does anybody earn a living programming in python?

[Paul Boddie]

Fredrik Lundh wrote:
>
> well, I think I prefer the "are you sure you exist?" trolls over the "python sucks
> and you are all a bunch of clueless something something" and "this thing is broken
> beyond repair and you are all a bunch of clueless something something" trolls.

I can see where the "trolling" is coming from, though. If you read
various "industry newspapers" you often see stories about there being a
huge demand for Java or .NET developers, whereas Python barely gets a
mention. One example I read recently [1] described how the marketplace
in Oslo, Norway is currently short of 300-500 Java developers, but if
you look beneath the surface, knowing that there are lots of Java
developers out there looking for work, a gulf between the story and the
facts emerges: the employers who vocally complain about a lack of
talent in the marketplace are typically either those who want to
promote their credentials in some realm ("we're the experts on Java and
can't do enough of it"), those who want to poach employees from their
competitors (a job advertisement for the in-crowd), those who only want
to hire cheap, recently graduated people and are just railing against
the supposed injustice of paying the market rate, or just those who
aren't good at recruiting people (if, as the article says, there's no
point in advertising jobs on high traffic job sites, even though many
companies have recruiters doing most of the legwork, one has to wonder
how competent the recruiters are, and what the employers think they're
paying for).

So, from the perspective of some person reading mainstream news
sources, talking to recruiters, reading job adverts, Python doesn't
appear that much. But one has to question what underlying interests are
at work in continually hyping the demand for other technologies, and if
personal networks are more effective at getting people work, whether
the old-school job classifieds market (on the Internet and otherwise)
is becoming a thing of the past.

Paul

[1] http://www.idg.no/karriere/karrierenyheter/article15027.ece