The company I work for provides Perl training. During the last week I contacted an agency who were looking for someone to deliver a Perl training course in Ireland to a group of people. I asked for details of the specific aspects of Perl they wanted the course to cover and for some idea as to how much they were willing to pay.

Their response astounded me. They wanted to pay about £230 a day for a trainer and they expected the trainer to provide all the training material. They also didn’t really need you to be a trainer - just someone who was an experienced Perl programmer!

Trying to cut training costs by using inexperienced people will end up costing a company time and money.

Tony quotes Jerry Weinberg.

Software reviews are a useful method of on-the-job training. They also greatly improve the quality of code that is produced but not all programmers can or will do it.

Reviews are usually rather clumsy at first, but even without outside help, reviewers soon learn to do a much more efficient and effective job.

Not all programmers make good reviewers. Some programmers make such a bad job of this that you start having to review the reviewers. In my experience the worst type of reviewer is the senior programmer who resents having to waste time looking at other people’s code. They either spend five minutes on the review and pass everything or fail everything with really scathing comments about the stupidity of the developer - neither or these things is helpful to the project or the team.