Companies need more young enthusiastic Perl developers!

There are many companies out there using Perl for projects that are critical for their business. I saw about 40 such companies on CeBIT so I am quite confident there are thousands of such companies around the world. The ones I saw on CeBIT were relatively small companies, based in Germany with Perl teams between 3-20 people.

The common problem they had was finding new Perl developers. I already mentioned this in my first post about CeBIT (Two days into CeBIT) and asked for the reason but let me revisit the problem.

When the issue of lack of good Perl programmers comes up I often hear people say: You don't need a Perl programmer. You just need a good programmer and teach him/her Perl. After all they will have to learn the business and the project as well and learning a new programming language is not that hard.

In fact due to the lack of Perl programmers on the market that's most of the companies are doing. They are hiring people they think will fit their organization and then teach her Perl. Either by sending to a training course, running one in-house or in many cases telling her to learn from the books/tutorials.

The problem is that, now in addition to learning about the company and the project these new employees will also need to learn Perl and CPAN. I doubt that just in a few weeks or months anyone could learn enough to match the experience of someone who has been writing Perl and using CPAN for 3-5 years. For a long time these people will be a lot less productive than someone who already has several years of experience in Perl programming.

In an earlier post I asked How to help people make money using Perl?. Helping companies to find more developers is just one aspect of this. So if you wonder why Perl needs more marketing or promotion then helping these companies to find Perl developers is one of them.