The Blogo’Shawn

I thought it would be interesting and handy to compile some data regarding which programming skills are hotter than others, as evidenced by mention in job posts. Now certainly, the Bay Area tech community has been all abuzz for quite awhile in regards to relative newcomers Ruby on Rails, AJAX, OpenLaszlo, Flex, and so forth, but it occurred to me that their adoption rate might not be so readily reflected in job postings, which is the realm that affects me as a contractor at large. I used to pride myself on being up-to-date with the most current OOP languages and technologies, but programming has taken a backseat lately to strategy and design for my contract gigs. Yet, it’s a good principle of thumb to still be well-versed in the current prominent programming platforms and languages. The guts of which technologies should I be delving into thoroughly as based on numbers?

So the upfront disclosure is that my little study isn’t nearly scientific, but I am confident that it sheds light on what companies are directly seeking. I turned to Craigslist job posts as a fair indicator of the job market pulse, and I gathered numbers across four metros: SF Bay Area, NYC, Seattle, and LA - I consider these metros the most forward-thinking for software development (and Craigslist jobs usage). Yesterday (9/7), I searched on individual programming language keywords to get a total number of all job postings listed and then I restricted the search to those jobs listed as “contract” engagements. Except for HTML+CSS, I didn’t run couplings of the keywords for search, because I only just had enough time to graze the pickings.

So the results proved telling. If you take a look at the data tables (metros are represented as tabs at the bottom), you will see that I highlighted in green the top two programming/scripting languages with the highest total jobs and percentage of that being contract work. The next two languages after that are highlighted in yellow.

Draw your own conclusions, of course, though I think it’s incontestable that Swing, the once popular Java UI API I knew so well, is going extinct. What I extrapolated was that the top requested contracting programming skills in my dataset and across metros are:

1. PHP
2. HTML with CSS
3. JavaScript tied with mySql
4. Java

This was a surprising outcome for me somewhat since I had thought, given the amount of sustained buzz, that requests for AJAX and Ruby on Rails would be stronger by now. Then again, these days, maybe such specific job postings are being routed to specialized opportunity areas like CrunchBoard or 37 Signals job board for targetted exposure. Another explanation is that AJAX and Ruby on Rails jobs may pass more so by word-of-mouth (blogs, forums, referral, specialized board ads), which is plausible considering the startup community in metros can be quite cohesive. Nevertheless, when technologies hit the big time and there exists a shortage of talent at hand, the need percolates to more typical job boards with opportunities posted for pay.

It would be interesting to see how numbers would compare using a vertical job search engine like SimplyHired.

I’ll tell you this, though, I had assumed that AJAX and Ruby on Rails would have already infiltrated more hiring companies’ vocabularies. It seems that is not so handily the case. After all, a search for “web 2.0” on SF Bay Area Craigslist only garnered 108 hits while “blog” scored practically the same at 99 hits. My, things move relatively fast at the vanguard of Boom 2.0!