The last few months were tiring. I hardly got any time for writing. I was busy preparing content for a workshop and talk. Hopefully I will get into my flow soon. In this post I will try to answer one of the most important question of our life, “Employment!”. At conferences, IRC channels or even by the roadside, I had requested people to suggest good employment opportunities for me. I have not always been very lucky in finding greener pastures. I am writing this blog post so that you learn from my poor experience. I am happy that at least I was able to knock the door of good companies. I am sharing a list of portals and companies that I am following or have followed in last few years. As a bonus point, I will highlight some uncommon ways which helped me to invite new opportunities. You should read this post if you are looking for **Python + web
- (remote OR India)** related employment.
Disclaimer: I have not taken any money or any other type of bribes to advertise companies here.
This website is the best choice for finding jobs in Python. The portal is managed by volunteers from the Python Software Foundation. You can find both remote and on-site visa sponsored jobs here. You will get an option to subscribe via RSS feeds. They have an active Twitter handle too. I have configured IFTTT to drop me an email whenever new feeds are published.
Mailing lists are a good source to get notified for new job openings. In India, there are a few active mailing lists managed by volunteers of that community. Often Job emails are tagged with "[JOB]" in the subject. I have configured my mail client to collect all the mails with "[JOB]" in their subject in a dedicated folder of my mail client. This configuration helps me to pay steady attention to them. Your Hack May Vary.
Below is a list of active Python communities of India.
HasJob is an easy to follow job portal. You will find jobs posted by emerging to well-established startups of India. I am following HasJobs since day one of my career. During my early days, I used to run a bot to apply to all the latest openings of the day. I am not using that tool now, but if you are interested in making that bot compatible with the new HasJob, please create an issue here to show your interest. I am happy to hack on this project again.
This job board is less known, but I find it effective for remote or visa sponsored positions. Openings are mostly from companies based out of Europe or United states.
There were a good amount of invitations from recruiters, employers via my Github profile. While Github jobs has not helped me much, this worked for me. I would recommend adding your email address on your Github profile. It helps people to reach out to you. In my case, most of the Github invitations for employment were targeted to a common audience. May be people are crawling Github profiles from popular open source projects and sending them opportunity emails. I don't consider anything wrong in the crawling way, but one should spend enough time in identifying my expertise. Contributing to open source projects for inviting better opportunities is a long subject which might be a good fit for an entire blog post.
I am not too much following this website, but I have followed this when I was actively looking for a change. You will find openings for Django developer from all around the world.
OpenStack is a free and open source tool for cloud computing written in Python. In my opinion, OpenStack is one another domain in Python. You should follow this if you are interested in shaping your career in OpenStack.
You will find openings from all domains of Python. Openings for remote developer is less in proportion to on-site opportunities. I didn't notice any opportunities by Indian tech companies at this portal.
I have heard from people, that AngelList works. It worked for me to observe company culture, team and information about the investors of the company. I have mixed experience with this portal. I was contacted by few employers for joining their startups via AngelList, but they weren't so impressive. You should create your Angle List profile and upgrade it periodically.
If you are looking for your first job or you are good at solving competitive programming questions, then this platform can work for you. I have not followed HackerEarth since almost 3-4 years. One thing is sure that once you create a profile at this platform, they will spam you with emails of their hiring challenges. You can obviously turn off email invitations from their platform. My experience from those email invitations is that Hacker earth is good if you want to get hired for large corporate.
Most jobs were open from years. There are few openings which I had applied 2 years back, and they are still deciding whether to hire me or not. Some rejected my application after 6 months. The employers don't bother to reply to my questions. The openings which are flashed by the website are mostly inactive years before. Subscription to new openings is even worse. Stackoverflow will spam you for each and every opening despite you are only interested in watching jobs from selective domain. Maybe you should have catchy Stackoverflow profile (which I don't have) to get at least good response from the employer. I don't think Stackoverflow should be the preferred choice to get employment at least in India.
LinkedIn works great for advertising your skills. I often use LinkedIn to observe the employees of any company or finding the employment history of anyone. I am contacted by a recruiter at least once a month which is a good thing. But I had a poor experience of their premium service. It was total loss of my money. I am recommending to have an updated LinkedIn profile that's it. Premium services are more helpful to recruiters.
Github jobs has too many outdated jobs. It is not the recommended platform to find an employment in India. I have stopped expecting good from this portal.
This platform has mostly openings from Y Combinator startups. Companies posting job openings are impressive, but there are very few openings for India or remote for India based employee. I haven't got single invitation for an interview from openings I applied via this website, but one fellow in my known has got employed via this website. You should sure try your luck for sure.
Twitter is a great platform for find jobs, contract jobs, projects. Tweet that you are looking for change in your employment. Add appropriate hashtags like "#job #python" etc. I had pinned my "Looking for job" Tweet until I found satisfied position. I had updated my profile description to "Looking for interested position in Python Django..." to let people know that I am open to be hired. I was contacted by lot of good people via Twitter. If you are new and you don't have good network then you can find people having good influence in the community and request them to re-tweet your "Looking for job" Tweet. Those people can be organizer of any conference, meetup group, maintainer of any open source project or known speaker of any technical conference. If you request them politely, I am sure they will happy.
Just like Twitter, Facebook also helped me to let people know that I am looking for change. Facebook is kind of limited in networking with unknown people. I have not tried posting on the walls of polular community pages, but there is nothing wrong in following them if you are looking for any change.
There are millions of advantages for attending any conference and this is one of them. Conference has stalls managed by companies. You can visit them, talk with them, ask questions about their culture, work pressure, kind of problem they are trying to solve. When I was looking for job, I went to each and every stall of Pycon and tried to talk with them. If I find them interesting, I go to their career page and skim for openings matching to my skills. If I find any, I go back to them and try to initiate a contact with the person by showing my interest in openings at their company. Most of the time I was succeeded by personal recommendations to their recruiter. Believe me, recommendation works better than applying via online portals. Recruiter pays dedicated attention when your profile is recommended by existing employee. If you are a good candidate, people are happy to take you in their team.
You shouldn't be limited to stalls. You can check companies of speakers, organizers or anyone you find interesting at the conference. LinkedIn works best for skimming profiles and locate their employment details.
Job boards are interesting resource. You can demonstrate yourself that you are looking for change and you can watch companies looking for employees. I prefer to look the board at the end of the conference so that I get all possible openings without re-looking. I scan profiles of companies, If they are doing I don't delay in applying. I will advise to not take much time in applying to positions you are interested in. You shouldn't assume you are the only one in the race. Last year at Pycon India, we had an amazing response for job board.
- Pycon India Job board
Pycon US has some remote openings for people located at anywhere on the earth. It is worth scanning it once.
Below are list of conferences that I attended in past and found them helping for finding better employment opportunities.
Meetups are mini conference. Meetup helped me to connect with many interesting people and I have learned most recent trends via Meetup events. The fun part of Meetup is that Meetups are always arranged at different venue. Venue is generally sponsored by tech company. You should take time and talk with the available employees of the company. Meetup is the best place to step into their premise and actually see their environment. I always hear announcements from regarding openings at meetup.
This was a different case when I was living at Gandhinagar. There were a few communities for sure, but it wasn't as diverse as what I am seeing at Bangalore. I am sure this will be a situation at your hometown. I have seen people starting Meetup if there isn't any in his/her town to create a community. Today benefit of good network and support of community are standing with them as a success of their efforts.
Small events, mini conferences are a great way to connect with people. When I mentored for Django Girls Ahmadabad and Bangalore, I got connected with awesome people. I was able to make a healthy relationship with them which helped me in finding better opportunities and improving myself in many ways.
Incubation centers has early staged startups. In my opinion, they are good place to find contract based opportunities. I had never attracted by any job offers for a full-time employment because of their low paying capabilities than an established startup, but your preference may be different. Good incubation center does events. You can go to their events, talk with the startups to know more about their requirements. Things to be careful while choosing a contract work is another matter to discuss, so I am skipping it here.
Co-working space are good choice for bit progressed startups. Good co-working space arranges lot of events for startups. These events include hiring camps too. In the past, I have got small contract based opportunities and weekend work via network of co-working space. I try to maintain a healthy relationship with the managers. I brief them regarding my technical expertise and request them to keep me in mind whenever anyone is looking for any technical help in my domain. You can try that too.
I will advise you to do a clear contract before starting any temporary work. Contract has saved me once from over work and get paid for what I did.
Below is the list of companies who are working in Python and hire/hired remote developer who are located in India.
Below is the list of organizations who has some tools/utilities written in Python, and they hire/hired remote employee located at India.
Below job portals which aggregates openings at free software projects. Ratio of Python jobs is less compared to other languages. I didn't work as expected for me, but I still try to follow them as much as possible.
Apart from portals, below are the list of companies that I know are working in Python. This list involves companies to which I was interviewed, worked for, referred by friends or I spoke with them during the conference. These companies were looking for Python developer at any point in time. You should look for current openings before showing your interest to them.
- Odoo India
- Ishi Systems
- Auberginesolutions
- Codal TrellisSoft
- Infibeam
- Peerbits
- Caret IT solutions
- Limelight
- GoJek
- HeackerEarth
- VMWare
- Razorpay
- Petasense
- Sprintboard
- OpenEBS
- NikiAI
- Zauba Labs
- Infinity + Beyond
- Doselect
- GALE
- Intel
- Accion labs
- Credy
- Grab
- Treebo
- Soroco
I am sure there are many good companies left from my catch. If you want to suggest any, then please write a blog post or tweet about it and share it with me. I will reference it in this post and pay you the credits for it. I hope you had enjoyed reading this blog post. Happy hacking!