[BangPypers] Python and Employment

[Noufal Ibrahim]

kunal ghosh <kunal.t2 at gmail.com> writes:

> Hi all,
>
> I read a lot of emails in this list and others, posting job offerings.
> They all list, "years of experience" required by a candidate to be
> considered for the job.
>
> But what is the metric to measure this experience. If it indirectly
> means , "corporate experience" ( in django , etc ) does it mean that
> free and open source developers who use these technologies in their
> free time (and not in their day jobs) are NOT experienced ?  Even
> though they might have worked with those technologies for a much
> longer duration than the "experienced" ones ?
>
> looking for comments, suggestions and constructive criticism.


I've generally felt that "years of experience" is a poor metric to
filter people with. It's easy to rack up a few while not doing anything
useful. I spent a year at a company early in my "career" clicking
"Start" 2 times a week and sending an email. Later, I interviewed
someone who had 3 years of UNIX experience who didn't know the
difference between a hard link and a copy of a file.

In older times, when people worked in factories, the number of years of
experience you had were a decent metric. You couldn't get that kind of
experience except on a factory floor and the work was repetitive enough
that the more raw time you spent doing a job, the better you'd get at
it. The HR departments being the kind of people they are translate this
to the software world.

Of course, the amount of time people spend doing stuff does help them to
get better at it but in the software world, you'll have to account for
"free time" and time spent in college working on things. The "years of
experience in the industry" doesn't really work for that. You'll have to
use a different metric. 

-- 
~noufal
http://nibrahim.net.in

"Triumph without Victory, The Unreported History of the Persian Gulf War", -Headline published in the U.S. News & World Report, 1992.