[San-Diego-pm] jobs available, going unfulfilled

Anthony Foiani tkil at scrye.com
Wed Sep 22 13:56:06 PDT 2010


merlyn at stonehenge.com (Randal L. Schwartz) writes:
> Twice in the last two days, two different organizations in the
> greater LA area approached me to help them find folks to fill
> mid-level Perl hacking slots (varying between IT and webdev).  They
> both said "it's getting *very* hard to find people."
>
> Now, I'm really curious.  Why is this?
>
> Is it a supply problem, or a demand problem, or both?
>
> As in, are there fewer Perl programmers here but the same demand?
>
> Or the same (or more) Perl programmers here, but even more demand?
>
> Or something else entirely?
>
> By the way... I'm not trying to make a buck out of this.  I'm just
> trying to help people who ask me to help, and I'm also genuinely curious
> about the state of hiring in the Perl community, particulary in LA since
> I'm also working here for a while.

I'm not entirely up to date on things, but I've seen the "Desperate
Perl Hacker" meme show up a couple of times lately, e.g.,

   http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/201x/2010/07/21/DPH

I agree with others that point out more languages in the same basic
space, some of which are considered "sexier" than Perl (or, at least,
more up-to-date).

There's also the fact that, whether for good reason or no, Perl 6 is
taking most of a decade to come out; as Menolly mentioned, that's eons
in tech business.  That contributes to Perl seeming out of date,
regardless of the fact that Perl 5 is still evolving, improving, and
getting regular releases.

Myself, I've spent most of the last 5 years doing C++ and Java.  :-/

One other factor that might influence the availability of Perl
programmers is an overall decline in programmers brought up in the
command-line culture.  Most programmers trained after about 1990-1995
likely grew up in IDEs, not on the command line.

Without that culture, and with limited support for Perl in most IDEs,
I wouldn't be surprised to find that younger programmers would trend
away from Perl.

t.


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