Where Are All The Perl Jobs?

My current job search has been an interesting one, especially when it comes to jobs in one of my more familiar programming languages, Perl.  Four years ago when I was scanning the job boards, Perl jobs were more common and I got hired specifically for that skill.

During the past four years, I went on a number of tangents, so when returning to the job market, I went back to my Perl roots.  Surprise!  I can hardly find a single one.  Everyone's posting for PHP developers.  Even the "P" in LAMP has become PHP.

I did some quick Google searches and found an article from 2008 which did a bunch of job posting comparisons and noticed a few trends.  The charts they use from indeed.com still pull current data, and the trends they showed then are even more pronounced today.

I customized a chart to pull the job postings I'm most interested in, for Perl, Javascript, and PHP developers.

There you have it.  At the start of 2007, Perl and PHP jobs were on par.  Four years later, Perl is where it's always been, and PHP has about five times the volume.

My guess is that Perl is still there, as are the jobs, but they are either so drowned in other postings that they are hard to find, or more likely, developers are found without the need for postings by looking within an organization or by the means of networking.

Looks like I'll be adding PHP to my skills set though, and soon.