Perl Developer

Career Area: Information Technology

Occupation Group: Software Development

Salary

Percentile wages tell how much a certain percentage of an overall population in a geographic area or within a given industry or field makes. The percentile wage estimate is the value of a wage below which a certain percent of workers fall.

An example would be the 25th percentile, 25 percent of workers employed in that occupation earn less and 75 percent earn more than the estimated wage value. At the 75th percentile, 75 percent of workers employed in that occupation earn less and 25 percent earn more than the estimated wage value.

A typical Perl Developer earns the following wages (national and state):

State

The average salary in North Carolina for those pursuing this career is $112,503

*The salaries depicted here are representative of the range of salaries posted in job listings over the past year. Living wage in North Carolina is $30,000.

National

The average salary in the United States for those pursuing this career is $110,873

*The salaries depicted here are representative of the range of salaries posted in job listings over the past year. Living wage in North Carolina is $30,000.

What Does a Professional in this Career Do?

Designs or improves computer software and applications using the Perl computer programming language. Oversees the entire Perl software development process. Analyzes customer or user needs, designs programs, writes code or instructs computer programmers, tests design, and documents programs. May assist with upgrades or maintenance.

Employment Trends

The job demand and job growth statistics shown here were derived from job posts over the past year. Expected job growth projections are extrapolated from year-over-year job post listing history.

Job demand and job growth is expected at the following rates:

LocationGrowth
North Carolina50+29.1%
Nationwide970+25.6%

Skills

A professional in this position typically utilizes the following skills in the course of everyday work in this exciting and challenging field:

Baseline Skills

The following are baseline skills every Perl Developer is expected to have in order to experience success in this field:

  • Troubleshooting: Troubleshooting or dpanneuring is a form of problem solving, often applied to repair failed products or processes on a machine or a system.
  • Communication Skills: The ability to convey information to another effectively and efficiently.
  • Problem Solving: Problem solving consists of using generic or ad hoc methods, in an orderly manner, for finding solutions to problems.
  • Teamwork / Collaboration: Experience working in collaborative efforts with a team to achieve a common goal or to complete a task in the most effective and efficient way.
  • Writing: Experience expressing business messages effectively in written form. This may include planning drafting and revising as necessary.

Specialized Skills

These skills are specific to working in this career:

  • Splunk: Splunk is a horizontal technology used for application management, security and compliance, as well as business and Web analytics.
  • Linux: Linux (pronounced LIN-ks or, less frequently, LYN-ks) is a Unix-like computer operating system assembled under the model of free and open-source software development and distribution.
  • Python: Python is a widely used high-level programming language for general-purpose programming, created by Guido van Rossum and first released in 1991.
  • PERL Scripting Language: Working experience of PERL Scripting Language, which is a family of high-level, general-purpose, interpreted, dynamic programming languages.
  • UNIX: Unix (; trademarked as UNIX) is a family of multitasking, multiuser computer operating systems that derive from the original AT&T Unix, developed starting in the 1970s at the Bell Labs research center by Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, and others.

Distinguishing Skills

Any Perl Developer that possesses the following skills will stand out against the competition:

  • MySQL: MySQL (officially pronounced as My S-Q-L,) is an open-source relational database management system (RDBMS).
  • UNIX Shell: A Unix shell is a command-line interpreter or shell that provides a traditional Unix-like command line user interface.
  • Kubernetes: Working experience of Kubernetes. Kubernetes (commonly referred to as K8s) is an open-source system for automating deployment, scaling and management of containerized applications that was originally designed by Google and now maintained by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation. It aims to provide a platform for automating deployment, scaling, and operations of application containers across clusters of hosts.
  • Red Hat Linux Administration: Working experience of Red Hat Linux Administration, which is competency at system administration, including installation and configuration of a Red Hat Enterprise Linux system and attaching it to a live network running network services.
  • Amazon Web Services (AWS): Working experience with one or many of Amazon's cloud computing platforms. These platforms allows subscribers to have at their disposal a full-fledged virtual cluster of computers, available all the time, through the Internet.

Salary Boosting Skills

A professional who wishes to excel in this career path may consider developing the following highly valued skills:

  • Amazon Web Services (AWS): Working experience with one or many of Amazon's cloud computing platforms. These platforms allows subscribers to have at their disposal a full-fledged virtual cluster of computers, available all the time, through the Internet.
  • Apache Kafka: Working experience of Apache Kafka. Apache Kafka is an open-source stream processing software platform developed by the Apache Software Foundation written in Scala and Java. The project aims to provide a unified, high-throughput, low-latency platform for handling real-time data feeds.
  • ElasticSearch: Working experience of ElasticSearch. Elasticsearch is a search engine based on Lucene. It provides a distributed, multitenant-capable full-text search engine with an HTTP web interface and schema-free JSON documents.
  • Chef Infrastructure Automation: Working experience with Chef, which is a configuration management tool written in Ruby and Erlang. It uses a pure-Ruby, domain-specific language (DSL) for writing system configuration recipes. Chef is used to streamline the task of configuring and maintaining a companys servers, and can integrate with cloud-based platforms such as Internap, Amazon EC2, Google Cloud Platform, Oracle Cloud, OpenStack, SoftLayer, Microsoft Azure and Rackspace to automatically provision and configure new machines.

Experience

This position typically requires the following level of experience. The numbers presented in the pie charts below were derived from actual job posts over the past year. Not all job postings list experience requirements.

Experience Required%
0 to 2 years12%
3 to 5 years54%
6 to 8 years23%

Many of the programs offered through NC State are designed for working professionals who need additional credentials to enhance existing work experience.

Students who do not have the expected level of experience may wish to look into internship and employment opportunities.

Common Job Titles

It is possible to find work in this field in positions commonly listed as the following job titles:

  • Splunk Engineer
  • Software Engineer - Splunk
  • Perl Developer
  • Siem/Splunk Engineer
  • Senior Splunk Engineer

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