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.

In reply to Re^2: Perl Job Marketability Question - very important for me! by Your Mother
in thread Perl Job Marketability Question - very important for me! by o2bwise

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