I do not want to sound to harsh here, but seriously you are requesting a bit much. Judging by your choices of words, you realize it yourself ("special snowflake

I do not want to sound to harsh here, but seriously you are requesting a bit much. Judging by your choices of words, you realize it yourself ("special snowflake"). The system works a certain way, you do not want that, fair enough. You then continue how you do not want that consulting thing either. So you go back and basically say, that you want to be hired by a company, which produces a product of your interest. They should use a technology that does not advance while there are other choices, which would lure in coworkers, who are interested in using it. It does not matter whether Perl is technically a reasonable choice. There are other more important metrics for a company. When you get hired as a programmer you got to program. If you want to make bigger choices, stay your own boss. I get, that it is hard to move on from a beloved community and something that defines yourself. But really, I do not think, that Lua, Ruby, Python - you name it - or even PHP are so different, that you could not use some of those 20.000 hours of experience productively in them. Also, you can go back to Perl anytime. I think you wrote that rant, because you were faced with making a decision and wanted to wallow in memories of the good old times. I hat this once on a much smaller scale when I switched from PHP to Python. As many people already suggested: Identify yourself as a programmer not a Perl programmer. You will highly increase the likelihood of getting into an environment that satisfies you when language choices is not important to you anymore.