Perl, Outsourcing and China

One of the reasons there is such a lack of skilled LAMP engineers is that it is simply not taught in colleges and universities. These schools seem bent on pumping out people with rudimentary Java and C# programming skills, glossing over general computer science applicable to all programming languages. Moreover, they seem to be avoiding altogether languages and paradigms not found within the (perceived) absolute mainstream of corporate software development. This fosters an attitude among Chinese job seekers that Perl is an 'old' or even a 'dead' language, making it difficult to draw decent engineers from the talent pool to join LAMP projects. If China is to surpass India in terms of IT expertise, this trend needs to change. Enough lamenting, what can be done to resolve this predicament? The onus is on us, the Perl community within China, to combat the negative perceptions that have tarnished Perl's name. In order to do that we need to do several things:

1. Evangelize! We need to tell people about Perl and why it is the Right Choice for many applications, as well as how fun it is to write in Perl!

2. Support! We need to support our community, especially the newcomers. We need to help beginners, even with simple questions, even when the answer is in page 1 of the manual!

3. Contribute! We need more members of the Chinese Perl community to join in open source projects and make contributions. Something that desperately needs contributers is documentation. We need the standard set of Perl documentation in Chinese. What can companies do? If your company is taking on LAMP projects but you lack the skilled resources for the job, obviously you need to put together a serious training program.

Ideally you would have these LAMP trainees work on one of the many open-source projects out there first and let them build up their LAMP skill-set, then once they are suitably trained, let them loose on your customer's code. Don't just rush through the training! You don't want to make a bad impression on your customer by having people with little or no Perl skills hacking on their code. One big advantage you get with

letting your LAMP trainees work on open-source projects is that they get code-reviewed by experienced Perl engineers. Also, your company gets some street-credit for making contributions to open-source projects and you are more likely to attract better talent in the future.

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