Re: Easiest city to find Perl work:

[renodino]

Shouldn't the best city (or, for that matter, place) be whereever a Monk (or even acolyte) decides to be ?

This reminds me very much of the recent dust up in France... rather than encouraging entrepreneurship to create jobs, the passive and, oddly, accepted answer is to legislate hours.

I've done some pretty decent Perl hacking in some very remote locales, with nothing but a Jeep battery to recharge the laptop. Some of my best design/development has occured with a tall Whibdey's Port and tasty cigar at my elbow, lit only by sunshine or campfire.

If your purpose is to locate yourself to find work, you'll always be a nomad.

If your purpose is to locate the work that finds you, you'll always be employed.

[samizdat]

Hear, hear!

Not to mention the possibility of creating a project and hiring telecommuters from wherever they are... no taxes, no staff coffeemaker, no watercooler politics discussions on your dime...

It's not just France... we've had a few "dust ups" (love that phrase) here in the US about all these "furriners" who are showing up our homegrown programmers, or, at least, underbidding them. Tempest in a teapot, of course; Ukrainian and Russian programmer paychecks are now rising rapidly, and people here have rediscovered the benefits of live team brainstorming sessions.

As we have. We started our business with two Ukrainian brothers and a few others, built our systems over the course of several years, and have now imported them (the brothers) into the US, paying them US-sized paychecks. It allowed us to survive our own fumbling attempts to define our product and our market, and keep the business going until it was profitable. Now that it is, we're reaching for the next level, with our two very good programmer friends having earned a piece of the company. I don't know that we could have done so had we tried to depend on only my programming skills or hiring American talent. And yes, we got lucky, hiring two of the most talented and loyal guys over there.