Should I work in the US or the UK? - which pays best? (slight diversion)

[Toby Wintermute]

On 15 December 2011 17:25, Toby Wintermute <tjc at wintrmute.net> wrote:
> On 15 December 2011 11:36, Toby Wintermute <tjc at wintrmute.net> wrote:
>> On 15 December 2011 08:01, Kieren Diment <diment at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> On 15/12/2011, at 2:52, Travis Basevi <travis at cricinfo.com> wrote:
>>>
>>>> On 14/12/2011 09:39, Kieren Diment wrote:
>>>>
>>>>> (I've got to concur with Toby btw. Australia is a pretty good option
>>>>> in a lot of respects. Outside of Melbourne, Perl jobs (as opposed to
>>>>> jobs with some perl) are a bit thin on the ground...
>>>>
>>>> Not that I'm necessarily in a hurry to move back just yet, but by "outside of Melbourne" do you mean in the areas just outside of Melbourne, or are you including the rest of Australia in that and implying that Melbourne is some sort of IT hot-bed?
>>>>
>>>
>>> To my mind there seems to be much more Perl going on in Melbourne than elsewhere (possibly the influence of Monash University). Although if you do a search for perl on com.au a fair bit of stuff usually comes up.
>>
>>
>> Melbourne.pm is the most active of the Australian perlmonger lists,
>> and I believe the only one in Australia to manage regular meetings
>> (almost) every month. Although maybe I'm just biassed because I've
>> been managing those for the last couple of years :)
>>
>> Historically (ie. before my time) the Melbourne Perl mongers spawned
>> the Open Source Developers Club, which has the associated yearly OSDC
>> conference, which moves around Australia. So it does seem like
>> Melbourne has been a hotbed of open-source development for some time
>> now.
>>
>> It does feel like first-class Perl jobs (as opposed to
>> sysadmin-with-perl or other-language-plus-perl) has dropped in
>> popularity in Melbourne over time though; I think I work at one of the
>> few development houses that still uses it exclusively for big
>> projects. Most others that I know have migrated to Ruby or Java. :(
>> Attendance at Perlmonger meetings is down a bit compared to four years
>> ago, and it seems harder to rustle up people to give technical talks.
>
> I thought about this some more, and feel I need to correct myself.
> There's at least three or four other places I know of that have been
> hiring for Perl projects in recent memory. It's just not everywhere is
> involved with the community, so they don't come to mind immediately..
> and hiring has been at a low rate due to the general global economic
> situation.

And after asking around at the PM meeting last night, it seems we have
quite a lot of big places using Perl here. At least two banks, two
telcos, and assorted bigger companies of which you'd recognise the
name, plus bunches of start-ups and smaller places.
I was glad to hear it :)

-- 
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The falcon cannot hear the falconer
Things fall apart; the center cannot hold
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world