Planet Geek!: Most marketable tech skills?

September 19, 2005

Most marketable tech skills?

So while working with some other geeks this afternoon, the subject of Ruby on Rails came up. I've heard good things about it, but I voiced my skepticism about shelving my current workcycle (in Java) and learning Yet Another Language. I mean, how many folks can be looking for Ruby programmers nowadays?

Well. Gee. How many are looking? Good question!

So off to Dice, one of the better job / tech search boards out there, and I did a little keyword searching. The summary of what I found isn't all that surprising, but still interesting...

Sampling 75,117 entries...

Keyword... Number of matches...
Java: 12210
C: 8235
C++: 6828
Basic: 6369
Perl: 3718
C#: 3516
Cobol: 1177
PHP: 639
Python: 383
awk: 138
REXX: 72
Ruby: 40
Pascal: 27
Lisp: 24

Interesting. How about platforms?

Keyword... Number of matches...
Windows: 10753
Unix: 11474
Linux: 4859
Mac: 461
VMS: 275

So apparently being a Java programmer on Windows is the way to go :)

Posted by dbs at September 19, 2005 2:11 PM

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Comments

Another way to think of it is that Java on Windows is the most crowded (and competitive) pool.

Posted by: Ringel at September 19, 2005 2:25 PM

re: crowded comment

I don't agree with that. This is the number of job openings. Not how many jobs there are, these are positions that are waiting to be filled. So if you're a windows java programmer, you have ZILLIONS of opportunities for jobs.

Posted by: dbs at September 19, 2005 2:35 PM

Hey, where is Prolog on that list??!

What are there only 12 of us left? 11?

Posted by: sandro hawke at September 19, 2005 5:17 PM

Um, am I doing the math wrong? I see way more Linux/Unix jobs there than Windows jobs. (I think it's fair to combine them -- they are maybe more similar than various versions of windows.)

Posted by: sandro hawke at September 19, 2005 5:19 PM

Um...
Keyword... Number of matches...
Windows: 10753
Unix: 11474
Linux: 4859

That looks like 50% more hits for *ix than for windows to me.. What am I missing?

Posted by: JB Segal at September 19, 2005 5:20 PM

The reason I say they didn't toal up was because this was a keyword match in their database. I'm going to assume that Linux and Unix overlap. I seperated them out because I was curious "Of the Unix ones, which ones are specifying Linux in particular".

Posted by: dbs at September 19, 2005 6:22 PM

awwww where's fortran?

yea if you wanna hit the big demand pool windoze/java is the way to go, also keep in mind that you're then competing with a larger pool of developers since those are the de facto standards right now. On the other hand being in a smaller pool of developers, like ruby, should (I don't really know) increase your job offers for those applied to, and offer more compensation, since there are generally less ruby developer's services andit is a more specialized portion of the market.

Of course how the hell do I know. I'm seeking employment as well.

Posted by: Dan at October 13, 2005 12:52 AM