No, it's not just you. In the various times when my company has been looking, we've had an extremely hard time finding senior Perl people. I know a manager at Yahoo who says the same thing. (We're all in the SF bay area.)

We posted at the same places that you listed, plus a couple of local Perl Mongers groups. I get the feeling that all of these places are ok for finding contractors or telecommuters, but that just won't work for the positions we've wanted to hire for.

We have done well finding fresh graduates with strong Perl ability. Not much help if what you need is what you need. I'm often wondering what the impact of switching languages would be -- there's a lot of very solid work happening in Python, and although we have a ton of existing code in Perl and I personally much prefer Perl to Python, it's not a preference I'd kill a company over. But that may just be a "grass is greener" thing anyway; I might be complaining about the same thing with Python/Ruby/.... It's a shame that scripting languages tend to be so partisan, though -- I have every belief that a strong Python programmer could easily become a strong Perl programmer and vice versa, but people who like one tend to irrationally dislike the other. (Including me, but I'm trying, dammit!)

Of the senior Perl programmers we have now, every one of them came through Craigslist. That said, we're a tiny team, and Craigslist has not worked for a while.

One last thing -- please, keep posting on jobs.perl.org. Although it doesn't seem to be The Place for Perl people right now, I want it to be!

In reply to Re: Where are all the Perl programmers? by sfink
in thread Where are all the Perl programmers? by johnnywang

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