[Chicago] Pizza providers update

[Kenneth P. Stox]

On Thu, 2007-08-16 at 17:36 -0500, Kumar McMillan wrote:
> 
> this may be worth pointing out ... the company I'm at
> (leapfrogonline.com) has worked with Roy Talman way way back in
> ancient times.  

I guess I go back to pre-historic times then. My first dealing with Ilya
Talman was back in 1985. Unless things have changed much since I last
had contact with them, they are among the finest recruiters in Chicago.

> Had it not been for Doug graciously providing free
> pizza and pitching Roy Talman services at the meeting, then we would
> not have known that they are now beginning to provide contractors for
> open source jobs.  They certainly were not in the past.  This is
> excellent news for us since it is very hard to find Python developers
> in Chicago (btw, we're hiring!
> http://www.leapfrogonline.com/who/careers.php ).
> 
> In fact, I'm not kidding here, but we recently had to mandate that
> front-end web development be limited to RUBY because the resources we
> can find are greater in the Ruby dept than in Python.  This is sort of
> sad because we'd rather use Python for these things.

Have you thought of developing python talent in-house? This can be a
very effective mechanism as your developers will more in sync with your
internal methodologies. Continuing education also helps build employee
loyalty. 

> It doesn't help to push people away who are trying to move into the
> open source field.  I think it was pretty obvious from Doug's first
> post that it wasn't spam.  It may be that Roy Talman is still in early
> stages of being able to support Python resources, but they are
> certainly *trying* and this list is a great place to start!  There are
> a lot of talented developers on this list.

It seems that Doug has accepted the criticism in good faith. It was not
meant to push him out, but to suggest that an alternate method might be
more effective. It will make a better impression on open source
developers and on open source shops.

> 
> -Kumar
> 
> PS. if you use gmail then you get a nifty "view as HTML" link for Word
> docs.  Just sayin

Or configure your email client to use Abiword, Open Office, etc. to read
Word doc files. That being said, it is in the best interests of the open
source community to encourage the use of open tools and formats whenever
possible.

-Ken Stox
 ken at stox.org