I applied for a company that worked with a huge perl based website. They had developed a good standard to handle the scripts by running them through a "wizard" that put in the right constructs for the "shop standard". They had about 5 person working on the code

Now you're might be asking for what does this apply to your problem:

Trouble is that in this job market, all most companies can seem to hire/retain are the less fluent, translation dictionary toting, "just visiting for the money" computer science tourists. It's reassuring to hear that other people are in the same situation, but I don't hear that many success stories. That's quite discouraging.

They wouldn't hire me. The reason they gave me was that I was not quite right on their specification.

So they actually looked carefully on the testcode that I did on the interview and said to themselves: "This guy isn't going to follow our specification"!

So their are companies that actually try to avoid the "tourists" and people that aren't as adaptable to the standard that they apply! /JanneVee