[Edu-sig] real advice to a real student (comments welcome)

[kirby urner]

Student (paraphrase):

What else do I need to know besides Python to get a job in IT?

Might some jobs involve telecommuting and not physically going anywhere?

-----

My answer:


Good questions.

There are many walks of life for those with coding skills.  If
you were to attend the expo hall at Pycon (generic name for a
"Python circus"), the booths, where companies recruit Python
coders, range from Disney to DNA analysis work.

Oft times, your value to a team comes as coding skills plus
some domain specific knowledge, by which I mean some special
familiarity with the needs of specific clientele.

To take an example, I became familiar with the needs of small
nonprofit groups to keep track of members and subscribers, to
help people register for events, and later to harvest and
warehouse medical procedure related data.  My coding skills
were valuable but also my ability to understand a client's
need.  I was an independent for-hire contractor.  In that
role, I was not back office but always in demand at some
suite or headquarters, but then I also had my own office for
coding.

A big divide in the work experience is between people who
code "solo" i.e. for or by themselves, perhaps sharing code
over the web, and people in teams, organized by project and
community managers.  Many different ecosystems prevail, and
some involve telecommuters.  I am a telecommuter myself in
that OST mentors are scattered across several cities and
each has responsibility for providing a place of work.  My
office is in a 2nd floor with wifi and as it happens has an
actual physical python for me to take care of, a pet snake.

The Python community (the community of Python users) is of
course not just one community.  Those who use it for web
development, i.e. for coding websites, form a large pie slice,
I will guess (a wild guess) they account for 50% of Python's
vitality.  The other 50% consists of academic and scientific
establishments needing to glue together elaborate pipelines
for data processing, such as the Hubble space telescope.
They have an in-house language but are committed to making
Python a tool of choice.  I know because I taught the Hubble
instrumentation people a few years back.  They liked Python's
scientific computing capabilities.  It felt like a comfortable
language to them.  This 50%-50% description is of course a
gross over-simplification but I just wanted to give you a
clear idea of different subcultures within the user sphere.

In conclusion, I encourage you to deepen your Python studies
by choosing an area you may already care about or have some
experience in and try to think of a Python angle i.e. what
would a coder or team of coders contribute to this enterprise?

Rather than speculate as to this other interest you might
cultivate, I will leave it to you to write again and tell me
more, should you wish to, of the sorts of topics that capture
your attention.  Do you want to work for large companies?  Do
you want to teach coding skills to others?  Do you enjoy any
particular kind of study?

I enjoy marketing campaigns or PR campaigns i.e. ways to
change the ecosystem of ideas.  In that vein, I think about
how to advertise Python as a language and have suggested and
then started using the slogan 'Just Use It'.

If you know about advertising, you might recognize the similarity
with 'Just Do It', used by Nike.  Google it if curious.  The fun
thing is:  Nike and Python actually have a mythological connection
in Greek Mythology, so my training as a philosophy student actually
comes into play as well.  I like working in areas that take
best advantage of what I already know, while challenging me
to learn new things at a rate I can handle.

Kirby
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