We're looking to hire a Perl programmer for a short-to-medium-term project, maybe lasting 6 months in planning, development and production and maybe a few more weeks or months after in testing, maintenance and any future developments.

The budget set for this project is not dot.com style budget. It's relatively small. The project will require a lot of coding and development from a skilled programmer, but the project will work off a backend database. Now, this is the important part. I know many of us are hackers, programmers, whatever you may call us, but how many of us, or how reasonable is it to assume or to expect some level of database knowledge or confidence from the prospective Perl programmer?

Is it fairly reasonable to expect to find a Perl programmer who knows how to work well with databases and do any modifications to the database if needed? Or do Perl programmers know nothing about databases and one must hire a separate database guru to work with the database and create some sort of pretty front end for the programmer to access the data? I know modules exist for this, but what about if I needed the programmer to access and make changes to tables and create indexes?

Does such a person exist? And is it a reasonable expectation, if laid out clearly in the interview processes, that some database knowledge is required? How many of you would be comfortable with this position? How many of you take up this dual-role in your current job?

- wil

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