Friday, January 23, 2015

A Perl Contract Or Spiralling Down the Rabbit Hole

T.A. of Newton, MA e-mails about a Perl contract in Snottybridge (Cambridge) saying
My client is looking for an Engineer to work with Perl and improve some in house applications.
I followed up with a call and it appears that U of Harvārd has some webapps of mixed Perl/PHP backends and they want to do a bit of cleanup. My position was along the lines of
Improving Perl applications can be tricky as Perl (unfortunately) allows people to write unreadable code.

I would like to see some of the offending code first (perhaps under NDA).

Alas it wasn't meant to be: the hiring manager wants people to pass a knowledge test and come interview in-person on a set date.

Being that atm I am busy and know better and am not jumping for joy at the thought of working for such a exalted institution I conveyed them my warm wishes of all the luck in the world finding a Perl guru interested in maintaining a (potentially disastrous) code base and bid them adieu.

-ulianov

P.S. The parking situation in Snottybridge is catastrophic so one more reason to "say no to the Tee" ;)