Are we a dying breed?

[thaigrrl]

Recently at my place of employment we have decided to try and hire a contractor to come in and help out with our overwhelming amount of work. It appears that every perl developer in the area has once worked here. And to make matters worse, no new perl developers understand inheritance or any other OO methodology. What's the deuce?

I don't understand it, we have been looking for months and have had a very very difficult time trying to find quality people. And by quality, I mean someone who is proficient enough in perl to be able to learn how things work here. We're not asking for any superhero "perl gurus" or anything fancy like that.

Back to my original question: Are we a dying breed? I've also been trolling the jobs.perl.org site for recent job updates and it appears that there's no jobs on the east coast. There are the same 10 companies out west repeatedly searching for perl people.

Is it java that is scaring away quality perl people, or is Perl just not that viable a solution for company needs?

It seems that here at least, Perl is a very expensive solution, because Java programmers are a dime a dozen. Which is why the company has decided to convert all large perl applications into it's nemesis.. java.

~thaigrrl~