in reply to Would you move for a Perl job? (relocate for employment)
If you're young and you want to do it, by all means take the opportunity to move. But, don't think that “Perl jobs are non-existent,” no matter where you live. If you find yourself ping-ponging across the country “five times in five years,” either you love to travel, or you're really pissing-off the people who try to work with you, or you have no sticking-power, or you're just doing something wrong and need to adjust your strategy.
What you gotta do, though, is to quit limiting yourself to Monster and Dice. Quit looking just for hits on keywords like “Perl.” Don't expect a commissioned recruiter to do your leg-work for you; don't limit yourself to what they have to offer. It's your job. You're going to have to define it and then get it: that means salesmanship.
(Don't freak out at the word “sales.” As they say in in-flight magazines, “you don't get what you deserve; you get what you negotiate.” It's true. And, it can be great fun.)
So, define your product. You are a computer programmer, not a Perl programmer. You might even find that your true talent is not being a programmer at all, but rather some other part of the overall business. I, for example, am much stronger as a project-manager and architect: I work better at a higher level of abstraction. I know this about myself, and generally pursue opportunities accordingly.
This does make “the sales cycle” a little longer and harder to come by. But it also makes it a whole lot more interesting, and the job that you finally land is much more likely to be something that enables you to grow, not just eat.
It's worth remembering that the computer-programming business is constantly changing. Perl skills, and HTML web-site development skills, are already becoming dated. There's nothing that you can master now that's going to carry you through the next forty years, at least not if you measure your worth (or pursue your career) strictly as a technical specialist. Five, maybe ten years from now (at most) it will all be different technology, and what we are doing now will be getting tagged with the word “legacy,” which is roughly equivalent to “oldie” to a radio-station. And yet, people will continue to be doing large technical projects using digital computers of some sort... so you can “go with the flow, wherever the flow may take you,” and have a helluva ride. Not too many careers can offer that, but you have to learn how to surf.
Anything that will be making your house-payment five years from now is likely-as-not going to have been invented during the last five years, and you will have acquired those skills on-the-fly during that time. (Training programs and/or college degrees on the new subject will yet be, at best, many years away.) You will be answering ads for “eight to ten years' experience in” this technology ... :-D ... and you'll be successfully landing those jobs by selling yourself. May as well face it and get real good at this: after all, you did the same thing with Perl, didn't you?
You thought you were “faking it,” right? (OMG, they're gonna find out and fire me!) But you came to realize that you really weren't “faking” anything at all. You adapted. Somehow, you landed four-paws-down.
Thomas J. Watson, the founder of IBM, liked to use this story: two shoe-salesmen were dispatched to the jungles of outer-nowhere. Both of them promptly wired back: