The Top Perl Shops

[princepawn]

I am listing the places that I hold in awe as being the best places to be at if you want to improve your Perl skills.

who	where	why
ActiveState	Vancouver, BC, CANADA	Ever hear of Data::Dumper by Gurusamy Sarathy? How about Inline by Brian Ingerson? Well guess what. *Both* of these cats work at ActiveState. Talk about a nosebleed company. Oh. Forgive me. I almost forgot Gisle Aas, author of LWP and original author of HTML::TreeBuilder and developer of perl-lisp works there too.
Canon Research Centre (link down at moment)	London, England	They won a Perl wizards contest long ago. Andy Wardley , author of widely acclaimed Template Toolkit works here. Also, Neil Bowers works here. He developed cpan-upload, which puts things on CPAN via the command line via Net::FTP and LWP among other highly useful things.
Morgan Stanley Dean Witter	Mainly New York City	This place has a massive investment in Perl. They have weekly tech talks that often focus on Perl. Every time I put out my resume in New York, I had an interview with a different group there that was developing 90-100% of their code in Perl. They were going to buy Damian outright, but their offer was rejected by Yet Another Society for some reason.This interest in Perl, coupled with their stability, excellent pay structure and benefits package as well as huge fault-tolerant Perl infrastrcture built upon years of experience as a major Wall Street firm makes them a viable place to work. That being said, their corporate structure sometimes makes using CPAN an issue. And most groups won't be using DBI but rather use Sybase's sybperl instead.
Evolution	New York City	Well, M. Simon Cavaletto, developer of Data::DRef and Class::MakeMethods is here. They were one of the first people to develop in-line HTML templating via Evoscript.
Riskmetrics	New York and abroad	japhy is here. Other people have interviewed there and reported good experiences
Ticketmaster	Pasadena, CA	They are responsible for doubling the speed of Template Toolkit. They are a very major open source Perl shop, serving hundreds of thousands of hits via mod_perl during the week and probably 10 to 100 times that on the weekend. Even the recruiters there seem to be good programmers. They are also employing Stas Bekman to do basic research on mod_perl which will improve their applied development on their website.

And of course you have your one-man shops like ECOS, Codewerk, Stonehenge Consulting and Magnum Solutions

[davorg]

A couple of others to add to your list:

• O'Reilly employ Nat Torkington, Jon Orwant and Larry Wall
• SlashDot employs Chris Nandor (MacPerl pumpking)

And a few updates to your list:

• Brian Ingerson hasn't worked for ActiveState since last summer
• I think japhy left RiskMetrics to go back to school
• The Canon Research Centre is in Guildford, not London

Update: Oh, and also the list of Stonehenge instructors rather implies it's not a one-man shop :)

--
<http://www.dave.org.uk>

"The first rule of Perl club is you don't talk about Perl club."

[TheDamian]

<Morgan Stanley> were going to buy Damian outright, but their offer was rejected by Yet Another Society for some reason.

The reason was that YAS felt it was important that at least some of my sponsorship come from "grassroots" donations, so as to give the entire community a sense of proprietorship in the experiment.

Nevertheless Morgan Stanley were a major sponsor of my work this year. I've been very grateful both for their support (especially that of Phil Moore, Merijn Broeren, and Hildo Biersma) and for the several opportunities I've had to interact with the large number of seriously clueful people they have working there.

[japhy]

I can vouch for Morgan Stanley Dean Witter's involvement. I befriended Phil Moore from MSDW at OSCON this year. He was very interested in the young Perl talent (he took me and Michel Lambert (of Rebug fame)) to dinner with a large group of other people. And then there was that convertible... mmm...

I should get in contact with him again. ;)

_____________________________________________________
Jeff[japhy]Pinyan: Perl, regex, and perl hacker.
s++=END;++y(;-P)}y js++=;shajsj<++y(p-q)}?print:??;

[mpeppler]

I'll second that - I've worked with Phil (and others at MS) to improve both sybperl and DBD::Sybase.

Michael

[busunsl]

Just a small correction:

sybperl isn't by Sybase, it's by mpeppler.

[atlantageek]

Great Node. I suggest adding The Federal Reserve. Oreilly mentioned them in their perl success stories booklet (Can't find the link.) There's something cool about modelling the economy with perl I always wanted to be somebody... I guess I should have been more specific.

[FoxtrotUniform]

I'm working for Advanis, and while I can't say that it's done as much for the Perl community as, say, Activestate, I have gotten a few orders of magnitude better at Perl since I started here. Probably 60% to 75% of our work is Perlish, and it's a great environment for learning.

(And no, they're not paying me for this plug. Sad; I could use a new video card. :-)

--
:wq

[chromatic]

Don't forget about Blackstar, which hired Schwern (Kwalitee Assurance) for a stint last year. Doesn't Nokia Boston also employ not only 5.8 Pumpking and Master Librarian Jarkko Hietaniemi but also the Perl Queen of Chaos? Valueclick also pays the underappreciated Ask Bjorn Hansen and sponsors several mirrors and mailing lists.

I ought to send out my resume. :|

[TheDamian]

Don't forget about Blackstar, which hired Schwern (Kwalitee Assurance) for a stint last year.

...and sponsored 50% of my 2001 "Year For Perl" as well!

Or does that count against them? ;-)

[chromatic]

That must have slipped my mind in the shock of the lovely and gracious Mrs. Conway actually recognizing me. :)

If I moved my workouts to the mornings and acted on my weirder Perl impulses, would I be able to scam^H^H^H^Hearn a sponsorship too? :)

[Rudif]

>> Oh. Forgive me. I almost forgot ...

You may have heard of Jan Dubois of Win32::OLE fame, too. Jan has been sighted at ActiveState.

Disclaimer: I have no connection to ActiveState other than via PPM - I am just another satisfied user ;.).

Rudif

[simonm]

Regarding Evolution -- many thanks for including us in this list, but as of two weeks ago, the company has officially gone belly-up. It's sad to see it go, after seven years of Perl web development, but it was fun while it lasted. I'm now making the transition to being a one-man shop.

[Anonymous Monk]

MP3.com