Hacker News Reader

Comment by shaggie76 | Hacker News Reader

When I read the latest "who is hiring" post I was overwhelmed by the amount of Python listed; I've always used PERL but I seem to be the only one at the office left who can.

View on HN

So you're becoming a niche developer. Congrats, now is time to shine and rack in the big dough. While everybody flocks to Python, go search jobs for Perl and ask for big buck. I bet there are plenty of legacy projects for Perl.

There are at least 3 somewhat big companies that have huge Perl codebases and a lot of Perl developers (>2k each) - Booking.com, Ebay, PayPal. Source: worked in one of the companies above myself till this year.

I am pretty sure Perl developers cannot ask for big bucks just yet, perhaps in 10 years?

I moved from python to Perl in 2011. I miss writing Perl but career options are a lot better using Python - there are more of them and the money is better.

I would not be surprised to find that many of those new Python gigs are rewriting the legacy Perl.

Interestingly enough, one of the reasons I'm learning Python is because I don't know Perl, which is used at my workplace. My experience is that Python works well as a 'glue' language for doing systems things.

EDIT: I should mention, I'm not just refusing to learn Perl, I'm just choosing to use Python where Perl would have been used before. No other Devs on our team are Perl experts, all our Perl code is Legacy.

Because of ML...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com