Difficulty Finding Python Developers

[Chris Green]

simoninusa2001 at yahoo.co.uk (simo) writes:

> Yes, I'm beginning to think Python isn't as accepted as we think ;o)

I've run into a few people that have used python in jobs but not very
many.  It seems to leave a bad taste for many people that don't have a
text editor that does the right thing out of the box.  

It's amazing how much software development is done with people that
don't place enough emphasis on making their tools make their job
easy. I've seen a really good algorithms person run vmware on linux to
get notepad.exe in win32...  

> I'm actually looking for a Python job now (in CA, not Atlanta) and
> it seems that there's only a few out there, mostly at Google doing
> SysAdmin stuff!  Barely anyone actually lists Python as a main
> requirement, more like a "nice to have" alongside Perl or C++.

When I've gone into places, I've often sold them on having good luck
teaching other people python and ending up with something more
maintainable as everyone is forced to write about the same kind of
python code as long as you don't get trigger happy with speciality
methods. 
>
> I've seen no web development positions or prototyping/testing at all,
> which seems strange to me, as I mainly use Python for RAD, prototyping
> C++/Qt apps etc.

I've definately not seen webdev in python.  Lots of asp, perl and php
and lots of "where do we go from here".

Often it takes doing something quickly in python and seeing some good
results to get people to wake up to python.  

One example I was sharing at pycon was using the unittest framework to
test other apps. Take an existing project that doens't have a test
suite but does have a command line interface and generate test cases
based off causing the prgram to perform actions.  I first saw this in
ghostscript and I wrote a preliminary one for an IDS.

When searching for jobs I try to feel out how open the company is to
new solutions and when a need that python fulfills comes up, use it.
-- 
Chris Green <cmg at dok.org>
Eschew obfuscation.