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Job Postings For Python, NoSQL, Apache Hadoop Way Up This Year

Posted by Soulskill on from the year-of-the-accidental-dba dept.

Nerval's Lobster writes: "Dice [note: our corporate overlord] collects a ton of data from job postings. Its latest findings? The number of jobs posted for NoSQL experts has risen 54 percent year-over-year, ahead of postings for professionals skilled in so-called 'Big Data' (up 46 percent), Apache Hadoop (43 percent), and Python (16 percent). Employers are also seeking those with expertise in Software-as-a-Service platforms, to the tune of 20 percent more job postings over the past twelve months; in a similar vein, postings for tech professionals with some cloud experience have leapt 27 percent in the same period. Nothing earth-shattering here, but it's perhaps interesting to note that, for all the hype surrounding some of these things, there's actually significant demand behind them."

9 of 52 comments (clear)

  1. Is SQL really such a bad thing? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    It seems strange to specifically ask for experts that know no SQL.

    1. Re:Is SQL really such a bad thing? by DoofusOfDeath · · Score: 5, Funny

      It seems strange to specifically ask for experts that know no SQL.

      It's a ploy to get more H1B's into the country. "We can't find any database experts in the U.S. who know no SQL!"

  2. Percentages? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Percentages can be very misleading, do they have raw numbers?

    If there was only one python posting last year but 10 this year, that's 1000%!!!

    1. Re:Percentages? by antifoidulus · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Not just raw numbers, some sort of weighting system would be useful too. A lot of postings I've seen throw in a lot of these technologies as sort of a "nice to have", but don't really require them nor will they most likely be used on the job. However the search engine will still hit upon them, influencing the numbers. TFA has no mention of their methodology or what they define the various positions to be, so I'm guessing their methodology is "search every job posting we have had for certain words and count them".... Wonder if they used map-reduce to do so :P

      --
      Monstar L
    2. Re:Percentages? by Sarusa · · Score: 5, Informative

      TFA is kind of dumb for not giving the numbers, but a quick search on Dice turns up 4800 python listings.

      Compare to 1770 Hadoop listings, 1490 NoSQL, and 3250 for 'Big Data' and you can see that it's kind of the opposite of what you were suggesting. The reason Python is only up 16% is because it had so many listings last year already.

      2700 Ruby listings for comparison, regarding another post.

    3. Re:Percentages? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Informative

      Anecdotal, but I've basically got all the skills listed in this article. I started job hunting a few weeks ago (mid April). The last time I went job hunting, about 6 years ago, my rule of thumb was that roughly 1 out of every 5 recruiters I spoke to would translate to an interview. This time around, every one of them seems to land multiple opportunities. I've done at least 3 phone interviews each week. This week alone I've had one face-to-face on Monday, and 4 more phone screens. I've never seen anything like this level of interest before.

    4. Re:Percentages? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Informative

      16599 for Java
      15924 for C,
      3359 for PHP
      4327 for Perl
      0 for fortran (heh)
      0 for COBOL (heh)
      2657 for iOS
      2522 for Android
      27 for Lisp
      11055 for Linux
      36 for Haskell
      373 for Scala
      425 for Groovy

      etc. etc..

      These numbers mean hardly anything at all. Dice has serious selection bias too.

  3. "Python" - no they want specific CMS niche skills by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Sure, the job may say "Python" or "PHP" in the title, but .... they usually want niche skills with some CMS you've never heard of written in these languages, and if you read the whole job writeup, it's not a "Python" job other than you need to know Python to write extensions for the CMS. So if you know Python programming, you still won't get the job.

    The reason why there's a "shortage" of skills at the same time there's a glut of developers available is the insanely narrow specialization that companies want. There aren't many people who have even heard of the CMS-of-the-week the company uses, let alone knows its internals well enough to do what the company wants done. Companies seem very good at picking losers in the technology race, and get stuck with things that are evolutionary dead ends, further limiting their talent pool.

    Big data is probably the same thing, but I don't know anything about it.

  4. Small market, big percentage changes by tomhath · · Score: 2

    Those were all niche markets a couple of years ago so big percentage increases don't mean all that much.

    IMHO...most companies won't ever have a use for Hadoop. "Big Data" is a buzz word that doesn't mean anything. "Cloud" doesn't require a specially trained expert. NoSQL is another word for caching, which most enterprisy applications don't do well, so that's worth knowing (especially if the app is trying to use Java/Hibernate for persistence, yuck). Python will continue increasing in popularity because there isn't a better alternative for quick scripting and small applications, Java is too cumbersome for small tasks.