Well, to answer your question first: I am a software developer/lead. This is what I was hired for, but somewhere down the line, the corporate found out that I had DBA experience, so to the DB team I went.. The first piece of bad news: I don't use Perl very much at all these days. But when I did use it, it was for tasks as varied as getting dumps from databases, quick and dirty import and export jobs, data analysis, some CGI interfaces. Occasionally, I used it to organize my source files, make source distributions, I automated some jobs that I hated (like generating status reports) and I had fun too, like building a mirror server for cricket scores.... lots of things, in fact :o)

Being in an environment that is not very friendly to new and hackerish programming languages (and Perl has that reputation here), here's one thing I've learnt. It doesn't matter what the position is. DBA types are supposed to deal with nothing except SQL and configuring databases, don't believe them. Network types, people will tell you, should just know one end of a cable tester from another, don't believe them either. :o) Web designers should just know HTML and Javascript like thingies.. that's not entirely true either.

The fact of the matter is (as I've found it, anyway), that Perl is so versatile that you can use it in any one of the jobs that I mentioned above. It may not be a standard requirement that you know Perl to be hired for the job, in fact, far from it.. but if you know a glue language like Perl, it can only make your job easier if you use it in the appropriate place.

If you want to use Perl and nothing but Perl, then you should look for a job like "Perl programmer". Heaven knows I've wanted to, but I don't think I know anything like enough Perl yet. Nothing else will work for you if all you want to do is Perl. If you look for a job called "Software engineer", then prepared to do stuff like VC++ or Java or whatever else the company uses.. :o) If you're like me, though, then rather than what language or particular technology a company is using is secondary to the type of work you will get to do once you are hired... Perhaps you should think about where you'd like your career to go, and where your interests lie as well ?

I'm shocked and extremely sorry at what happened to you, though (and here I was thinking that the worst was over, little did I know :o(. Good luck on your job hunt...

In reply to Re: Perl Job by tinman
in thread Perl Job by gaggio

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