In many of my own experiences, I have seen companies treat Perl programmers with disdain, and regard them as a "necessary evil" until a "real" programmer fixes the problem in Java, C#, C++. Their perception was that Perl programmers are tinkers/sysadmins trying to hack together a "quick fix" to a problem. And many a shellscript writer, sysadmins among them, have come to Perl as another major tool to augment their use of grep, sed, and awk.

Yes, I think Perl is a great language, and I can one-off a lot of stuff with it, but it is also a powerful programming language, and many companies treat it as a low-end scripting language, or as a temporary RAD fix.

I've also noticed that many companies see Perl programmers as being grown organically, rather than resources that they can send to "Perl camp" to become instantly proficient, much as they do with C++ and Java.

Currently, I'm lucky to be blessed with being part of a team of Perl programmers, working with Perl as the language of choice for a complete project. Some of us are new to Perl; others are not. We work by sharing, reading, studying, and just trying out different techniques. This is how we're building the next generation of Perl programmers.

Just my $0.02,
-v.