"Ed Leafe" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote in message news:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Allow offsite workers and you'll have all the candidates you want.
Exactly. I'm 5 hours away in Rochester, NY, and might be interested
And, if they are willing to go offsite, why not go to India and save lots of bucks?
Trust issues? In general, Python requires you trust your programmers. People give Java grief about its restricted environment and static typing, but if you don't trust the programmer to do a good job, at least with Java they (maybe) can't mess things up as badly for everyone else working on a project. You can mess things up royally with Python. I like working with a language that respects my intelligence, but that's not without its costs.
In general, Python rewards highly-skilled programmers with a considerably increased productivity. We talk about how Python is also easy to learn and maintain, and that's still true, but it doesn't mean that it evens out the differences in productivity between programmers. In fact, quite the opposite -- that it's easy to learn and maintain means that there's less risk in using a highly skilled, highly productive programmer; in other languages you risk being left with a program that only another highly skilled programmer can maintain.
Also, Python encourages agile methodologies, even if you aren't explicitly trying to use agile methodologies. They just work well. They also work well when you can have a more intimate relationship between developer and project manager or customer. Hiring in India or elsewhere makes that intimate relationship harder to create. And frankly, Python is not the language for companies who expect mediocrity in their programmers, and I think that outsourcing is for companies that expect mediocrity.
I don't mean to insult Indian programmers -- certainly there are Indian programmers who are just as good as a good programmer in the US, able to communicate well, able to work independently, able to judge tradeoffs, etc. But those aren't the cheap ones. This isn't just about nation of origin. Outsourcing is about turning programmers into a commodity, and you can only make a commodity out of something where quality isn't an issue. In the case of programming, that means you must expect the lowest common denominator of quality given the constraints. I think that's a stupid way to look at programming in general, but it's *way* more stupid with Python.
-- Ian Bicking / [EMAIL PROTECTED] / http://blog.ianbicking.org -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
