[Baypiggies] Hello friends

[Shannon -jj Behrens]

On Wed, May 20, 2009 at 3:02 AM, Brian Harring <ferringb at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Thu, May 14, 2009 at 09:56:05AM -0700, Aahz wrote:
>> On Thu, May 14, 2009, Meenal Pant wrote:
>> >
>> > As many other developers I am seeking work at the moment. I am
>> > applying for jobs but there are hardly any leads.  I am looking for
>> > tips and advice on the best approach to this situation. I have been
>> > following this list for a while and sense that there are many Python
>> > gurus out here. I am learning Django nowadays to add a skill and have
>> > started a blog http://pythontalk.blogspot.com/ .
>>
>> Make sure you're monitoring the Jobs Board on www.python.org and keep
>> looking on Craigslist.
>
> The problem I've always had with CL is that the mentioning of python
> is basically defacto for HR folk- you wind up seeing quite a bit of
> "python would be great" for SA jobs that are mostly uninteresting in
> tech, scripting rather then actual development- this of course is
> exempting the front end work.  The front end work is mostly utilizing
> framework xyz to do JS/CSS/HTML abc.  Not knocking it, it's
> interesting work if you like the frontend. I'm personally more
> curious where folks are finding the true backend work, the "twisted
> backend that interfaces with the media store to serve out 100-1000
> files per second".  The code that powers the architecture
> essentially.  Best description I can offer, if it involves debugging
> the lighttpd state machine (nasty piece, that), it's the sort of work
> I'm talking about.
>
> So... sans the python job board, anyone got any pointers?  What I've
> mostly seen these days is positions where <=2 years of python
> suffices, or it's templating work.  I'm personally looking for
> something where knowing the intricacies and idiocies of the cpython
> vm matters (personal favorite, doing __getattr__ = getattr in
> <python-2.5).  I'm seriously not knocking the frontend work
> (templating and such), I'm just curious where folks see the sort of
> work where hacking the hell out of the django ORM to speed it up is
> the day to day work.
>
> Might just be that the market is a bit locked up right now, but most
> of the adverts I've seen really don't fall into the category described
> above- I'd be quite interested in any pointers to boards/forums w/
> work of the sort described above.
>
> Thanks in advance,  Feel free to view this as a mild rant about the
> PITA nature of finding a position where they're doing interesting
> things (positive social results, say kiva.org) *and* doing
> interesting tech in the process (say metaweb/freebase, although kiva
> may fall into that classification).

There *are* a bunch of jobs like that out there, although I personally
prefer Eventlet and Nginx over Twisted and LigHTTPD ;)

The companies that I can think of are VMware, IronPort, Metaweb, and
Google.  Only VMware is still hiring, but Google is still open to
hiring super stars.  I also think there's a market for people who can
really own the database sharding infrastructure.

I don't think the situation is as dire as you might think, but I do
think finding a really awesome job requires patience.  As hockey fans
say, "If you skate hard, you're going to score some goals!"

-jj

-- 
In this life we cannot do great things. We can only do small things
with great love. -- Mother Teresa
http://jjinux.blogspot.com/