Django Hidden Hires | Hacker News Reader

Django Hidden Hires

django.hiddenhires.com

71 pointstwampss26 comments

What if you're a "pretty good" developer, or a "great" developer? Why is there only ever a market for "awesome" developers?

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.

you go to monster.com

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

Ditto in Chrome.

Probably a Windows issue with font-face.

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

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]

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.

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

http://djangogigs.com/ has new jobs showing up every few days, despite being an ultra-niche site. My experience is that the Django job market has been very healthy for several years now.

I've been a full time Django developer for two years now.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

Your deviousness is subtle, great master.

yeah, if my website happened to be in django, I'd still be happy to hire great developers who haven't happened to work with django before. is this the new java certified?

Agreed; why not have a site like this at least for Python ? Any half-decent Python programmer should be able to pick up Django quite quickly, and I'd rather hire a good Python programmer with broad experience than someone who has just used Python through Django.

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

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?

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.

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?

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.

brighter please

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

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