recruitment agents) to post job adverts for free. Perl programmers who are looking for work either get new jobs sent to them by email or can subscribe to an RSS feed of jobs on the site. It’s a very effective way to get your Perl job requirements in front of a lot of Perl programmers quickly.
Secondly, the London Perl Mongers run a jobs mailing list. People who are looking for Perl jobs in London can subscribe to this list. And people who are looking for Perl programmers can post jobs to the list (send mail to jobs[at]london.pm.org). Whilst this is a London-only list, other Perl Monger groups may well have something similar.
Of course, both of these initiatives only works as long as they have a good supply of both jobs and job-seekers. So as well as encouraging employers and agents to post their jobs, I’d also like to encourage Perl programmers to subscribe to use resources when they are looking for a job.
Oh, and it seems to me that currently in London the pool of Perl programmers is smaller than the pool of Perl jobs. So perhaps more companies should consider cross-training programmers. Did I mention that I run training courses in Perl?
Are they paying any more?
It’s not quite back to 1999 levels, but it’s getting close. It’ll get there in the next few months.
Yes, I work in Staines, and seen the job advertisements but they usually are more specific in their requirements. eg. Perl, and Postgres experience. Now I write Perl programs that interface with Oracle and mySQL and need very little knowledge of the said DBMS. I wonder who writes the job requirements, if they knew something about Perl, everybody uses DBI/DBD to interface to DBMSs. But when you enquire about the job they always quote “they need Postgres experience”.Indeed I have this theory that there isn’t an IT resouce problem, it’s just employers expecting to find somebody with exactly the experience and skills they require and not accepting somebody who may match the 70% of what they want. The same goes for programming languages; they are simply tools it’s the ability to write and design a program that is important. All programming languages have similar concepts and can be easily picked up.