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Ask HN: What jobs can I have knowing Python?

by mahdi7d1 on 4/11/22, 6:13 AM with 83 comments

• by 0xedd on 4/11/22, 8:08 AM

  Using frameworks is a must. Writing maintainable code is a must.

  DevOps - you'll quickly run into requirements to write parallel work. Not using something like fabric is a waste of your employer's money hiring you. You'll quickly run into requirements to use ansible/terraform/other. Same applies here; surrounding tools with subprocess and parsing stdout/stderr is a waste of your employer's money. Use appropriate packages, instead.

  DataScience - all the cool toys, from simple stuff like pandas, or more focused ones like working with spark and the plethora of big data libraries require indepth knowledge of both the library and the underlying datastore. Combined, you make the most of your time and hardware. Not doing so, and only writing something that works on a small scale is a common costly mistake.

  Security - python is just a helper tool. Your requirements, depending on position, will be focal knowledge about a domain and its set of tools. From highly skilled domains like research onward to threat hunting, PT and to the entry level stuff like NOC.

  You're better off enjoying the little wins in life and dealing with the less pleasant moments. That'll give you a nice career in anything you choose.

• by ecshafer on 4/11/22, 2:38 PM

  Programming by itself is a borderline useless skill, just knowing python gains you very little. There are many fields where Python is an important skill, but that is because it allows you to perform other tasks faster. That is the importance of programming, the fact that you can automate work, and do large amounts of analysis faster than you could otherwise. If you want to program embedded devices, just knowing C doesn't help you if you don't understand how processors, memory, motors, sensors, etc work. Knowing python can help you leverage your mathematics or statistics knowledge to work as a data scientist or a quant, but just knowing python isn't sufficient. Knowing python alone is not sufficient for devops, since you also need to know how operating systems, networks, cloud infra, etc. works.

• by gherkinnn on 4/11/22, 9:19 AM

  Every field that isn't immediately related to programming can benefit from more code. Fields related to programming from less code.

  For example, every scientist I know struggles with a cobbled mess of bash, R, and Python scripts. Reading and writing CSV, cleaning data, moving things about, renaming and merging files. Drawing a pretty graph at the end. That sort of thing. Thousands and thousands of files. TBs of data.

  Few scientists can program, but every single one would profit immensely from somebody who can set up small scripts. The coding itself isn't tricky but some of the domain knowledge is.

  Though I don't know where to find such a position. The labs I'm familiar with work with first year bioinformatics students and similar and don't publish job openings as such.

• by rich_sasha on 4/11/22, 8:42 AM

  Frameworks are not created equal. Some are awful. Some seem awful but are actually great. Some seem great but are pants. Some are just great all round.

  Regardless, you say working on such frameworks "seems" bad to you... have you spent like a solid week trying to make something work in one? There is definitely an up-front investment of time, but once over the initial hump, working with a well-designed framework can actually be very liberating, enlightening and enjoyable.

  Things I enjoyed in the past include numpy, flask, Django and sklearn (the latter in particular, no offence to any maintainers, seems like a mess but is actually very well designed and thought-through IMO). Things I don't enjoy are Ansible and Pandas, though both look like they're polished and well thought-through. YMMV.

• by personjerry on 4/11/22, 10:57 AM

  If you enjoy writing scripts then something in devops might be best suited for you.

  But to be clear, there is a lot more to know in devops than just Python, and you will not make money if you don't learn frameworks and libraries. This is because while it's possible, you won't get anything done in a timeframe that anyone will pay you for.

  Learning Python and then not using frameworks is like saying "I like playing with glue, what can I make with JUST GLUE?"

• by TeeWEE on 4/11/22, 8:51 AM

  Dont forget the core of python is also a framework-ish :p imho You can for example start create a server with pure python, witout any framework.

  I'm a bit baffled on your stance not liking frameworks. If you really now python then using frameworks should be do-able... And long term you notice it makes achieving your goals easier.

  So, not liking frameworks, makes you less efficient of an engineer... Tip: Try some frameworks, pick and choose the one you like. And learn from there.

  Also: Try other programming languages. Its about the concepts, not a specific language.

  But if you know how to program: The oppertunities are endless... You can work in any field, any domain. BOOM

• by jockerz on 4/11/22, 7:52 AM

  I am freelancing on Fiverr for cheap $5 Gig (with optional $10 and $15 package). Barely have a client for march and this month, but sometimes got like 5 project months. Sometimes i reject several offers. Because i choose only small project (for cheap pay) :D

  Note: first good rating really help. Need to install the Phone App to make sure keep response rate green.

• by dncornholio on 4/11/22, 9:15 AM

  If you wanna code professionally, it's time to put your personal likes and dislike to the side. There's a reason frameworks are being used. Don't let ignorance cripple yourself.

  Frameworks offer a standardised way to build things, sometimes I don't like how some frameworks do stuff, but that's not a problem. I can set aside my personal feeling and just go with the flow.

• by nummerfuenf on 4/11/22, 8:02 AM

  TL;DR: Python alone won't land you a job!

  So here is the thing: Just knowing a programming language, isn't enough of a skill to land a job! That's why you learn other things too on university, like math, data science and so on. I for example work in the robotics industry and I do exactly what you ask for. I write many short python scripts for ROS. But my ability to write python code isn't what makes me valuable. It's because I studied robotics, know how to solve complex problems using math, and then implement said solution in python. The last part being the easiest. Coding is like writing. Just because you know how to read and write, doesn't make you a bestselling author. That's just a basic requirement, and even back-end devs need some knowledge about databases, distributed systems, etc.

• by shantnutiwari on 4/11/22, 8:58 AM

  Here in the UK(dont know if this is global)-- test /automation / devops is heavily into Python. Even companies that used Perl/Ruby are moving to Python, simply because more people available. Dont know if this is globally true

• by fatih-erikli on 4/11/22, 8:07 AM

  I worked as a Python developer in several companies and projects, in most of them I used Django, but if I would get a job in Python now, probably I would focus on AsyncIO. It's much closer to other stacks, such as NodeJS, and other languages support coroutines etc.

• by jacquesm on 4/11/22, 7:49 AM

  If you're into python and have a strong background in math you may want to check out the 'data scientist' path, there is a serious shortage of good people in that field and the pay is a lot better than cranking out web stuff.

• by tharwan on 4/11/22, 1:13 PM

  We[1] use Python to help with optimizing, forecasting and trading renewables. And we are not the only ones.

  [1] https://www.e2m.energy/en/

• by a-dub on 4/11/22, 7:56 AM

  qa/test engineer.

  sre/infrastructure/automation.

  release engineering.

  web scrapers/some etl.

  scientific python.

  tech writing/examples for python apis.

  solutions engineer/professional services/post sales engineer.

  they all require some domain knowledge though and some likely require the use of popular libraries/packages. maybe have a look at the libraries used for each and find one you like?

• by WestCoastJustin on 4/11/22, 3:33 PM

  Might want to investigate ML/Data Science. Python + Math background == big money. All type of hedge funds use python for quant type stuff. Pretty much any company doing ML is using python. These are all extremely high paying jobs. Personally, I'd drop the frontend/backend stuff and focus on those areas if you have any inclination towards math or find data science interesting. ML is still in it's infancy and you can make an entire career out of helping companies adopt it. There is tons of overlap between quant/ML since you're mostly just looking at data via jupyter notebook's with python libs like numpy, pandas, matplotlib, etc (good book: https://jakevdp.github.io/PythonDataScienceHandbook/).

  Look at the job postings for hedge funds (look for quant / ml researcher):

  https://www.investopedia.com/articles/personal-finance/01151...

  Looks at job postings for ML companies (look for data science / ml):

  https://technologymagazine.com/top10/top-10-machine-learning...

  Also, look at Google, Tesla, etc.

  Here's a good crash course:

  https://developers.google.com/machine-learning/crash-course

• by faizshah on 4/11/22, 10:57 AM

  This really depends on your background. If you’re a student currently getting an internship is the easiest route to a job with just knowing python.

  If you’re not a student then you need to bring something additional to the table besides python.

  A few avenues for python jobs involving short python scripts are:

  - solutions architect/sales engineer at a cloud company or consultant at a cloud partner, AWS certs are pretty easy to get and can help you go down this path

  - government contracting, there’s a ton of jobs especially related to healthcare/scientific data where they need python engineers to build scripts

  - bioinformatics, there’s lots of genomics companies looking for software engineers to help build scripts under scientists direction

  - election data, there’s a large number of firms that need people to build and maintain ETL scripts for election data and demographics

  Can I suggest visiting a local python meet up?

• by Beltiras on 4/11/22, 10:19 AM

  Anything and everything. In addition to Django and ML (which you mention), there's a lot of systems programming that can be done with Python. I recently left a position where I automated systems tools using Saltstack and Python, Gitlab CI/CD and Python to automate a lot of data loading and wrote some services using Flask and DRF. The CI/CD project had me make a satellite system of Docker images to interact with SMB and REST interfaces. That was a lot of fun, akin to making basic Unix tools for a multi-OS hoard (think cp mv and rm except the endpoints are services instead of files). Made me realize that in the Docker world we have to adjust our expectations for what you pass between commands. It's no longer text on a pipeline, it's filesystems passed between containers.

• by gigatexal on 4/11/22, 2:48 PM

  Ok so you know enough Python to be dangerous. But as a lot of the comments are suggesting: now you need to learn programming paradigms like how to organize your code, write tests, source code management, etc etc

  You are where I was almost 10-years ago. I had taught myself enough python to be dangerous to automate the boring parts of my job as a SQLServer DBA but I didn't know Python well enough to be considered a Python developer.

  At this level though you could get into automation or even system administration using things like Ansible and get a good paying job and learn the software engineering stuff later.

• by endre on 4/11/22, 7:37 AM

  I'm writing Ansible plugins for living.

• by bckr on 4/11/22, 7:47 AM

  Perhaps DevOps is an area you can go into.

  Also, if you don't like Django, give Flask a try. It's much simpler and easier to get started. If you can tolerate that it opens up a lot of opportunities writing backends.

• by schoen on 4/11/22, 10:10 AM

  I don't know how to find jobs in this, but the "automation" aspect is something where an enormous amount of organizations could benefit, as they are constantly doing repetitive things manually that could readily be automated. It's amazing to happen upon cases where a big part of someone's job is forwarding things by e-mail or copying and pasting between applications. And that's still the case many times today, because many people see software as a black box.

• by gonzo41 on 4/11/22, 11:02 AM

  Maybe just learn Django and SQLAlchemy, there's stacks of jobs out there for it and what you don't know you can google. You'll learn a lot quick and have more options.

• by case0x on 4/11/22, 8:52 AM

  My first guess would have been Web development with Django but if that's a no you might want to give DevOps a try. Of course, it will include a lot of tooling and other technologies (nearly impossible to do it without knowing about Docker/Kubernetes) but people who can develop DevOps tooling are in high demand.

  Last but not least you can look into automated testing. Not the most interesting job for many but Python is widely used there.

• by nurbl on 4/11/22, 1:05 PM

  There's a lot of room for general python skills in various parts of science, and in my experience quite easy to get a job because there's not a lot of competition (mostly due to wages I guess). Often any libraries/frameworks in use are obscure and you're not expected to know them beforehand. Projects tend to be numerous and small rather than a single huge one.

  Universities, large scientific labs/facilities, etc.

• by bartvk on 4/11/22, 8:29 AM

  In science, lots of Python is used. Perhaps do a web search for scientific programmer jobs, or look on the jobs sites of institutes. If your background/interest is in physics, check NOAA, NIH, NASA, JPL, et cetera. For other fields, check job sites of the appropriate universities.

• by criddell on 4/11/22, 2:24 PM

  Big projects in general seem arduous, or just big software projects? Is it a problem of not being able to focus and do deep work?

  I ask because it's a very common problem and the solution is much different than most of the advice that has already been given.

• by lattalayta on 4/11/22, 3:29 PM

  The VFX industry typically relies on Python and there are roles that help maintain small scripts that automate various tasks for artists. Python is well supported in many digital content creation (DCC) tools

• by snomen on 4/11/22, 1:10 PM

  Python is used as an extension language in everything from 3D modelers to banks' internal trading platforms. You have to have domain knowledge or something more than Python skills to compete though.

• by hiyer on 4/11/22, 8:37 AM

  > Especially if it involves writing many short script!

  I think a role in DevOps or writing internal Developer Tools (many larger firms would have this role) would be perfect for you, given this preference.

• by tjpnz on 4/11/22, 8:03 AM

  If you also like 3D modeling you could try applying for ATD roles at VFX companies. The job involves writing many, often single use scripts.

• by alwalo on 4/11/22, 8:08 AM

  You can research Python uses in DevOps, sysadmin and security testing. There is more potential there for writing a lot of small scripts.

• by markus_zhang on 4/11/22, 2:05 PM

  Maybe sort of framework project so instead of using frameworks you create them?

• by MikeDelta on 4/11/22, 7:43 AM

  What about teaching Python?

• by mfbx9da4 on 4/11/22, 10:25 AM

  You could be a quant at a bank