I'm not sure what your definition of 'very few' is, and I'll admit I haven't done a statistically valid survey of the data, but I can tell you that there are perl jobs that are exactly what you describe. In fact, the one I'm in now was specifically looking for a person with 1-2 years of Perl experience for the primary task, although the person would also be a backup sysadmin for the department (only 3 IT folks in the department)

Here's the exact text (bad capitalization included), except for company info removed:

(um ... I had ~8 years of Perl experience at that point ... I'm still not sure why I applied for the job, other than boredom from having been unemployed for a few months ... and I had heard good things about the location)

Now, from a project development standpoint -- keeping people on site makes sense -- when you need something, you can talk in person, not through e-mail, or have to fly someone in. It might not make sense for all companies, but for some, it does. (especially when you require security clearances, which results in multiple months before you can get full access)

Oh -- and I'm in the Washington, DC, area ... and the dc.pm mailing list normally has a posting or two per week for people who are primarily Perl programmers.

If you need something you can send the person an IM message or exchange a few emails and get more details, better laid and have someplace to look for details later. Shoot me a message and you'll have the solution in half an hour, call me and we'll still be talking in half an hour.

Jenda


Support Denmark! Defend the free world!

Sometimes that's easier said than done. (remember -- I already mentioned security clearances taking months)

Imagine working at a place that has a restriction on the use of IM. They finally lifted the restriction for Jabber/SSL. We started using it for a couple of months, but then they changed the policy, and we had to file paperwork. So I did. A month or two later, I got permission to use it, specifically for the project I was working on. Then I was informed that I wasn't allowed to use a public Jabber server. So one of the folks on the project installed it. Another month or so later, the security folks called to get the IP address of the server. I told them, and they freaked out that it wasn't at our site. So I suddenly had to install Jabberd locally -- and I spent 2 weeks trying to get something working under MacOS 10.3 (which didn't have Java 1.5) with absolutely no luck (this was the point when the jabberd2 servers got hacked so many resources were unavailable). Finally, my boss got me developer access so I could install MacOS Server 10.4 beta on one of my machines (which came with jabberd).

So yes, with IM, I can get a 10-30 min turn around on discussions as opposed to the 2 days that it took via e-mail. (and maybe 2 hrs using a mix of email and phone), but I've probably lost a month worth of man-hours in getting to the point where we can use it on this project. With 4 of us on the project, we've easily made the time up, but it's frustrating.

Oh ... it was bad enough that at one point, we were using various 'talk' varients

the vast majority of hosting is done on remote servers

And as we all know, Perl is really only used for web server scripting.

Since the vast majority of hosting is done on remote servers at some third party hoster, rather than in-house, there's no reason why most people should have to live on site.

Apart from that whole communicating with the rest of the development team / company / customer / user thang.

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