turgid's Journal: Rejection No. 5

I didn't get the job (interview number 5).

They said some very nice things about me, but the particular skills they were looking for (i.e. Perl) in addition to C and Linux were too rusty. They said that there was no doubt that I'd be able to pick it up again, but that they needed a real expert who could start on the project straight away without any time to ramp up.

There are a few other things I need to revise as well.

The thing is, I don't want to spend much time on Perl since it's not a skill that's in great demand these days. This job was a bit of a niche.

Too bad...

[jawtheshark]

I always wonder where they find those "real experts". It's always so unlikely that you have a perfect match with the skillset required that the ability to learn (and eventual former, even long in the past experiences) is IMHO more desirable anyway. It's a sign of times, I'd say... Keep us posted.

Re:

[turgid]

The thing is, when they want to reject you, they have to give you some kind of a reason. It's often not the real reason, and often it doesn't make sense.

At least this lot managed to do it without being too insulting.

What makes me suspicious is that they are going to keep looking (although they said they were absolutely desperate to get someone on board as soon as possible) in the hope of finding someone better at Perl. At the phone interview they said that I'd had the most Perl experience out of anyone else

Re:

[gmhowell]

It's a sham. Some companies have requirements to hire a certain amount of citizen talent. They can set an arbitrary standard, magically not find them, then contact an outsourcing company (foreign) and voila, there's an Indian with the exact skillset needed. At least on paper.

That sucks

[tqft]

", but that they needed a real expert who could start on the project straight away without any time to ramp up."
So who actually trains anyone anymore? No-one if it requires some of their time & money?

Re:

[turgid]

The "technical test" was done over a mobile phone on speaker. The guy hadn't see my CV.

A lot of the questions were about Perl, since they have a lot of (very cryptic) legacy Perl code to decipher and reimplement (in C). The guy who wrote the Perl has left but is on contract to them a few days a week.

It's now over 4 years since I did any significant Perl. I wrote a notification system for a Linux-based storage appliance in Perl. It monitored various logs in /var/log and looked for events using regular expres