Anton Vredegoor wrote: [...] I mean, not everyone is able to visit expensive > high-profile hiring fests like pycon.
What! I resent that remark. PyCon was started precisely because I felt a low-cost event would better encourage community involvement. If PyCon is beyond your means that you clearly aren't looking to be hired as a programmer ;-) Seriously, I know that not everyone can afford to travel away for a week's conference, but I've had reports that people *from the UK* have found it cheaper to attend PyCon than the three-day Python UK event held in concert with the ACCU (though that track is no longer purely Python anyway, so things are changing). > ... while I'd be immensely useful in a > space telescope science institute or a genome database research > institute or in an artists educational institute or in a psychological > statistics institute or in a computer science or mathematics institute > etc. there is no way people can see that, because they're thinking in > resumes, job experience and formal education instead of in just asking > themselves what needs to be done and can he do it. With an attitude like the one you exhibit in your post I seriously doubt that. "You've got to speculate to accumulate". If you don't have a dream your dream can never come true. If you dream of being a paid programmer then it's up to you to make it happen. There's no use standing around saying "the world is all wrong so no-one will ever hire me". See it from the employer's side. Their first problem after advertising a vacancy is to get the numbers requiring interview down to manageable proportions. This involves looking for reasons to reject applications. If you can't make it on your resume/CV then try something more attention-grabbing. Just don't sit there and whine :-) regards Steve -- Steve Holden +44 150 684 7255 +1 800 494 3119 Holden Web LLC/Ltd http://www.holdenweb.com Skype: holdenweb http://del.icio.us/steve.holden Recent Ramblings http://holdenweb.blogspot.com -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list