Why do Perl programmers make more money than Python programmers

[Chris Angelico]

On Mon, May 6, 2013 at 5:49 PM, Fábio Santos <fabiosantosart at gmail.com> wrote:
> I may rise the average pay of a Python programmer in Portugal. I have asked
> for a raise back in December, and was told that it wouldn't happen before
> this year. I have done well. I think I deserve better pay than a supermarket
> employee now. I am sure that my efforts were appreciated and I will be
> rewarded. I am being sarcastic.
>
> The above paragraph wouldn't be true if I programmed in perl, c++ or lisp.

I dunno, it depends more on where you work than what you work with.
I'm the top employee at my workplace and use C++, Pike, PHP,
Javascript, and bash, plus ancillaries like SQL... and my salary is
definitely on the low end. Why? Because I work for a startup. No doubt
Google or IBM would pay their top people way more than I'm getting,
but that's not something a little internet startup can afford. So I
bide my time :) Some day we'll be massively profitable... some day.
And if not, hey, I'm making enough to survive.

Of course, there's the whole thing of "how easy would it be to replace
you" too. If the only language you know is PHP, chances are you can be
replaced by any idiot straight out of secondary skool (sorry, that's
school_real_secondary now isn't it), but someone who speaks FORTRAN
and knows the bank's internal systems well enough to maintain them can
ask for whatever salary he likes and still be cheaper than finding a
replacement. But that expert FORTRAN programmer, if he quit his job
and went searching, would quite probably find himself at the lower end
again if he joined a small company.

ChrisA