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Job Market for Developers Evaluated

Posted by Zonk on from the java-barista-coffee dept.

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."

20 of 163 comments (clear)

  1. Java scripting by fembots · · Score: 5, Insightful

    The article mentioned it's relatively hard to compare Java to C# as Java is a fairly generic (and sometimes misused) keyword. I have seen companies who asked for JAVA experience, which in reality is expecting you to do Javascript.

    And did the analysis take into account that some "jobs" are posted by head hunters who are only interested in resumeh collection?

    --
    Rock that crushes, Paper & Scissors that don't matter.
    1. Re:Java scripting by lukewarmfusion · · Score: 4, Interesting

      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.

    2. Re:Java scripting by plague3106 · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Its not the VB programmers most have a problem with; its the programmers that ONLY know VB. And thier code is always awful.

    3. Re:Java scripting by lukewarmfusion · · Score: 4, Interesting

      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.

      if a = "5" then
      ' code
      end if

      if (a == "5") { // code
      }

      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.

    4. Re:Java scripting by Bill+Dog · · Score: 3, Insightful
      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.

      Or you can add to all the artificial jobs for which unsurprisingly no USian qualifies, thus the software industry as a whole can retain "evidence" for continued desperate need of H1-B's, that they can pay less.

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      Attention zealots and haters: 00100 00100
    5. Re:Java scripting by Klaruz · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Funny you say that, I've been writting in C like languages and python for a long time. Sometimes at work I need to write a vbscript to automate something. I always takes me a while to wrap my head around the bizzaro syntax and quirks (error handling! Ahhh!!) of that language, more than others ever do. After a day or two I'm good to go, but I'm usually done with the project by then.

    6. Re:Java scripting by mrighi · · Score: 3, Interesting

      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.

  2. PennState Career Services by KingOfTheNerds · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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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  3. Labor Dept. and CAO did similar thing by moofdaddy · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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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  4. linux work by argoff · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

  5. That's My Site.. Good Luck Viewing It... by booms · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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...

  6. Language popularity. Java use going down. by zymano · · Score: 4, Interesting

    This website has a nice graph on the popularity of languages.

  7. google's cache by qwasty · · Score: 4, Informative

    here's google's cache of the site http://216.239.63.104/search?q=cache:0P-b3Qx1lg8J: devnulled.com/content/2005/01/an-evaluation-of-the -current-technology-job-market-updated/+&hl=en&lr= lang_en

  8. Oh, great ... by jc42 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I can just see flocks of PHBs reading this, and mandating a conversion of their JavaScript to SQL, because JS is going out while SQL is holding steady.

    I wonder how many readers here will understand all the things that are wrong with this ranking.

    It's also amusing that Fortran, Cobol and RPG still make a top-20 list.

    (Who was it that said "We don't know what programming language we'll be using 50 years from now, but we know it'll be called Fortran"?)

    --
    Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
  9. work per person by bersl2 · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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"?

  10. ".net" jobs by xswl0931 · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.

  11. .Net languages won't really take off til v2.0 by Bill+Dog · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

    --
    Attention zealots and haters: 00100 00100
  12. what about new trends? by LuxFX · · Score: 3, Funny

    I'd be interested in how many job posting were already asking for Ajax experience.

    Of course, with the modal intelligence of headhunters I've worked with, most of the adverts probably read:

    min. 10 yrs. in A.j.a.x. development REQUIRED

    --
    Punctanym: alternate spelling of words using punctuation or numerals in place of some or all of its letters; see 'leet'
  13. Uh-oh by wumpus188 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Most of these "available" jobs are in fact advertisiments required by INS for someone's H1B.

  14. Flawed Methodology. by luh3417 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Companies often post fake job listings to bolster their case for more offshoring and H1-B hiring. A significant percentage of those jobs just don't exist. At least not if you're an American and/or over 40. Soon, many of you reading this will become American. Soon, many of you reading this will become over 40. Hear me now, believe me later. Let's call it karma.