That's my experience, too.

With my employer, the nice, shiny frontends are concocted either in Java, VB or PHP.
The backends -- bulky scripts "interconnecting" data-streams -- are written in perl. Confessed, they are sprinkled with some tasty C.

Since December, 2004, PHP-development is stopped and the "web-applications" -- I hate that word -- are to be re-written in perl. Even our VB-programmer want to have a tutorial in perl

perl may or may not be an advantage in a resume, but down there in the machine room, with crying users, clueless PHBs and grumbling customers at the phone, there it is the kind of heavy gear you like to have around.