GUI (tkinter) popularity and job prospects for

[2QdxY4RzWzUUiLuE at potatochowder.com]

On 2020-10-22 at 12:50:43 -0700,
Rich Shepard <rshepard at appl-ecosys.com> wrote:

> On Thu, 22 Oct 2020, Lammie Jonson wrote:

> > I looked at tkinter which seems to have quite a few examples out
> > there, but when I searched indeed.com for tkinter and wxpython it
> > appeared that there was hardly any job listings mentioning
> > those. Why is that ? It's a bit of a demotivating factor to get very
> > serious with tk etc. I was going to look at something like
> > tensorflow perhaps, though I am not sure if machine learning is that
> > easy to pickup or not

[...]

> You're looking for a job from the wrong end. Let me offer an analogy I
> use to describe how you ought to go about your job search. I've often
> said that you can teach someone how to use a word processor but that
> does not make them a writer. Your rails/JS experiences and your
> interest in tkinter or wxpython is focused on tools, not the products
> produced by those tools.

> If you wanted to hire a professional chef how would you respond to
> someone who told you they had great knife skills? Your interest is in
> what they could do with those skills to prepare outstanding meals for
> you. After all, it's the meals you're buying, not how uniform are
> their diced onions.

> An employer will hire those who will benefit the employer's company
> and position. The tools used to provide those benefits are less
> important than the prospective employee's skill in using them to solve
> a problem or increase company profits and prove how great a manager is
> for hiring you.

> Make a list of what you can do and what you've accomplished, not a
> list of tools you know. I've no idea what you really want to do but
> define that in terms of both your personal satisfaction and what an
> employer would value.

I'll second that.  I had a 40+ year career spanning multiple companies
and multiple industries, and putting a tool on your resume may get you
past a gatekeeper, but that's rarely why you actually get hired or paid.

I picked up Python in 1997 to build some proofs-of-concept for some
designs I was working on.  I ended up with a tkinter based GUI, but only
because the command line programs came together so quickly.  IMO, the
GUI didn't add anything to my design or to the proofs-of-concept.  But I
digress.

Pick a few tools, learn them well, and use them to build something
(often, those last two go hand in hand).  Build something that interests
you, or something related to an industry or a technology in which you'd
like to work, or something that might be useful to you or to someone
else.  Pick a new tool here or there, but only as a means to improve
some other area of knowledge, like building GUIs, or concurrency, or
scientific software, or a different style of programming, or whatever.

Happy hacking.

-- 
“Whoever undertakes to set himself up as a
judge of Truth and Knowledge is shipwrecked
by the laughter of the gods.” – Albert Einstein
Dan Sommers, http://www.tombstonezero.net/dan