There really are not that many Perl gurus extant. What a company can demand for a position depends on the location and the type of job; telecommute jobs are more hotly contested.

It’s trivial to write a “Hello, World” in Perl. So there are a million Perl acolytes. It requires as much discipline as any other language—Java, C, etc, etc—to be good at Perl. I am good at Perl, I do not consider myself a guru at all. I only became “good” after 5 years or so and I only stopped learning new things on a weekly basis after 10 and it’s sidling up on 20 and I am still learning somewhat frequently because the technology and ecosphere change rapidly and I pay attention when those that I consider gurus speak or post.

If you are willing to move, there are tons of Perl jobs without enough applicants. If you are looking for telecommute… you’re competing with a lot of folks, like me, and sysadmins are more in demand than Perl hackers anyway. :P If you really want a Perl job, you should buckle down, start contributing to the Perlsphere via github and the CPAN, and elevate your chops. It was 7 years for me before I landed a pure programming job that paid more than the design and QA and customer service and typesetting and teaching and … I’d been doing previously.