[sapug] Plethora of jobs on SEEK for Python programmers in Adelaide.

[Chris Foote]

On Fri, 7 Mar 2008, Daryl Tester wrote:

> Chris Foote wrote:
>
>> I thought it might be interesting to see the proportions for different
>> languages in different cities for Seek IT Job listings:
>
> Automated query, or did you just punch in these keywords and write down
> the results?

Manual searches.  I had a spare half hour :-)

>> |-------------+----------+-------+-----------+--------|
>> | Search Term | Adelaide | Perth | Melbourne | Sydney |
>> |-------------+----------+-------+-----------+--------|
>> | Ruby        |        2 |     1 |        27 |     58 |
>> | Perl        |        4 |    19 |       157 |    312 |
>
> What?  No Smalltalk or Lisp?

I did some searches and found zilch for languages like LISP, Lua, Fortran,
Prolog, Erlang, Haskell, Smalltalk, Tcl.  I forgot Ada and didn't bother
with others.

Perhaps in the case of non-mainstream languages, job adverts might
just list development experience instead.

>> Here's a stack of guesses to explore as to why this might be the case:
>
> Where was "enlightened management"?  :-)

or perhaps these:

- Lack of organisational awareness of high level language benefits.

- Organisational resistance to change to new development environments
   stemming from large amounts of legacy code.

- Management's failure to embrace technologies before their use
   by the late majority or laggards.

- Management and staff are influenced by tool vendors &/or the press.

- Management's failure to listen to recommendations from their staff.

>> - The popular dynamic languages have an interpreter implementation that
>>    doesn't lend itself to hiding proprietary code from prying eyes.
>
> I have written an obfuscator/signing module import mechanism for Python,
> but ultimately these things are breakable (I've no delusion about how
> easily breakable these schemes are :-).  It was more of an experiment
> with Python's import process than anything else.

That's cool.  I know that Obsidian (http://www.obsidian.com.au) ship
.pyc files with their proprietary Jet billing software (also uses a
license key), but they didn't think it was worth the effort.

>> I wonder if someone has done a real study on dynamic language
>> use for employment.
>
> I have read something along these lines, but I'm stuffed if I can
> remember who what or where the paper was (not so much employment
> but definitely use of higher level languages in business).

Yes, I did mean to say its use.  If you come across the study, send me
a link ;-)

Chris Foote <chris at inetd.com.au>
Inetd Pty Ltd T/A HostExpress
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Phone: (08) 8410 4566