Here at Idea Works our primary development platform consists of Perl and MySQL on Linux. In addition to that, over time we’ve established specific tools we use in development. This leads to about ten software tools that are used daily which our developers must be comfortable with to be productive.

But, in our experience it’s always better to hire someone smart, not simply someone who is familiar or skilled with the tools used. Programming languages and environments are just syntax. Understanding computer science concepts is the hard part.

You can teach almost anything to someone who’s willing to learn, and companies should be wary of requiring candidates to know specific language sets or tools. If you hire the right people they’ll learn, and you’ll be better off in the end.

We practice what we preach: We’ve recently hired two interns for this summer. One has beginner Perl experience and the other has none. But, we have confidence that they’ll learn, and that they’ll learn fast enough that we won’t be impacted negatively.