best way to get data into a new instance?

[John Salerno]

Let's pretend I'm creating an Employee class, which I will later 
subclass for more specific jobs. Each instance will have stuff like a 
name, title, degrees held, etc. etc.

So I'm wondering, is the best way to get all this information into the 
object to just have a really long __init__ method that takes each argument?

Does a question like this depend on how the class will be used? I'm 
trying to construct it in a way that is independent of, say, the GUI 
interface that will be used, but I can't help but think that if all the 
data is entered into a GUI, then passed programmatically to the class, 
then it's no big deal because it happens behind the scenes. But if, for 
instance, someone manually created a new instance, they would have a ton 
of arguments to type in each time. Granted, even with the GUI they are 
basically typing in arguments, but in the manual case you'd have to type 
in the call to the class, the parentheses, commas, quotes around the 
strings, etc. (But still, I'm trying not to let a specific interface 
influence the construction of what should probably be a completely 
independent class implementation.)

Thanks.