Rethink the list of companies

[honzajavorek]

This issue is about the https://python.cz/prace/ and https://python.cz/en/jobs/ pages.

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Notes

• We should be able to contact the companies (see Seznam firem by měl obsahovat email #249) to be able to annually ask whether they
  • still exist
  • still use Python
  • want to sponsor PyCon CZ
• The most visited page from python.cz is the one for beginners. The page about jobs could (should?!) aim for higher exposure of entry job opportunities.
• A past brainstorming we had about jobs and job boards ended up with a decision we should not run our own job board. Still, I think we could have something more useful than a list of companies.
• The call-to-action I want to be on the list leads to editing a GeoJSON file on GitHub and is understood by a small niche of senior-ish OSS and GitHub -friendly developers. It is completely inaccessible by beginners without GitHub, those not knowing GeoJSON, recruiters who would like to register their company to get listed, etc.
• The list of individuals is very stale and was never really used or extended by anyone much.

What's the purpose of the page?

• To give beginners an idea that they can find a well-paid job in Python, so it makes sense to learn it
• To give companies an idea that they can find Pythonistas to hire so it makes sense to use and invest in Python
• To give people outside of big cities, such as in Hradec Kralove, an idea that they can get a job in a nearby company or remotely

Secondary purpose is to have a permalink to a canonical tutorials for job seekers and head hunters (currently below the list of companies).

Ideas

There's no way we can capture a list of all Python-friendly companies. There are many companies, many use Python as a secondary tool, many are not active in the community, ... Also it's tedious to keep the list updated. It just doesn't scale.

Aggregated stats + links to job boards

It probably doesn't make sense for us to aggregate jobs from other job boards, but we can link to them, showing some "stats". Something along the lines: "There are currently 123 Python jobs from 123 companies available in the Czech Republic, plus there are 123 Python jobs available worldwide as remote positions. Check them out..." linking to jobs.cz, startupjobs.cz, https://www.python.org/jobs/, https://stackoverflow.com/jobs, https://www.linkedin.com/jobs, ... This takes away the need to implement anything close to a job board, but still gives the reader an impression there's a lot going on. Also the call-to-action is pretty clear.

The challenge is whether we're able to easily gather the stats from the job boards. One clear way would be to try to scrape them, but since this is something they should be interested to be involved in, I think we might be provided with an API as well if we ask for it (and they have it).

Featured companies list

Since we still want to give an impression there's a lot going on locally in the Czech Republic, we kinda want to have a list of the interesting players - big fish (Seznam), community-friendly (Fragaria), local stars (Energomonitor) etc. I'd scratch the map though and keep it only as a list, although organized by headings according to location - kinda like this:

Headings being Czech regions (not cities) and entries being featured companies.

Where would these companies come from? The GeoJSON list works for us OSS developers, but it doesn't scale when it comes to other mortals. Perhaps we could use a shared Google Spreadsheet as a backend for the list? Spreadsheets

• can be managed by Google Forms, so it's easy for mortals to add themselves to the list (and Forms can even perform basic input validation)
• can be managed manually if we need so
• is visible internally to PyCon CZ organizers when they seek for sponsors
• can be exported (and thus easily fetched during the Elsa build and provided as an API a .json or .csv variant of the jobs page).

So the jobs page could have a list of featured companies and a call-to-action leading to a Google Form for submitting a new one. Being in the list should require listing some company contacts. The listing would be free, but we should state (and in the beginning we should confirm with every company listed) that if a company wants to be in the list, it is their agreement that they can be contacted by the PyCon CZ team once a year regarding sponshorship, or by the python.cz team to confirm they still exist and use Python (for convenience, in practice these two should happen together). The listing should allow for linking a company jobs page (e.g. https://www.redhat.com/en/jobs) as without something like that it has very little value for anyone.

In the future we could introduce a paid "featured featured" company status - if the company pays Pyvec a regular fee, they could get listed as the first one within the region, but I'm not sure whether this wouldn't come with more overhead than benefit for us. Perhaps we highlight (or give a heart or badge) to companies who sponsor Pyvec through other activities? If they sponsor through Pyvo (Red Hat in Brno) or PyCon CZ, we mark the sponsoring date in our spreadsheet (5 min work once a year) and they get listed as highlighted. There could be a call-to-action for companies along the lines of "wanna get highlighted as well? sponsor Pyvec-supported activites!". The highlight would expire in 1 year from when the sponsoring has happened.

Since the list of featured companies would be tightly coupled with PyCon CZ organization and sponsoring, it gets a yearly update by a dedicated staff.

Currently hiring companies

If the APIs or scraping we use to get the "Aggregated stats" (see above) allow us, we could have a list of companies which are "currently hiring" (they have a job posting somewhere). This could be a valuable source of more features for the jobs page:

• If we pair the list with the "featured companies list", we can mark featured AND hiring companies with some "currently hiring" badge in the "featured companies list"
• For the rest of the currently hiring companies (those which are not in our featured list) we could just list them below in a "word cloud", or just add them to the featured companies list as dimmed (similar to tentative Pyvo dates on the events page) - we know they exist, they use Python (they're hiring for Python) we just don't know much more... this could also work as a visual "inbox" for PyCon CZ organizers to find contacts to them, add them to the spreadsheet, etc.

One challenge would be to remove job agencies from the list of currently hiring companies, but hopefully that could be done somehow.

[sarimak]

Python jobs at jobs.cz can be referenced via https://www.jobs.cz/prace/?q[]=python

[honzajavorek]

Yup, we link following now, although the links are pretty much invisible on the page:

• https://www.jobs.cz/prace/?q[]=python
• https://www.startupjobs.cz/nabidky/15/python-programmer?jobfield=15

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[honzajavorek]

Idea: we should be saving the stats (like numbers of job offers) to see trends over time.

[encukou]

FWIW, this makes sense to me. (But right now I don't have time to contribute much.)
The connection of Jobs to PyCon CZ sponsoring sounds great – just be sure contact details are only shared with appropriate people (i.e. Pyvec, not the other companies).

[torsava]

That sounds great to me.

As you said, I don't think "Featured" fee would raise us much, but sponsoring other activities works. Spit balling: we could have badges for platinum/gold/... sponsors for example.

Using a Google Spreadsheet/Forms sounds like a good idea. Easy to use, and people can go back and update their data by themselves. We could have a secret field in the spreadsheet that can't be touched by the Form where some human on our side verifies that it looks like a genuine entry and only then it's showed on the web.

Minor point though, I like the map, let's not remove it!

[honzajavorek]

How to get information from job boards:

• SO - https://meta.stackoverflow.com/a/349034/325365
• Jobs.cz - scrape https://www.jobs.cz/prace/?q[]=python or get a custom export (✅ I have custom export in my Slack)
• Startupjobs.cz - scrape https://www.startupjobs.cz/nabidky/15/python-programmer?jobfield=15 or get a custom export (✅ I have custom export in my email)
• LinkedIn Jobs - they have API, but we first need to apply to a partnership program https://developer.linkedin.com/partner-programs/apply (might be worth doing, but perhaps only as a next step when other job boards are working)
• PSF - scrape https://www.python.org/jobs/ or use the RSS https://www.python.org/jobs/feed/rss/
• RemoteOK - link to https://remoteok.io/remote-python-jobs and take jobs from https://remoteok.io/remote-python-jobs.json
• Glassdoor - https://www.glassdoor.com/developer/index.htm

[honzajavorek]

This is something I was more or less able to address with my experimental "fork", at least from the technical perspective - https://github.com/honzajavorek/py I'm missing the spreadsheet part, but I'm able to aggregate companies from various sources.

If the "fork" gets a nice UI for this feature and becomes upstream one day, this issue can be closed.