I am one year out of school (12/2002) and I already am experiencing some of the problems you are mentioning. I couldn't get a "coding" job because of my location (Louisville, Kentucky) and its somewhat narrow-minded view of what skills are important (win2k admin, asp.net, vb.net, MCSE) I started applying for jobs that had any kind of technical pre-reqs.

Long story short, I end up at an insurance coordination firm(where if someone is covered by more than one policy, we make sure the primary policy was the primary payer) in R&D. This is a privately owned company and their business is still evolving so I can kinda push some things through. I started coding perl as I saw the need. I didn't neccessarily say... let me find something to do w/ perl.

I end up working around the IT department(VB.NET, ASP.NET MSCE Win2k) and writing something that saves our department a great deal of time in daily operations. They were apalled because it wasn't "theirs" and they accused me of not testing my code at all. So to me it's a constant battle of avoiding the "evil grip" of the MCSE's and VB programmers, and getting my work done in the most efficient manner ( which happens to be in perl most of the time).

Another subject that I haven't seen anyone touch on... what if you can't afford (time-wise) to make serious contributions to CPAN and/or code some serious projects of your own?. This may sound odd.. but my wife doesn't understand how I can code/work all day and come home to sit in front of the computer rather than spend time w/ her. She has a valid point.. it's not healthy to spend all your life in front of your PC chasing the dream of that one big dev job. For me as a married,disgruntled coder it's hard to find a balance between furthering my chances at getting out of said "current shithole" and maintaining a healthy relationship w/ my wife.