jobs

The Linux Foundation has announced a new job posting website dedicated for Linux. That's right - people get paid to work with Linux.

But, why do companies do this to themselves? The listings include things such as one for a "Director of Technology" that states "you should be comfortable with OO Perl, databases (especially MySQL), ORMs such as DBIx, etc." or one requiring "Strong Scripting skills, Perl or Korn Shell."

Others state you must be conversant in "ASP.NET", "MS SQL 2005 / 2008" and "Active Directory" though I'm unsure why anyone wanting to hire a Linux person, where the best ones traditionally will be very anti-Microsoft, would need those skills. Perhaps the poster missed the fact that the domain name ended with "linux.com"

The biggest thing that jumps out at me is how many of the job postings required expertise in obscure or outdated technologies. I'm sorry, but I lump Perl in with that bunch. There has to become a point at which it's easier to build from scratch a version 2.0 of whatever it is that you do, than to try to continue to maintain 150,000 lines of Perl code even when integrated with DBIx. Languages like PHP and even Python allow developers to write cleaner, easier to read code in half the time.