variety

And yet (aside from mega deal-breakers, like clearly overstating competence in some category) that's pretty much what hiring decisions come down to: "Are they for real? Can I rely on them? Will I get along with them?" -- the battery of contrived, essentially "objective" assessment that get thrown at candidates notwithstanding.

Email is a wonderful thing for people whose role in life is to be on top of things. But not for me; my role is to be on the bottom of things. What I do takes long hours of studying and uninterruptible concentration.

That said, if your interviewers are doing their jobs properly, they should be able to filter for (or simply ask about) that level of skill awareness during the phone screen.

More likely, when you get told post-interview that "we need someone with more experience in X" it's usually a polite way of saying that they just weren't, you know, all the into you, and are trying to save face on both sides by pointing to something dry and objective, rather than things that actually matter. Like you know, the fact that you were underdressed (or overdressed), all those awkward silences you had with that second or third guy you interviewed with (remember, the one who announced his presence in the room by slouching in a chair and saying "I'm hungover"), or that you seemed to exhibit a slight latency in your recognizing some technical term that's common coin in the circles they run in (and so therefore, you just don't have enough chest hair), etc.

A much more important (and deeper) skill is to be able to solve (or reasonably approach) problems they have never seen. And an even more important and deeper skill than that is the ability to recognize algorithmic problems embedded "in the wild" (in naturally occurring business contexts), and to tell the interesting ones from the non-interesting ones (and the trivial from the hard... and among the hard, the plausibly solvable ones from the intractable rabbit holes) without the imprimatur of having someone from a place like Google or MIT telling you that they're "interesting" problems (let alone tractably solvable).

Of course, this kind of skill is much, much harder to test for -- if it can be tested for in the awkward setting of a tech interview at all.

I don't particularly venerate the concept of design patterns, nor would I bother asking about them during an interview. But could you justify this statement?

It might, instead, have had something do with the fact that the point you guys were trying to make was rather trivial.

It's been that way since the beginning of time; and (if you follow eminent domain disputes, and the handling of most aboriginal land claims carefully enough), after all is said and done, that's pretty much the way things work nowadays, also.

Also, lots of people who were once productive on CPAN years ago have "gone dark" in recent years. Generally has something to do with having a life (fulltime job, family, that sort of thing).

So all in all that's a pretty snarky question to ask. It's definitely a plus to show that you have the sense of civic engagement to go through the full-fledged publishing process on CPAN (including processing testing reports, RT issues, etc) but it should suffice to provide code samples with clean coding style and decent enough documentation (even if it's a well-written README).

Also, it's not a "scare word" in this context at all. It's a fairly neutral term, and an accurate enough description of what these investment firms are doing (even if they chose to use other words to market these instruments).