Difficulty Finding Python Developers

[Gabriel Cooper]

Paul Morrow wrote:

>We've worked hard to convince our company to migrate our core
>applications to Python, and now we're looking for a Python developer
>in Atlanta to handle a short-term (approx. 3 month) project.  But our
>initial searches have been fairly unsuccessful.  We haven't actually
>posted a job on Monster, but we have been talking with various
>headhunters in our area and they don't have many resumes that show
>Python experience.  An so now, of course, mgt is wondering whether
>selecting Python was a mistake.
>
>As anyone had a similar experience?  Suggestions?
>  
>

The company I work for has an interesting hiring technique.

They anticipate and expect that the applicant knows little or nothing of 
Python and as such they interview the person for personality, 
compatibility, etc. first. If he seems competent then we hand him a 
project and boot him out. He has 10 days to complete the project. At the 
end of 10 days the applicant comes back for a second interview where he 
basically discusses what he was able to accomplish regarding the project 
and where he ran into trouble, etc.

In our case, the project is a website (we're a website development 
company that does its work in python). We set up a server with a 
frontend and hand them the specification document. We give them data but 
it's up to them to normalize it (if they choose to do so) and put it 
into the database we give them access to. The project has to be done 
using python exclusively, of course, and is a great way to make sure 
your applicants aren't the type that "interview well."  Also, you will 
be able to see exactly how these people code. Is it spaghetti code? Is 
it clean? Do they use debug vars? Log information for testing? etc.

In my opinion it is a very accurate measure of an applicant's 
capabilities. In this case it makes it ///beneficial/// when the 
applicant has no python experience.

We have tried this method for two separate rounds of hiring and both 
times have resulted in us hiring someone different than we would have if 
we had had only the initial interview to go on. It proves that the 
people we hire are smart, interested in learning, capable of learning, 
capable of *adapting*.

Hope this helps.

Gabriel.
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