Tell HN: booking.com is looking for 40+ Perl programmers (in Amsterdam)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1784399

116 68 16 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

Note: I'm not affiliated with booking.com - they mentioned these offers at the open-source developer conference in paris/france this week-end, so I'm forwarding the information.

Booking.com is looking for more than 40 perl programmers (either seasoned or beginners willing to learn).

They are based in Amsterdam, provide a "competitive salary + relocation package".

They use Perl, Apache, mod_perl, MySql, Memcache, Mason, JavaScript, Git etc.

They are facing a huge growth, which definitely results in interesting scaling challenges :)

You can contact Sheila Sijtsema at sheila.sijtsema@booking.com or have a look at http://www.booking.com/jobs

thibaut_barrere4• 16 years ago

Link: http://www.booking.com/jobs (although I believe email contact may be better).

Jun8• 16 years ago

Hmm, so the news of Perl's deaths have been exaggerated then?

misterm• 16 years ago

Perl is still very much alive and well.

borism• 16 years ago

unfortunately if I may add :)

thibaut_barrere4• 16 years ago

Well, something that surprises me is why hasn't this post been upvoted at least once (after 25 minutes) ?

I'm pretty sure it can be interesting to many more people (I would be if I loved perl, but I don't practice it).

btilly• 16 years ago

Perl is easy to learn. It also borrowed from a lot of languages, and a lot of languages borrowed from it, which makes it easier.

If you already know C, bash, Ruby, Python or PHP, you will find a lot of carryover to Perl.

Nate75Sanders• 16 years ago

If you search on indeed.com, perl has more hits than python and ruby combined by a solid margin. Certainly many of these are for sys admin positions, but I still think it's a pretty telling statistic.

elliottcarlson• 16 years ago

Oh man, I <3 Perl...

If it weren't for the whole family/rooted thing I would go for it - plus not to mention I already speak Dutch.

thibaut_barrere4• 16 years ago

Maybe you can still try to get in touch with them. They are apparently struggling a bit (why I posted) to hire that many people; maybe they would agree to see some remote work at some point (just extrapolating!).

kees• 16 years ago

Speaking Dutch is not necessary at Booking.com.

jonasvp• 16 years ago

But definitely a plus in Amsterdam.

You can get by fine with English but to really feel at home - you should know the language. This is assuming you want to make the place you live in feel like home.

andrewvc• 16 years ago

And I thought I was crazy looking for 40 unicorn trainers in los angeles

moe3• 16 years ago

40?!

Are they trying to prove the infinite monkey theorem, empirically?

thibaut_barrere4• 16 years ago

I don't think really. Based on some discussion, it seems they are more adding a pile of new servers everyday, and they also seem to do a very good job at automating their process etc.

Empedocles99• 16 years ago

Can't be that good if they need 40 more keyboardists.

endtime• 16 years ago

I don't think the number of servers you need is even loosely related to the number of devs you need.

tlack2• 16 years ago

I've worked with them as an affiliate and they have a pretty good system. The travel industry as a whole is pretty fast moving.

jacquesm2• 16 years ago

Here is the link to the actual job I believe:

http://www5jh.openhire.com/epostings/submit.cfm?fuseaction=a...

40 decent perl programmers in Amsterdam is going to be tough to fill.

The only ones I know of that are good with Perl you wouldn't want to hire for any reason.

First I thought they meant Perl programmers 40 years and older, but age discrimination is illegal here :)

rjbond3rd• 16 years ago

If they are "good with Perl," then why would you "not want to hire them"?

hvs• 16 years ago

I think that he's saying that their other characteristics would make you not want to hire them, even though they are good with Perl.

yoak• 16 years ago

It's probably a bad sign. Almost no one is in a position to bring that many on board and use them effectively, and I'm tempted to say no one is unless they're already a fair multiple of that size. When you combine that with being open to "beginners willing to learn" which almost no one can afford, it makes it sound like one of the "We need 5 times what our ten guys are doing and that means 40 more." bad decisions. Generally you don't need forty more. You need one or two geniuses and perhaps management and replacement.

This is all based on information in this posting. I know nothing about the company or its situation or even if they really are looking for 40+. I'm just generally suspicious about this sort of recruiting.

AdamN• 16 years ago

Obviously a management issue. 40 Perl developers is overkill on many levels.

If I were a Perl developer who wanted to live in Amsterdam, I would be scared of a place looking for 40 people - it means that their management is doing something nonsensical.

moe3• 16 years ago

Nonsensical is an understatement here, imho.

Unless this is their humorous way of celebrating the 35th anniversary of the Mythical Man Month...

40 salaries + X! That's at least ~2mio down the drain, even if someone comes to their senses and pulls the plug within the first year.

isotopp• 16 years ago

This company is part of the Priceline group of companies.

Comparing http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=PCLN+GOOG shows size-related statistics that are about 10% of GOOG, whatever that may mean in reality given the difference of marktes in which they operate.

mmaunder• 16 years ago

http://jobs.perl.org/

While Erlang and Haskell may get you laid, Perl remains the glue of the web.

mustpax2• 16 years ago

Not that I don't know but for the other readers here, how would one get laid with Erlang or Haskell?

blackdog2• 16 years ago

quickly and in parallel.

jrockway6• 16 years ago

I never realized until recently how hard something like this is. People do not want to move. People that hear about your job post usually have some reason to have heard about your job post, like they can't program at all and their last employer finally figured it out. Unfortunately, you can't know this until they show up and you ask them a few questions about Perl. (I love how one candidate tried to BS me on a basic Perl question. "Do you know OO Perl?" "Yes." "What's the first argument to a Perl method?" "$_". "Don't you mean $_[0]?" "They're the same thing." Congratulations, you have clearly never written any Perl.)

I work at a bank, and we need Perl programmers too. We can afford to pay a lot better than booking.com, but we can't find anyone, either. It's very odd. (And it's not just Perl, we had the same problem with Java and C#, and are having the same problem with C++. Might as well rewrite our app in Haskell... at least those languages have a community.)

The other thing that I see as being difficult for booking.com is that people don't want to work with 40+ other people. Between learning "the rules" from the people already there and teaching the new folks how to program, there is never any time to get anything done. (My second "real job" was like this; I was not even a "team lead" and yet all I did was teach other people basic Perl + Database stuff. We got exactly no work done. At least if I was by myself I would have been able to do one person's work.)

In fact, I find the other Perl team in my office to be too big -- and they only have 4 people!

snarkyboojum• 16 years ago

I have an almost diametrically opposed experience. I have good Perl skills, and 8+ years experience, and can't get Perl work in Sydney Australia, primarily due to the fact that recruiters looking for Perl devs here don't know anything about Perl tech.

The few Perl dev jobs I've interviewed for and taken have relied on unbelievably basic programming tests.

jrockway6• 16 years ago

Yes, recruiting basically sucks for Perl, and probably programming in general. The only way I have ever successfully found people to work with is through pre-existing relationships. (In the case of my current job, Perl Mongers; in the case of past jobs, people I know on irc.)

You also mention location specificity -- this hurts employees and employers. Employees don't want to relocate, and employers don't want the communication barrier that telecommuting raises. (And FWIW, having telecommuted at an all-telecommute company... it kind of sucks on both ends.)

blackdog2• 16 years ago

if you're looking for perl jobs in Sydney, drop me a line at mwotton@gmail.com. I have a few friends who are constantly looking for good perl devs.

symkat2• 16 years ago

I stay away from applying for a lot of Perl jobs because my skillsets don't seem to match what's used in production environments often, though I've been doing it for >5 years.

For instance, my webby experience with Perl is CGI::Fast, POE::Componenet::FastGI, Plack::Request with my own dispatcher, DBI itself. Where often the places are looking for Catylist or mod_perl with DBIx::Class / ORM, and I feel uncomfortable applying for a positon where my current skill set doesn't meet the technologies they use even if I could pick up either quickly.

In general my non-webby Perl experience is sufficient.

Does anyone else run into this, and if so how do you handle it?

jrockway6• 16 years ago

I like it if candidates know about testing and OO. If they don't know Moose yet, that's fine. Catalyst and DBIx::Class are not something I would expect. Not everyone does web/database stuff. I don't, and I wrote a freakin' book about it!

It's a little odd if you know OO Perl but don't use Moose, but not a deal-killer. Honestly, I've found that there is a large faction of Perl programmers that refuse to leave the 1990s behind, and those are the people I don't want to hire. If you just don't know something but are willing to learn, then that's perfect. It's the "I will absolutely not use Moose" that == unemployment :)

berntb• 16 years ago

I am in the same place.

I'm thinking about a couple of months vacation after this job, to do some web hacking and learning the newer frameworks.

I really like the present place, but I almost doesn't touch the web/CPAN. I have managed to drag people here from 1999 to 2005 or so, but that is probably the limit. :-(

(The killer now, is that I seem to be in the worst place in Scandinavia to have a peanut allergy. [Edit: The lack of challenge to learn new things is not good either.])

ig1• 16 years ago

Agreed. At one of my previous (financial sector) employers we had a crack perl team (the team had a number of well known members of the Perl community) and we still struggled to find decent Perl developers despite offering a decent pay package and a strong team.

aphexairlines• 16 years ago

Why is Perl knowledge a requirement? I've been writing Perl in my new job since June and almost the entire team of 10 (myself included) knew no Perl before joining.

Check that your candidates know how to develop software, make sure they are comfortable with functional programming so they don't break anything, and give them a couple books (programming perl & higher order perl) to read for a week after joining.

jrockway6• 16 years ago

This is even harder to select for. Now instead of the keyword "Perl", we have nothing.

SapphireSun• 16 years ago

Same here. At my current job I knew exactly 0 perl to start with. I haven't learned all the object oriented stuff yet, but I'm cruising (and have been for at least the past three months or more) at 4 mo. in, and I was capable of writing some of the simple stuff after a week or two.

mattm• 16 years ago

What about people that haven't used much Perl but can pick up languages quickly? Do you look for people like that or do they get screened out because they have little to no Perl experience?

sgt2• 16 years ago

No you got it all wrong. These are dutch people after all.

They are looking for 40 grams of "perl".. You know what I mean? Shmoke it wiff a pancake.

avar• 16 years ago

Odd to see this on HN now. I took the job with Booking, just finished packing and will be flying out to Amsterdam tomorrow. See http://blogs.perl.org/users/aevar_arnfjor_bjarmason/2010/10/...

For anyone considering this I can tell you that their whole relocation package (including the assistance they give you) is very impressive.

sigzero• 16 years ago

Ovid signed on as well. Do you know if they mentor well? I can program in Perl and have created a few websites and internal stuff but some things are best taught.

jrockway6• 16 years ago

Prediction: SocialText 2.0.

LoonyPandora• 16 years ago

Working with both Ovid and Avar makes this a great opportunity to learn from two big-hitters in the perl world.

warfangle2• 16 years ago

If this was about four years from now, I would be all over it. I've been toying with the idea of someday expatriating to the Netherlands.

Manfred• 16 years ago

Why wait?

warfangle2• 16 years ago

I'm not quite finished where I am now. :)

KevinMS• 16 years ago

Damn, being 41 years old I thought I finally find a ".com" that wasn't practicing ageism! Guess I'll have to take my 15 long years of perl experience and keep looking!

hendler• 16 years ago

Maybe they'll finish Perl 6?

draegtun• 16 years ago

Booking.com are a heavy user and investor in Perl5:

* http://www.booking.com/general.ja.html?tmpl=docs/pressreleas...

* http://news.perlfoundation.org/2008/12/bookingcom_makes_a_ma...

* http://news.perlfoundation.org/2010/02/grant_proposal_fixing...

NB. Last two links look a bit naff at moment! I think they're in process of some CSS amendments.

So Booking.com want perl5 developers and not anything related to perl6. However if you are interested in perl6 then you can find the latest version of Rakudo (perl6 on Parrot) here: http://rakudo.org/announce/rakudo-star/2010.09

Dilpil• 16 years ago

Hiring 4 people at the same time to work on the same project is a questionable idea- 40 is just absurd. I hope we eventually hear about the aftermath of this.

balding_n_tired• 16 years ago

Gee, I'm a 40+ Perl programmer. But Amsterdam is a few time zones away...

Tell HN: booking.com is looking for 40+ Perl programmers (in Amsterdam)

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