TL;DR some people say there's demand for work in Perl and it pays well, others say they can't find Perl work, it doesn't seem to be advertised, and they have moved on to other things as a result. A curious bifurcation.

I keep hearing about how there is demand for good Perl programmers, especially ones who know other things too, because there's so much Perl out there which needs maintenance, modernisation, or conversion to something else.

Well, I've read and written more Perl than maybe I should have spent the time doing. I'd describe myself as an expert. (I even have source for the Perl interpreter open in my editor at the moment.) However, I have used many other tools as well, so I haven't stayed in touch with Perl-using companies much.

Yet, when I go searching, I don't see much work around if I search for Perl. When people talk about demand for experienced Perl developers/freelancers etc, I can't convince myself it really exists.

Take a look in the HN "Who's Hiring?" monthly posts. Search for Perl this month: Out of ~800 positions, exactly 1 is for Perl, and Perl is mentioned in passing in only 2 others.

HN is biased towards startups, but still. Elsewhere, on the Perl-specific job sites there are a few jobs shown these days, many are "not currently hiring", and the dates reveal they are keeping old ones in the list, perhaps to hide the fact that there's only a handful in the last month. It's really not much.

On other more generic job/contract sites, searching for Perl yields far fewer options, compared with almost every other listable skill I looked at. It is quite striking.

Perl is mentioned in job descriptions, but not usually as a primary skill.

I have seen other people say the same kinds of thing: One person says there is plenty of work for good Perl developers, another replies that they can't find any and where are these jobs, and nobody answers, or they are referred to a website that has hardly anything on it any more.

Curiously, from speaking with people who work at companies that have large Perl codebases that are still being worked on, and which are hiring, this could be down to job marketing, rather than skills actually required.

Job/contract adverts from those companies either don't mention Perl, or mention it only in passing "DevOps... expert in Kubernetes, AWS, Terraform, etc. ...able to write scripts in Bash, Python or Perl".

Yet talking to people who work in those same companies, reveals Perl is something they need and look for, but they aren't mentioning in their job ads. I wonder why.

In contrast, as far as I can tell, Python is a superstar in the job market right now. It's one of just a few top skills for high day-rate gigs (along with DevOps), and this surprises me in a way, because although Python is perfectly usable, and very well supported, it's not amazing, it's quite slow, and its standard library is messy and inconsistent too.

Yet, about half of the best paid contracts I see have Python as the primary skill. There are easily 20x as many roles listing Python as the main skill, compared with Perl mentioned even in passing.

So I'd say, Perl looks almost dead and buried in the jobs advertised market at the moment.

I've considering removing Perl from my resume because I think it might be starting to be a liability, a "does this make me look old" sort of thing. I use enough other things that it's not that important to me, but it's a bit of a shame. After all, as a freelance/consultant I have a substantial personal library to bring to the table, and it's a shame when I can't use it.

I can't quite decide if there is a hidden Perl-hiring market (that I haven't connected with because I've been doing other things for a few years), or if the people who say Perl developers are in demand are under a bit of an illusion, getting repeat work from the same places and not realising it's inside a small community bubble.