Well, quite often you would not need any advanced optimization. Quite often all you'd need is someone who's been around for some time to be asked to have a glance over the code of the youngsters and tell them not to quote variables they wanna pass to a function (hey, this is Perl, not a shell script), to add a few indexes in the database here and there, to use Int instead of Numeric(9) in the database, to use this or that module instead of wasting time trying to control MS Excel or MS Word via Win32::OLE, ...

Noone expects people to rewrite parts of their code to the assembly code to speed it up or to spend hours trying to find the most efficient way to do something to save a few cycles. Even the very basic and easy to implement things can help a lot. And all it would take is for the management to understand that time spent teaching&learning, that the time spent reviewing each others code is not wasted.