print Dumper \@employees_my_try;
[download]

? You where close, but at the end of the map block you return only whether the match was successful. A bit more munging and stuffing the captured values into an anonymous array will do:

    map { 
      $_ =~ m/^employee\[(.*)\] = new employee_element\((.*)\);$/g;
      my ($index, $text) = ($1, $2);
      my @list = split/,\s*/, $text;
      s/"//g for @list;
      [ $index, @list ]; 
    } split "\n", $data
[download]

--shmem

_($_=" "x(1<<5)."?\n".q·/)Oo.  G°\        /
                              /\_¯/(q    /
----------------------------  \__(m.====·.(_("always off the crowd"))."·
");sub _{s./.($e="'Itrs `mnsgdq Gdbj O`qkdq")=~y/"-y/#-z/;$e.e && print}