Here I thought the problem was we were in Phoenix, and we had hired all the Python Developers in the area. (with a few exceptions for those who work at NASA)
I run into Ruby and Python devs all over the place. The problem is, like this article touches on, the jobs advertisements I've seen for Python seem to be written for the "hipster" crowd (I've even seen some with "ninja", etc in the title).
Then they end up wanting to pay $30k less than the competition, so most people I know chose to go work at Intel, Freescale, Microchip, one of the aerospace companies... somewhere that has a professional atmosphere, pays well, and you get to work on interesting tech.
The guys who want $75K would not fetch $50k in San Jose, and the guys who want $100K would not fetch $70k in San Jose.
I have been lucky to get some really great guys, but most of the guys are script kiddies who have never done anything hard, and are too high and mighty to learn to do the hard stuff.
We aren't competing with LimeLight very often for tech talent. We are competing with Silicon Valley. Because unless you have roots in Phoenix, if you are talented you aren't staying here.
I am very aware that if my guys wanted to leave Phoenix they would do well in Silicon Valley, and I'm very glad they choose to live here.
We build things like Search Engines. Which have a Crawler, an indexer, a few dozen scorers, the front end, the Natural Language processor, the content extractor....
And all of those things have to talk to each other and be set up to run on your personal dev environment. That often means borrowing some know how from the guy next to you. That is much harder remotely.
And all of those things have to talk to each other and be set up to run on your personal dev environment.
For this, we created (and keep updated) a textfile with requirements and a (terse) installation procedure a dev should be able to follow to set things up on his own machine.
That often means borrowing some know how from the guy next to you.
I once worked in a telecom company (open plan) where we also used this way of communication. Perhaps nothing wrong with it (from a social standpoint) but the senior devs were often complaining about being disturbed in their flow.
That is much harder remotely.
An alternative, which doesn't interrupt flow, could be email. But then you might have to wait hours for an answer...
Speaking to your troubles hiring, I can only generalize based on some job ads that I've seen. Like I mentioned before, some ads just seem too targeted at the "early 20s fresh out of school" demographic that companies think they can lure in with free soda in exchange for 80-hour weeks. Senior devs just don't go for that, so they ignore those ads and go interview at Honeywell instead.
I am working mostly in Python these days. When I was in Silicon Valley I could go talk to Guido. When I had questions about AppEngine from Google I met with the PM's.
Phoenix doesn't have that. Also the place I rent in Tempe is with in 10% of the price of the same thing in San Jose.
As far as Phoenix-based Python developers, there appears to be a Python meetup group, 'DesertPy': http://www.meetup.com/Phoenix-Python-Meetup-Group/
As far as real estate... I don't know about your specific situation but as a whole the valley is much more expensive than the Phoenix area. San Jose, through Cupertino, up to Mountain View... on average you're easily paying twice as much for the same square footage (I just checked San Jose on Zillow. 2,000 sq ft is easily 600k).
"nice outside" doesn't happen much in Phx. In Silicon Valley you open the windows and let the breeze in. In Phx you kick up the AC.
The flip side of that is that this place is just endless bubbles. Get on the wrong side of that and you'll never recover.
I'm completely baffled why so many companies that work in completely digital industries demand asses in seats.
Now, if enough companies realize a competitive advantage from saving $100K/dev/year on salary and office space that a leak in the bubble becomes visible… well, it'll be fun to watch from a distance.