What are the most important features of employer

Gabor Szabo started the poll for Perl developers What are the 8 most important features of an employer or a job opportunity for you?. Here are my answers with comments sorted by priority:

1. The company allows and encourages the contribution to open source projects

   That's the question of personal freedom. I doesn't accept any limits on my activities outside of work-hours. If company itself contributes to opensource, that's good too. Sometimes I'm creating something nice and generally useful on my work, if I could put it on CPAN it would be great, also, it would be additional motivation to ensure code quality.

2. I am allowed to dedicate time to refactor and modernise one's Perl code

   If you have to add some new feature to the existing code, and you're not allowed to refactor that's a pain. You see creepy code, you making it even more creepy, that's not kind of work which make you feel good.

3. I am allowed to use modern Perl tools (e.g. Moose)

   Absolutely. I respect history, but I love present and I'm keen to work for future. There's a lot of new exciting things that could make my work more interesting and I see no reason why I shouldn't use them.

4. The use of a modern version of perl (5.8 a minimum but better to use 5.10 or 5.12)

   There are some nice new features in 5.10 and 5.12 which would be fun to use. Recently I had to port pack 'N!' to 5.8.8, not a big problem, but still it was pity that I couldn't use the short and simple new form.

5. I prefer companies with agile development process

   On my current work there's practically no development process or effective planning and that's not good. I think that's very important that company has well defined development process. Currently agile methods look like most comfortable to me.

6. I prefer small companies (whatever you mean by small)

   Well, if I can remember all the people working in the same company (and I'm not good in this), that's small enough.

7. The company already has employees involved in the Perl community

   The higher qualification of my colleagues the better. That means I could improve my own Perl knowledge.

8. The applications written have lots of unit tests

   It's much more fun to change the application which has tests, comparing to the one which doesn't.

And here are my comments on some of the rest of the variants:

• Reasonable salary, reasonable daily workhours

  That's a requirement, but it has nothing to do with Perl.

• The company should be a financial supporter of the Perl community

  Yeah, that would be great, but as we are talking about small company...

• The company make it easy to install and use CPAN modules for production

  Using of CPAN modules must be allowed of course, but if company requires me to get some approval before using CPAN module, e.g. discuss the need of this module with other developers that's not a problem.

• Location (I don't want to move to other state/country)

  I actually would like to move to another place. It really stinks here in Saint-Petersburg (also too noisy and too many people), if I could find an interesting work in some quiet town with clean air I wouldn't think too long.

• The company allows telecommuting for at least 80-90% of the time

  No, I prefer to meet my colleagues every day in the office.

• Respect for Perl as a programming language

  It sounds like nobody will tell: "Oh, let's rewrite this in Python/Ruby/Java/C#/PHP, 'cause PERL is dead".