On Sat, 2009-01-10 at 15:38 -0700, David Lindquist wrote: > First, I understand that the world economy is in a slump, and that > the job market as a whole has not fared well of late. But even before > the recent downturn, I noticed that there are precious few jobs in > Django development (yes, I know about DjangoGigs.com). A simple > keyword search on popular job boards shows that the number of Ruby on > Rails jobs outnumber Django easily by a factor of 10 or 20. True, > Rails has been around longer, but not by much (a year maybe?). > > So my question to the group is: if Rails has been widely adopted in > the enterprise, why hasn't Django? Do you think Django will catch on? > Or do you think it will be more of a "boutique" framework?
There are some slight problems with your methodology. Large companies adopting something like Django aren't necessarily going to be posting to djangogigs.com or places like that. They'll already have competent programmers in-house to do the work. Or they'll hire through more traditional channels. So it might well be that Django is more heavily used in large organisations than Rails and all the Rails jobs you see being advertised are because there are lots more gigs at the smaller end. I have no evidence to support this either way, but it's always tough to estimate "the number of people using X" by the job advertisements without a lot more controlling of factors. It's probably a mistake to base your entire career for any period of time on only doing Django work unless you have some long-term contract or permanent position already lined up. But it's not a bad skill to have in your bag of tools, since many other problems that contractors are asked to solve can be solved using that particular skill. Keep in mind that keyword searches only find offerings where the client/employer has already picked the solution and is trying to backfill a lack of skills and hoping desperately that adding more people or bringing in new people won't make things worse than they are (hiring contractors is very risky). There are many other positions where the hirer is in a position of having a problem and after a solution. That's where the experienced, all-around consultant can often add genuine value. Over the years, Python job advertisements have lagged behind other, trendier areas. It's led to some perception problems, particularly when trying to "sell" Python-based solutions to more conservative outfits. But you can only hold one job at a time, so all you need is one job opening in an area you can work in and you're fine. Do you want to be a quality craftsman in an area where the quality can be identified (Python), or just one of tens or hundreds of thousands in an area like Rails or Java or C#? Malcolm --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Django users" group. To post to this group, send email to django-users@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to django-users+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/django-users?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
