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Job Market for Developers Evaluated
David Parmet writes "Using data from indeed.com (an aggregator for job sites), Brandon of devnulled did an evaluation of the state of the job market in the US for developers. Some interesting findings - there are more Linux jobs than Solaris jobs. Unix is still competitive with Windows (only 24,000 fewer job listings for Unix than for Windows), Java is beating .Net and overall there seem to be a lot of enterprise / corporate IT jobs available. Indeed has a web services API / XML interface available here, so if you want you can do the analysis yourself."
Indeed i do not have to goto this website and do the stats for myself. I goto pennstate university and I work at the MBNA career center building where we find jobs for graduating students. We actually do our own job statistics for different departments to attempt to find out what we should push in their ciriculum. For instance we did notice that solaris has been declining for a few years now giving way to linux use, so the computer engineering/ comp sci department has switch to developing for linux from solaris. Using the data we get from recruiters, we try to keep our students top notch as far as demanded job skills.
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The U.S. Department of labor in conjunction with the CAO did a similar study a couple of months ago. The study was request by a tech labor sub committee in the senate because they wanted to compare our tech jobs to those in other countries because of all the FUD about jobs being shipped overseas.
The labor department study was fairly inclusive though. They showed that there has been a 120% growth over the last year and a half in jobs looking for people to do web application development. They also found a 22% drop in ActiveX and Javascript workers. I doubt there are any jobs just for these skills so it is probably jobs requiring these skills.
On the Mac side of the aisle developers have moved away from C and C++ and now focus Objective C. On the Windows side there really hasn't been a replacement found for C++ so its numbers are holding fairly steady.
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Good points. I've also seen "Java" misused when they're really just looking for a programmer that can handle that style of syntax (a nice way of saying "no VB programmers, please."
Of course, if you're an employer, you can list it as a high paying job with a lot of requirements. The more requirements, the less likely you will find someone to meet all of them...and that means you can justify lower pay. The high salary listing attracts more folks. You might only need 10% of the requirements to do the job.
It's not a nice tactic, but I know it happens. The same folks complain that candidates are lying on their resumes.
I was curious if anyone knew of any sort of reverse analysis. What is mean is that it seems easy to figure out what sort of jobs are available based on demand, but is there any analysis that shows what sort of IT-skill-sets are available from people in the job market? This sort of info would be nice to have if you were trying to avoid being one of the thousands of lemmings all focusing on the same job market.
Mark A. McBride -- OmniNerd.com
During the dot com flush it was really slow, but now it seems like I have more work than I can handle using Linux, both programming, network admin, and system admin. My friends who had only MS admin and development experience haven't fared so well. I guess the down-turn wasn't about who fell down, but who was able to get back up again.
And guess what, it's on a Celeron 466 with 192 MB of RAM running on FreeBSD. I bet it died after the first 10 people got there.
I have a new server coming in exactly tomorrow according to the last time I tracked it at UPS. Figures, eh?
This is going to make finishing my final assignment for my current class rather interesting since I host it at home...
This website has a nice graph on the popularity of languages.
I don't think it's accurate to insinuate that all VB programmers have messy code, it's mostly all the beginners and lazy people that write unorganized code. I for one write neat VB code every time, I learned that even before I started coding in VB (also learned to write neatly/efficiently in C++, etc. as well).
Note the matching rise of Python and dip of Java from about Mar 04 and then a slight reversal for both. Maybe some people were using Java for scripting purposes. Or they thought Python was a better match for the problem (but thought better of it later).
Bitter and proud of it.
We always say that it takes fewer *nix admins to maintain a *nix system than it does Windows admins to maintain a Windows system performing the same tasks.
Should we factor this in, or does the headline really mean it when they say "developers"?
The point is that the coding syntax for Java is far more common than VB - see C, C++, and PHP. If you're a VB only programmer, you may not be comfortable with a lot of the more common syntax.
// code
if a = "5" then
' code
end if
if (a == "5") {
}
The difference is enough to shake things up for a VB-only programmer. It gets worse when you step into a for loop, arrays, etc.
It is POPULARITY thats graphed there - not usage, or demand.
I would love to see an equivalent graph that does graph the demand for languages over the last few years as it really would help me plan my future, whereas peoples fads could be a more dangerous (though more fun) trend to follow.
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What exactly does it mean to say ".net" jobs (which is #2 about 6000 jobs behind Java. ".net" probably includes both C# and VB.Net (and possible others). However, C# has it's own category. Combined, there's more ".net" + C# jobs than Java jobs.
The .Net framework and it's languages/technologies (e.g. ASP.NET) are 1.0 or 1.1 (2.0's in beta). How dominant was the Java language/platform in its 1.0/1.1 days. I was there, doing Java then at my first company. It was not unheard-of, but not dominant. .Net and C# (I don't think VB.Net will ever be big, nor anywhere near as big as VB was) won't really take off until its 2.0 technologies and Longhorn and all the Avalon/Indigo stuff. That is, when there is much more advantage, with the newer GUI and Web Services tools, to adopt it. Right now I view .Net as mostly an MS-only Java alternative, which is not exactly compelling to me, as a Windows C++ developer. I don't need another wrapper around the Win32 API. But I expect MS to leap ahead of the competition in a year or two, and only then will we really know how things are going to shake out.
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Companies that really know that they're looking for won't just ask for Java experience... they'll ask for things such as "J2EE","Struts","Applets" or another specific use of Java.
;-)
Also, I've been using sites like Monster.com for a while to gauge technology popularity in various cities. Living in Pittsburgh, I noticed that there seemed to be a lot of Java offerings but not as many offerings for C#. Moster.com confirmed this:
(Under the "Computer Software" category)
Pittsburgh
Java: 145 postings
C#: 9 postings
Seattle
Java: 99 postings
C#: 49 positings
Now, I wonder why Seattle would be so much more into C# than Pittsburgh? Hmm....
If you're looking at moving to a new city, you can use these job sites to see how popular one technology is versus another. This can be very useful.