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Tracking the IT Job Market with a Bot
atlantageek writes "Is the
IT job market improving? Is the growth in Unix or Windows? Should I
study Data Warehousing or E-Commerce? Identify the recent trends with
CJ Miner, a small tool I've written that has been monitoring the Computer Jobs website for the
last year."
"track how the computerjobs.com website has been doing"?
;-)
That was also my interpretation of this project. I'm afraid that computerjobs.com wouldn't necessarily represent the entire IT market, but rather a very small percentage of it. The software would be limited to indicating various demographics at computerjobs.com, perhaps arguably and tentatively serving to indicate the "competency level" of their members. Without data from many sources, however, you couldn't hope to provide an accurate impression of the overall market.
Maybe the programmer should sell the collected data back to them.
Do you like German cars?
I'd assume it means the employer will sponsor you for an H1-B if you take the job.
Surely, you have to be a US citizen before you can join the military?
Nope. Non-citizens may enlist in the U.S. armed services. Think about it: France has a foreign legion; why can't the USA?
You don't have to be a citizen to enlist in the US armed forces, but you do in order to be an officer.
I'm a CS major, and frankly, it's disgusting to see how many people can get a degree and not know how to program at all.
That being said, a language is nothing more than a way to describe a concept. Ask the "trend du jour" people about programming concepts, and you'll probably get a bunch of software engineering babble in the reply. (an experiment of this would be interesting, given that the person wasn't mislead)
My basic belief in learning computer science is to learn how NOT to be a code-monkey. Any idiot with minor interest in the topic of languages or databases can become a code-monkey.
I think Dijkstra was wrong about the cruelty of computer science. The true creulty is that we teach students more than the watered down industry will ever demand. Kind of like putting a professional athlete in a little-league team.
Why is this? One thought that has crossed my mind is something that a prof of mine, who used to work at IBM, once said "Back in the 60s programmers were created, not hired." Because there weren't many programmers at the time.
Now, if people are being trained on the company dime, the employers are going to cheap out. They are going to set a bar of "getting it done" and only demand as much. (we see this today in many parts of the industry)
Steve Jobs once said that "A players hire A players, B players hire C players", where the question was posed "then how do you get B players?" I think that in this case, C players hired people that would become (on average) at best B players.
Over time, these B+C players set the industry standards, both in hiring and development. (for example, if you are a boss and only know COBOL, are you going to start projects that aren't COBOL, with the loss of job security as one consequence, and that the employees currently only know COBOL?)
Which leads us to today and the demand for the "trend du jour" which is just an extension. Where programmers have been forced to ride the wave for decades to maintain bare employability. Thus, the market asks for it, people looking to do the bare minimum supply it, and a de facto standard in the common language is created.
What I'm saying is that if one chooses to enter this industry on the "trend du jour", they better be willing to have to learn the latest fads well into their fifties.
As for what the next trend is, I've heard that the best way to gauge that is to go into any CS department. What they are doing is what you will most likely be doing in 10 years.
Am I open minded towards open source, or closed minded towards closed source?
Or you can use indeed.com, which lets you search all jobs within the last 30 days from almost a thousand job sites (including computerjobs.com).
You don't even have to visit the site to check for new jobs -- it has RSS feeds and email alerts for new jobs that match your search criteria.
Or if you're really ambitious, use their free XML API and do whatever you want with the data.
Friends, local listings, and university career centers are good place to start. Monster.com usually has a fairly high ratio of people who are actually looking to hire, but you will still probably do better using the first 3 I mentioned.
Jobstats.co.uk has been doing this for years, and aggregating counts of listings from multiple sites.
My Karma: ran over your Dogma
StrawberryFrog