Well, it's a reasonable question. And we have talked about considering people with good skills and the right background, even if they don't have a lot of Perl knowledge. The difficulty is, we are a 100% Perl shop (ok, there's SQL, too, and the occasional shell script), so if we hire a good programmer who doesn't know Perl (at least not well), we won't get a lot out of them until they come up to speed. And to compound the problem, right now I'm the only developer here (we used to have another, but he left a few months ago), so all the training would have to come from me, reducing productivity even more. And there's a lot to do.

But if the new job posting we're putting out next week doesn't get a better response, I guess we'll have to reconsider this decision, reduce or eliminate our Perl experience requirement, and rethink this whole test business.