
Django Hidden Hires - twampss
http://django.hiddenhires.com/
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orblivion
What if you're a "pretty good" developer, or a "great" developer? Why is there
only ever a market for "awesome" developers?

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akavlie
What, didn't you know that's how developers are made these days? That's how
they come, standard issue: awesome rockstars. With 5 years of experience.

That's the impression I get from most job postings, anyway.

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abyssknight
Design is pretty, but in Firefox 3 for some reason the text is nigh
unreadable.

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zokier
Light typeface, low contrast colors and non-perfect text rendering. Welcome to
the custom font age.

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adamt
I was reading the bit about how they pre-screen candidates, and was wondering
if they actually know that much about Django themselves.

Then I saw saw their team page:

[quote] Our team is: Jacob Kaplan-Moss, a core Django developer and partner at
Revolution Systems. Eric Holscher, the testing master and lead developer at
the Lawrence Journal-World, where Django originated. [/quote]

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shadowsun7
This is new. Is it me, or does Django seem to be picking up steam (vs Rails et
al)? Don't remember seeing calls for Django developers before.

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carbon8
It looks like it's mostly just that the job market is getting better overall;
there are more jobs across the board. For example, about 9 months ago I looked
up the number of jobs for PHP, Rails and Django on various job sites
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=805931> Here are the old and current
numbers compared:

SimplyHired - PHP: 10726 to 15993, Rails: 2553 to 3823, Django: 328 to 926

Startuply - PHP: 280 to 488, Rails: 121 to 230, Django: 35 to 66

StartUpHire - PHP: 458 to 549, Rails: 119 to 152, Django: 9 to 25

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yesimahuman
Interesting, but I'm a bit shy about hiring people through channels like this,
worried that they really have only worked with Django or only _want_ to work
with Django.

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forsaken
Part of the point is that we pre-screen developers (and employers) to ensure
that people are high quality -- and that they have actually used Django
before. We are requiring open source code to be shown (or having a good reason
for not having any). Along with doing basic interview-style questions to prove
that you actually understand Django on a non-trivial level.

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yesimahuman
I guess my biggest fear would be to find a "fanboy". Is there some kind of
screening process for that?

I love django just as much as the next guy but no technology is the end all.

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jacobian
There will be a screening process, yes, and diversity of experience will be
one of the factors we take into account. Nobody wants to hire or work with a
one-trick pony.

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nailer
> Nobody wants to hire or work with a one-trick pony.

Your deviousness is subtle, great master.

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cmelbye
Really? Ultra thin font with light gray coloring on a gray background?

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grasshoper
I feel that the market right now for Django is still too small for something
like this to really work. Even the open Django job boards like
<http://www.djangogigs.com> are pretty barren. How are you going to convince
employers to fork over money without proof that there are lots of talented
Django developers behind the walls of your site? And how are you going to
convince developers to go through the trouble of opening up their code and
submitting to tests without proof that it might get them access to lots of
top-notch employers?

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jacobian
These are all great questions — indeed, they're ones I've asked myself. Only
time will tell, I suppose.

However, the impetus behind Hidden Hires is a cry real need: although Django's
community is growing at a rapid clip, it's still a niche enough technology
that employment is tricky. I regularly hear from developers who are having
trouble finding jobs that match their skills, and I'm simultaneously hearing
from companies who can't fill open positions. It's clear to me that the
existing employment markets — job boards, recruiters, etc. — aren't serving
our community very well.

We're hoping to fix that problem eith Hidden Hires. We'll see how it works
out.

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sumeeta
Hiring for Django or hiring for Python? For a Python coder, a _Django job_
sounds a bit drab. And a _Django developer_ sounds like someone way less
technical than someone who has a lot of experience writing Python code.

What’s the real difference between _Django developer_ and _Python developer_?

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alnayyir
I'm a generalist that found work as a 'Django developer', and I actually ended
up enjoying it, despite Django's flaws (minimal compared to what other
frameworks are out there).

I do in fact spend most of my programming time on Python, and I enjoy using my
faculties to write better/faster/smaller code.

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hassenben
brighter please

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RyanMcGreal
What part of "hidden" don't you understand? :)

