[BangPypers] Python and Employment

[Dhananjay Nene]

On Fri, Jul 15, 2011 at 6:51 PM, kunal ghosh <kunal.t2 at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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.

The years of experience comes from a broader industry practice (across
all industries - not s/w) where years of experience is a good proxy
for ability to add value at a vocation. As an arbitrary example
consider hospitality management or event management.

The fact remains that there are many occupations where years of
experience has less stronger correlation to potential performance eg.
say a chaffeur.  So many companies tend to quote years of experience
simply out of habit rather than an explicit understanding of the
relationship of experience to potential performance.

However there are factors which can still be influenced by years of
experience even within s/w programming. Ability to interact with
customers, ability to involve oneself into the business domain or
problem space, ability to take on tasks and complete them without
requiring oversight or fine grained guidance still do get influenced
to some extent based on the experience. (I am suggesting there is some
correlation - not how strong it is).

Yet another reason is to increase the probability of finding the right
candidate. A threshold of years of experience is sometimes kept to
reduce the number of interviews that need to be conducted to recruit
one person (presumably because people with lesser years of experience
are lesser likely as a universe to get recruited and thus save
recruitment time).

On the whole recruitment is a very imprecise and brownian process. As
companies realise github commits are an important proxy variable for
potential success on work that will eventually find a way into the
recruitment criteria as well. In the meanwhile, its generally best to
make clear how exactly your experience stacks up against the expected
experience, and if it does not meet the minimum criteria, highlight
the strengths (eg. opensource involvement) which could cause a resume
to be looked as more likely to be eventually recruited than average.
If the company cares for this strengths, great, if not, it probably
was not one you were seeking anyways :)

Dhananjay