At this point in Perl's history, there is no such thing as a mid-level Perl developer. I'm actually a Los Angeles Perl developer and I keep telling my HR depar

At this point in Perl's history, there is no such thing as a mid-level Perl developer. I'm actually a Los Angeles Perl developer and I keep telling my HR department to either look for college kids with basically no professional programming experience at all, or senior candidates that they're willing to pay at least $90,000. Looking for "some Perl programmer guy" with some experience that you're looking to pay $70,000 is pointless, because they don't exist. Perl's lack of a "sexy web startup framework" (e.g. Rails) essentially wiped out a whole "generation" of developers. I'll be the first to admit it's a lot harder to bang out your brilliant "It's like Facebook... but for cats!" startup idea in Perl and its respective frameworks. If you want a decent foundation, you'll use something like Rails or Django. If you just want to bang it out, you'll just inline some crappy PHP code in your HTML. Eventually your company will grow, you'll have different kinds of problems to worry about, like, "this third-party partner doesn't have an API so I need to write a spider that logs into their UI and scrapes the data we need" or "I need to parse this DB log to figure out the frequency of SELECT queries," but since 97% of startups[1] don't ever get to that point, Perl didn't get a lot of love in 2005-2007. After all, we're on Hacker News, not Mid-Sized Company News. So if you were a Perl hacker in 2004, 2005, you either loved the flexibility and "whipitupitude" Perl gave you for your back-end operations, and now it's 5 years later and you're a senior engineer looking for a commensurate salary. Or you decided to crank out CatBook in RoR until Zuckerberg sued you into oblivion and then you just got another Ruby job afterwards. For what it's worth, I would encourage the HR departments that Randall mentions to look at new college grads. More than any other language, I feel it's one of the easiest languages to learn regardless of your previous experience, mainly because of TMTOWTDI[2] you can write it in whatever syntax format you're already experienced in. I see a lot of college kids who came from Java and at first their code is full of HammerFactorySchematicFactorySchematicFactories, and while it's pretty silly, it'll work until they learn better, and in three months they're essentially as productive as the theoretical mid-level Perl programmer anyway. [1] This statistic is POOMA[3]. [2] There's More Than One Way To Do It [3] Pulled Out Of My Ass