If You Want To Code From Home, Learn JavaScript 152
itwbennett writes "Earlier this month, remote-work cheerleader and Basecamp developer 37signals launched a job board called WeWorkRemotely.com that is, you guessed it, devoted to telecommuting jobs. At present there are only a couple hundred jobs listed on the site, so you'll still have to use other job boards as well. (Dice, SimplyHired, and Craigslist all have filters for finding remote working jobs.) But here's another thing that will help you land a work-from-home gig: Learn JavaScript. ITworld's Phil Johnson looked at a number of job postings for software developers open to people wanting to work remotely and then compared the frequency with which a number of popular programming languages and technologies were mentioned by the postings to determine the top tech skills for telecommuting jobs. Not surprisingly, the ubiquitous JavaScript topped the list, being mentioned in just over 20% of these listings. Other languages and tools used for the web are high up the list as well: jQuery at #3 (12.5%), PHP at #5 (9.5%) in the fifth spot, iOS at #8 (5.6%)."
Absolutely crap methodology (Score:5, Informative)
He took a list of 10 languages, added another list of languages, then looked for those ...
Ie, there could well be other languages that he didn't look for that are more in demand than the one he looked for.
I don't know exactly how he handled only 'programmer' jobs for Dice.com ... but they've got 31 jobs that match 'perl'. Add that to the 3 from the other site, and we're looking at 4.4% (behind Python, above, C++, VB, TSQL, etc.
Of course, this is always going to be a point-in-time study. (I found 63 'Ruby' jobs (out of 745), which would put it at 8.4%, above his 7.2%) You really need to look at long-term trends. (and you need to make sure to not count the same jobs from week after week ... although the fact that they can't find someone to fill a job might be a sign that's skill's in more demand, but it doesn't necessarily mean it's good to learn that language if employability is your goal)
The really sad thing is that ASP is above Python (33+10=5.8%), and SQL's not on his list but mentioned in 27.8% (155+52) of the jobs. And Postgres (which he didn't check) has more mentions than Hadoop (which he did)
Re:Or properly learn C++, move to DC (Score:5, Informative)
For comparison, CNN's site has a cost of living calculator [cnn.com], and the US census site has several pages about cost of living [census.gov] worth looking at.