The Perl jobs from the sorts of companies that would advertise on Dice are down. The Perl jobs from the sorts of companies that would advertise on perl.org are up.

What does this mean? I can only assume -- the types of folks that advertise on dice/monster/hotjobs/etc tend to be from outside the 'perl community'. They might be tech companies, or recruiters, etc, but they have no clue where to search for employees with a particular skillset, or they might want people with more broad skills. (I'm of the opinion that overspecialization is bad -- learn a few more languages, so that you have more than just one tool that you can fall back on -- they all have different niches that they fill).

The types of groups that post stuff on perl.org probably don't want folks who have written two scripts, and so consider themselves to be 'perl programmers' -- they tend to be looking for someone with more advanced or more specialized skills.

To some degree, it's a matter of knowing where the fish are -- if you're looking for carp, you fish where there's a lot of carp, not in some place where there's 1% carp, and you're going to have to throw back the majority of your catch.

But, then again, we have no idea how many of the jobs posted on dice are also posted on perl.org, so it may just be that people are getting fed up with the results from dice, and so aren't posting there anymore, and are moving to perl.org, or that they're cross posting, and there really is fewer job openings.

But fewer job postings doesn't mean that there are fewer jobs. It may be that perl programmers have less turnover -- it may be due to job satisfaction, or just a fear of finding a new job in a depressed market. It may be that social networking has made it so that jobs openings are being offered through other channels.

I'm not much of a believer in statistics, unless I know what all of the assumptions are being made, the possibilities of any bias in the results, and how all of the numbers are calculated.

What was the 12% decrease? The overall percentage of programming jobs that mentioned Perl? (ie, it went from 8% to 7%), or in the overall number of job offerings mentioning Perl? (from 800 to 700)? In the first case, if the total jobs increased 26%, and the relative Perl mentions went down 12%, that's still an increase of almost 11%). It's possible to put almost any spin you want on the numbers to prove a pre-determined conclusion.

If you like doing it, and you like your job, then keep doing it. I'd still make sure you're well rounded should things ever go wrong, but I wouldn't overly stress about these things.