Sorry about the job. :(

That kind of thing is marketable but it is today often done in Python because a lot of the “big data” tools are coming out of the world around Google and friends. Hackers with a limited focus are not particularly marketable unless they excel at that focus. If you’re not cream of the crop then a generalist who is a good overall hacker could do as well and do more besides.

Hit the job boards, get your best code on a public repo for sharing, expand LinkedIn connections, etc. There are lots of Perl jobs out there for those willing to relocate. A few telecommute too but then you are competing with a higher quality crop of other JAPHs. Work on your own skills during your downtime. You can use the monastery to that end. Good luck!

I would say 'yes, you are marketable'. There is no real secret to marketability:

• Show what you have done, and that you learned along the way
• Show that you are willing to learn more
• Be able to articulate your success and what it was that made your efforts successful

Will you be able to find a job doing what you were doing before? Maybe. It depends on a lot of other things(willingness to re-locate, wage etc...), to many to list that are entirely up to you.

It sounds to me like you think your skills are limited, and maybe they are; but I wouldn't draw that conclusion until you listed out every module you have used, every db you have interfaced with, every file format you have parsed or written, formats you have output to(web, other db's, whatever) etc ... . Make that list and don't be frugal(if you have not already of course).

With 'Big Data' such a hot topic these days, it seems to me like you should have some luck. However, don't limit yourself to what you love! Be willing to love more (sort of the 'Love the One Your With' scenario). Perl is cool all around and for so many things(as I am sure you know). Don't over limit yourself, stay general to get as much interest as possible, then pick what sounds good.

I hope this does not sound patronizing. I have been in your situation a couple of times over the last 30+ years of my career and I always forget this stuff because I am worried about getting the next gig. It is a slow process sometimes, so it is worth it to slow down and do right by yourself.

I hope that is somewhat helpful, and good luck! Update Just saw Your Mother's post, don't know about the first half, but that second part is dead-nuts-on.

PS I worked with CA Harvest for a while, but had not heard of eHealth.. interesting...

I would suggest, instead, that you probably should mention nothing about “what Perl modules you have used” and so-on.   If you have been programming for 15+ years, then it should go without saying that you know, not only how to use a tool, but how to learn one.   To frame your presentation strictly in terms of Perl and of Perl library modules, though, not only interferes with the marketing-pitch but implies that you’re not accustomed to seeing the forest for the trees.

New programming-languages materialize with every dissertation that’s written by yet-another perpetual student.   :-)   Even though “the technically-correct technical-description of ‘our job’ ” is that we use these tools every day (and maybe, being Enlightened Souls, we earnestly desire to use none other ...), the “business description” of our jobs is these three:

1. We enable our employers to Do Things™ with this obstreperous thing called a Digital Computer.   Thanks (in part) to us, they Earn Money.™
2. We keep Bad Things™ from happening, most of the time.
3. When Bad Things™ do happen, we fix them ... graciously.

Kindly notice that not a single one of these things is in any way specific to the Perl programming language.   Therefore, neither are you.   “Oh, may the gods smile upon thee, that thou shalt not find thyself in Dot-Net Purgatory,” but even if they did not smile you could very-swiftly find yourself in a nearby lifeboat (or sipping cappucinos on a nearby deck).   And, this is the attitude that you need to take when (re)selling yourself in the software business.   Don’t talk about Perl modules to anyone that isn’t hip-deep in Perl ... and ... don’t restrict your job-search by language.   Of all the possible ways that today exist in this world by which one can manage to make a (good) living, computer-programming is the least-restricted.   Therefore, do not restrict yourself.   (“It’s still just ones and zeros...”)

I understand where your coming from sudialsvc4. From a general job search perspective, I think you are right in many ways. However, I am going to stick with what I said. The last thing that o2bwise asks about is:

My question is, is just the above thing I love to do marketable? I honestly do not know, but I sure hope so.

This is clearly important to him. And I think with his length of experience, he has a shot at something close.

My experience in job searching has been a bit different than yours I think, thus the different approach. Could be location, job types we have pursued... any number of things I guess. Doesn't much matter. In actuality, the contrast between our views might be a good thing for o2bwise to consider. The broader the spread in the points of view, the better to consider. There is no real formula for getting a particular job in my experience. One

• a) has to want it
• b) has to be able to do at least some of it
• c) demonstrate they are capable and willing to learn to do the the rest of it
... regardless of the job description.

One other point: several of the jobs I have had in the last 15 years have come to me because some recruiter skimmed my resume and found specific words which triggered them to contact me and submit my information. What you are saying is really good at the interview level, but getting to that stage can be a bit of a curvy path.

Ain't saying your wrong, just sticking with what I know....

Glad you tossed that out there!

...the majority is always wrong, and always the last to know about it...

Insanity: Doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results...

A solution is nothing more than a clearly stated problem...otherwise, the problem is not a problem, it is a facct

wjw

"There is one particular kind of scripting that I just love..."

This is often referred to as "ETL" (Extract, Transform, Load). That might be a keyword you want to include in your CV, and searches.

Don't really have an answer to your question. But one possible resource who could potentially help with your question and possible job search is Uri Guttman, who runs The Perl Hunter website. He basically tries to help people find Perl jobs. Since I have not used his services, I can't comment on how good/bad he is. Also, if you're planning to attend YAPC::NA 2014, Uri will be hosting a Perl Jobs BOF at the conference. Anyways, thought I'd share this information in case it proves useful to you.

This reply is for all you guys. Man, thanks so much. It is so appreciated. Couldn't reply before and only saw your posts just in the last few minutes as was indisposed.

Yeah, losing a job is a drag. Sure is.

Thanks sgain! :-)


Tony

Get used to being laid-off fairly frequently in this business (and for enduring long periods between contracts).   It’s too-bad of course that your employer could not distinguish between “the application that you worked-on for so many years” and the business-value of “you,” but ... c’est la guerre.   There are lots of people out there who perceive computer programming to be “indirect labor,” not “professional services,” and they throw out a lot of babies with the bathwater.   (The fastest way to lose a lot of money in computer software is to try to save a little of it.)   What happened has nothing to do with you, and there’s nothing you can do about it.   It was somebody else’s very short-sighted decision.   It will happen repeatedly.

I personally know more than a dozen programming languages and switch easily between, say, Perl (yay!), Python, Ruby, PHP (ick ...), VB/Dot-Net (puke ...), and so on.   So can you.   Your original-post, if crafted into the accepted résumé format that is required by all the HR-software systems that are used these days, is a strong sales pitch, as soon as you expunge your own self-doubts from it.   :-)

Never assume that you don’t have business-value that is highly prized.   The key is, as always, “selling it.”   But computer folks are notoriously-poor salesmen.   Here are four specific points I would offer you:

1. There is no such thing as a “Perl job.”   Perl is a tool of the trade; nothing more or less.   You are not hired to “write Perl” any more than a tradesman is hired to “use a wrench.”   Perl is a powerful tool that you know how to use very well, but what you must sell is what you did using it ... expressing that “what” in terms of business value.   In other words, what the CA eHealth application does for the business, and what unique value-added your combination of business skills added to it.   (Don’t talk to me about framing and plumbing ... even though that is technically what you “did.”   Tell me how you built a better house, made that house more valuable, and avoided business risks associated with that house.)   With 15 years of experience, you could learn any other language-tool overnight.   The unique thing that you have, which others do not have, is years of business experience.
2. Get rid of the self-doubts and don’t let them show through.   You are a salesman, and the one and only thing that matters is the Fuller Brush ... not the guy/gal who’s holding it.   (As Alfred Hitchcock once said to Ingrid Bergman, “Fake it, Ingrid.”)   Craft your entire marketing message to sell the Brush, not you.   Nobody else cares about your butterflies, and you’re not selling butterflies, either.
3. All resumes are munched by HR software ... parsed ... and so they must follow an easily parseable format.   If the company’s web-site offers you a chance to “log in” and “create a profile,” always do so.   HR software that accepts unidentified submissions “over the transom” throws them into a great big bucket that no one looks at.
4. Don’t waste much time with Monster, Indeed, CyberCoders or any of the other sites which only give you a too-easy path to a middleman.   That is, to another salesman with a sale of his own, who really doesn’t care which “unit” gets sold.   He does not, but you do.   Go directly to companies and apply (online) directly to them.   (If this company web-site links to an outside site, presume that the company has a representation-contract with that company, and proceed.)   Go for volume.   This is, to some extent, a numbers game.   You can with practice put out 50 résumés in one day, and do it every day, until you turn-down 15 offers and pick the one you want ... just because you out-sold the less nimble competition.   You can use the same document, but hand-craft each cover letter.   Canvass all the local companies in your local area, even if they are not advertising a job.   Even if they don’t use Perl, they need experience.
   
   
   • Note:   I would toss LinkedIn into the same trash-bucket, unless you seriously think that someone who went to high school with you thirty years ago, or that however-briefly worked with you since that time, is today in a credible economic position to offer you a job ... having the “MAP = Money, Authority, and Pain” with which to do so.   The future of the LNKD stock-symbol is, for some weird reason, doing better than MWW (Monster WorldWide), but neither of these has actual bearing on you getting a job.
   • Always remember that, while there is very-considerable money to be made from the fact that “at any particular point in time, lots of people are looking for jobs,” none of that revenue is in any way tied to the success (or, the absence thereof ...) of any one of those “millions of poor schlebs” actually getting one.   All you need to do is to persuade enough hopeful schlebs to register with your system, that you can persuade enough hopeful recruiter-schlebs to pay about ~$10,000 (USD) per year to tap into your “mother-lode of qualified resumes.” . . .   And then, with that source of revenue assured, to Go Public.™   The rest is multi-million dollar history, for the very few.
   • Even if you can’t solve Unemployment, you sure-the-hell can sell it.   :-/

Get used to being laid-off fairly frequently in this business … It will happen repeatedly.

In 15 years of this business I have not been laid off or fired and I’ve held something like 12 job titles and contracts. I was invited to re-up at the end of most contracts. Skilled Perl devs are in high demand. If they are willing to travel or take low-market prices for telecommute, they can walk into a job within a week.

I personally know more than a dozen programming languages and switch easily between…

Your signal to noise, code to op-ed, ratio on this site is worse than any monk I can think of. If it were in fact easy, one would expect to see code solutions constantly.

The key is, as always, “selling it.”

This is true especially when you have no value to bring. I don’t sell myself at all excepting the proper networking tools like LinkedIn and github. I’ve had 10 cold contacts from recruiters and hiring managers this year.

There is no such thing as a “Perl job.”

My job is 90% Perl code. That makes it a Perl job whether or not I have to edit .php or .sql or rebuild a .war or .swf now and then. It would take someone with a Python or Ruby specialty months to get up to my speed and I’m no Schwartz. A Java hacker would be lost for a year.

Get rid of the self-doubts…

Self-doubt is your friend.

Because you can't tell a great hacker except by working with him, hackers themselves can't tell how good they are. This is true to a degree in most fields. I've found that people who are great at something are not so much convinced of their own greatness as mystified at why everyone else seems so incompetent.
Great Hackers

As Alfred Hitchcock once said, I don’t know if this is a matter for wardrobe or hairdressing.

All resumes are munched by HR software…

Whether they are or not is a function of the company and whose hand the résumé crosses. Some of your other advice in this thread would gut a CV of the kind of keywords HR software does use to filter keepers.

Don’t waste much time with Monster … Go for volume … can with practice put out 50 résumés in one day…

This all but guarantees cover letters with typos, oversights, and obvious inanities or just plain lack of focus and care. Might get past HR but it’s getting roundfiled by the dev manager unless she’s also a careless jackass whose approach is better suited to assembling phones piece-rate than writing good code.

I would toss LinkedIn into the same trash-bucket…

I have received ten cold contacts from recruiters in the last 6 months. TEN. At least five came from LinkedIn.

Though LinkedIn is probably not a terribly valuable resource for those who don’t have a decent list of valuable connections and good recommendations from co-workers past and present.

…none of that revenue is in any way tied to the success…

Job posters pay to post jobs and pro recruiters pay to play. No success means the capital dries up.

“Mom,” I am most-delighted that your experiences to-date have been so dramatically different from mine.   As tempting as it may be for me to say, “Just yew wait, ’enry ’iggins,” despite such obvious and explicit provocations, I shall but graciously decline, and move on.

One of the great illusions in this business, which I have witnessed in its birthing over ... uhh ... the last 15 35 years or so ... is that “the ability to Write Source-Code™ (in Perl or whatever-have-you ...)” singularly Makes “You (Yes, You!! ... Yes, the Whole World is About You!!) A Rock Star.™”  

Well, pardon me for having a point-of-view that dates back to a full 10(!) years before the Perl programming-language was invented, but “I am not exactly impressed by this fond notion.”   I am, to be sure, very grateful that you have found gainful employment either by your willingness to relocate anywhere on-a-dime (as for me, I own 17 acres of land in one particular place in America .. with no mortgage ....), or to take remote-work for chump change whatever fees such work may command.  Truly, I am glad for you.   But I do not share your point-of-view, nor do I think that you should decry others who do not share it.   Perhaps indeed the next fifteen years of your life will demonstrate that “knowledge of Perl” is truly all that you will ever need to Live Long And Prosper™.   However, please excuse me for requesting a fifteen-year delay on the final decision of that particular point.   I’ve been there.   You haven’t.   Yet.

Meanwhile, my advice to the OP will stand:   that a software-professional’s business value to his employer/client is not tied to proficiency in any particular programming-language tool.   That one’s business-value to any particular employer is not linked to “the particular programming-languages and/or methodologies of the present day,” but rather to “the business, itself.”   That you therefore should not seek to plot your future career-course based upon any present-day proficiency in any particular programming language, but rather that you should be fully prepared to “discard” such proficiencies at a trice ... knowing, of course, that it is the big business-picture that actually matters, and that none of this actually has anything to do with languages.   That you should be at-a-trice willing to don an entirely new set of pantaloons, knowing that your true value to your employer is not linked to your attire of the moment ... but that it might well have very-much to do with your willingness to change pants.

The OP, after all, has just painfully witnessed this first-hand.   His employer decided to supplant an existing “legacy” Perl system, over which the OP had labored for many years, with something “–er.”   The OP did not see this coming, because his entire perception of the business problem was 100% tied to the Perl implementation of its solution, of which he was the (thought to be) priceless keeper.   Unfortunately, the decision-makers did not share this opinion.   As part of the decision to supersede the system, they irrevocably chose to jettison the OP as a now-extraneous artifact of that “legacy” business past, because they did not perceive the OP’s business value apart from that of the now-obsolete system of which he was the technical custodian.   Fifteen years of (perceived to be ...) “Perl-specific” employment history was perceived to be valueless in comparison to, say, “three years of experience with <<dot-Net | Python | Ruby | Haskell | Java>>.”   Yes, even though you have been supporting our business using this “obsolete” tool called Perl for the past fifteen years, we will cheerfully replace you with someone who “has been working with (tah, DAAHH!!) dot-NET” ... for less than three.   (Plus, he costs $15 an hour less than you do.)

It does not matter what you think of such business decisions, as you have no control over them.   It does not matter whether you consider such decisions to be stupid.   It does not matter if they are.

To get very-specific on this point ... in my earliest days, the “OMG you’ve got to have this” language was ... PL/1.   The conventional wisdom of that day was that “knowledge of PL/1 was Your Golden Ticket.™”   Obviously, this did not turn out to be the case.   “But, why?”   Because the world of business did not pause to suit IBM’s purposes ... any more than the same business world paused to suit Larry Wall’s.   Your best-bet, therefore, is to broaden your technical perspective across as many “silos” as possible, instead of comforting yourself within any particular one of them.   Just sayin’ ...

No, “Mom,” and with very(!) earnest respect to you personally, I am not going to “rise to your occasion” on this one, and I don’t mind saying that you’ll have to wait another fifteen years to find out why not.

If you look at job-requests on Monster and so forth, you will see an unmistakable progression of languages as they come and go.   For example, Ruby-on-Rails is very hot right now.   People are very specifically asking for proficiency in that language; Perl need not apply.   Now, you can’t change the language that a mission-critical system is written in, and it is not necessarily a good thing to have many systems in one shop each written in a different way, but it does happen a lot.

One very-insidious thing that can happen is that someone will come along – someone with authority to spend money – and this person will simply decide that a system needs to be replaced with something that is “–er.”   For example, I watched a very well-known computer company working to replace a perfectly-functional Perl application with a Ruby application.   It wasn’t particularly that the Perl application did not do its job well, as it had been doing for years.   Well, to their credit, they did not throw away their babies, but I have consulted with a great many companies who just had.   “Out with the old, in with the new!” is a very attractive sentiment to some decision-makers, and they decide not only to discard the old application, but also “the old way of thinking.”   This means ... you.   Decision-maker gets a bonus; you get a box.   C’est la guerre.

So, I feel very strongly that you should demonstrate business value to your company, and a willingness to change.   Don’t structure your affairs in such a way that your salary can be tied as an expense to any particular project, especially not an older one, because ... well ... “your salary” is the only expense-item of any meaningful size.   If someone wants to cut $125,000.00 from a project budget double-quick, the fastest way to do so is to lay somebody off who has “older” skills.   If the accountants didn’t tag your project to the profit-making activities that it supports, and if they do not log your contribution to be something other than just “source-code writing,” you are at risk.   You are the million-pound elephant with a big red target painted on your backside.

You should “switch silos” each time you change jobs (or engagements).   Sure, health-care might have been real good to you, so let your next gig be in ... transportation, or carpet-making, or a company in the business of selling supplies to funeral homes.   All of which I’ve done.   (Yup, “chemicals, coffins, and really-creepy flower arrangements.”   And sh*tloads of profits.   People will drop $25,000.00 on a funeral for their dad.)   In each case, strive to be more than just the code-monkey.   If you’re just a programmer of-the-line, then even if you’re a good shot you’re gonna be shot at.   Be visibly involved in the bigger picture.   Take an instruction-manual home for a system you’ve never seen before, and read it.