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The Almighty Buck

Number of Jobs by Programming Language 664

The Viking writes "I was curious about which programming languages are hot with employers, so I did an informal search of several job search engines. The results are interesting (to me, at least). Are these numbers relevant? We can certainly debate whether or not the online job search engines are representative of the actual employment landscape."
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Number of Jobs by Programming Language

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  • Forth (Score:5, Funny)

    by Tri0de ( 182282 ) <dpreynld@pacbell.net> on Saturday January 04, 2003 @07:37PM (#5016513) Journal
    forth use = if unemployed then
  • Slashdotted (Score:5, Informative)

    by cperciva ( 102828 ) on Saturday January 04, 2003 @07:38PM (#5016522) Homepage
    That was quick. Here's the important part (without the table tags):

    Number of Job Listings by Programming Language (January 3, 2003)

    monster.com hotjobs.com dice.com %

    Java 2739 1000* 1957 27.82%
    C++ 2103 1000* 1534 22.65%
    Visual Basic 2070 969 1127 20.35%
    Perl 955 517 577 10.01%
    Javascript 925 455 498 9.17%
    C# 290 235* 183 3.46%
    Ada 384 175 57 3.01%
    Fortran 124 68 48 1.17%
    Scheme 39* 138* 46* 1.09%
    Python 58 43 33 0.65%
    Smalltalk 42 27 32 0.49%
    Lisp 12 4 9 0.12%

    9741 4631 6101

    * hotjobs.com changes a search of "C#" to a search of "C", so I averaged monster and dice.

    * hotjobs.com limits the number of results that a query can return to 1000.

    * Searching on the term "scheme" may result in false positives.
    • by Zeebs ( 577100 ) <.rsdrew. .at. .gmail.com.> on Saturday January 04, 2003 @07:46PM (#5016583)
      So by this we can tell that companies are first wanting to make software that can run everywhere, and third software that will run no where. Interesting indeed. Looking further at these stats we see that 4th is software no one can read after writing. Further still, 3.46%(C#) of software jobs are with companies who probly want "An XML based .net solution for a dynamicly static problem range to achieve syenergy with other units"(I don't know enough buzzwords sorry)
    • Re:Slashdotted (Score:3, Informative)

      by thogard ( 43403 )
      A copy of it is Here [abnormal.com]
    • Re:Slashdotted (Score:5, Informative)

      by Alien54 ( 180860 ) on Saturday January 04, 2003 @08:05PM (#5016678) Journal
      here it is, made all pretty:

      monster.com hotjobs.com dice.com %

      Java 2739 1000 1957 27.82%
      C++ 2103 1000 1534 22.65%
      Visual Basic 2070 969 1127 20.35%
      Perl 955 517 577 10.01%
      Javascript 925 455 498 9.17%
      C# 290 235 183 3.46%
      Ada 384 175 57 3.01%
      Fortran 124 68 48 1.17%
      Scheme 39 138 46 1.09%
      Python 58 43 33 0.65%
      Smalltalk 42 27 32 0.49%
      Lisp 12 4 9 0.12%

      9741 4631 6101

      • Re:Slashdotted (Score:5, Insightful)

        by macrom ( 537566 ) <macrom75@hotmail.com> on Saturday January 04, 2003 @09:22PM (#5017023) Homepage
        This table is completely disheartening if you're a programmer. Monster has over 250 cities/areas you can search (on their US site, that is), making an average of 10 or so jobs for the top 3 languages PER AREA. Yuck. Obviously this won't be the case, but that means some areas will have NO jobs listed for a particular area. With a total of 9741 job listings, that makes a total paper average of ~40 jobs per area. I really hope things start looking better than this.

        Another thing to consider, of the total 20K jobs across all 3 services, how many of those are dupes? Maybe half? More?
        • Re:Slashdotted (Score:3, Insightful)

          by GreyyGuy ( 91753 )
          Disheartening? Maybe if you own part of Monster.com.

          What percentage of all available jobs do you think are posted on the site? I'd bet good money that it is less then 5% and and I'd even feel pretty good on a bet that it is less then 1%.

          I'm prety confidant that there are more then 9741 job openings for programmers in the U.S.
      • FYI, how PHP fares: (Score:5, Informative)

        by Greedo ( 304385 ) on Saturday January 04, 2003 @10:10PM (#5017277) Homepage Journal
        PHP 189 224 31 2.12%

        Which would put it somewhere between Fortran and Ada.
    • by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 04, 2003 @08:27PM (#5016791)
      It's been my experience that Monster (don't know about the others) have a shitload of phoney jobs. Descriptions very generic, no name of company, no specific city, maybe the state. I wouldn't be suprised if the top numbers are inflated just because Monster know what people LOOKING for jobs want.

      Since after all, the whole point of signing up for Monster is to start getting INCREDIBLE amounts of spam. That's what happened to myself and the whole department I was in when we got laid off and we'd all signed up with Monster.

  • Java & ASP (Score:5, Interesting)

    by AppHack ( 622902 ) on Saturday January 04, 2003 @07:39PM (#5016530)
    I work for a computer consulting company which deals with mainly Fortune 500 companies. Java is the most requested language with VB/ASP coming in next. .NET is starting to grow and we anticipate it will continue next year. It seems to be that companies are moving from VB to .NET, not that Java developers are moving to .NET.
    • Re:Java & ASP (Score:5, Insightful)

      by MillionthMonkey ( 240664 ) on Saturday January 04, 2003 @10:20PM (#5017337)
      It seems to be that companies are moving from VB to .NET, not that Java developers are moving to .NET.

      This is not surprising at all and it's what I've been hearing from everybody. Java code is harder to port to .NET than VB- not because Java is conceptually further away from .NET than VB is (it definitely is not) but because it comes from a different vendor (Sun). That makes it harder for MS to write a good porting tool. And people generally chose Java in the first place because they wanted to deploy their stuff on Unix and Linux servers (thus avoiding the vendor lock-in and security issues associated with Windows) while still being free to develop on their Windows laptops- on which the OS choice is a relatively minor project consideration. So there is that.

      The migration path from Java to .NET isn't as trivial as the VB->VB.net migration. J# gives you Java-like syntax. But while syntax seems like a major issue from a beginner's perspective because it's the first thing you have to learn, it's minor compared to library support. You eventually invest more time learning the library than the syntax. The .NET framework is a completely different animal than the Java libraries that you've learned and that your Java programs have been compiled against. And seriously, who would want to use J# for a new project when C# is available?

      VB and VB.net are both MS creations and MS is exerting pressure on the VB community to switch. A VB programmer can practically feel Microsoft's bayonet in his back pushing him down the VB.net migration path. And the porting tools are relatively straightforward for MS to implement, since they control both technologies. So if you program VB (ASP or not) for a living, I think you'd better learn VB.net ASAP.

      If you're a Java programmer, however, it isn't as clear. The best arguments I can think of for learning .NET are:

      -The obvious conceptual similarity to Java means that you've already mastered at least the fundamentals- even if you still have a lot of studying ahead to learn the .NET framework APIs.

      -Java is generally considered inadequate for Windows client applications. (Unless you're developing on Linux using SWT/gcj and cross compiling to generate a Win32 EXE, or you're just compiling against the SWT library using javac and distributing a JAR and DLL. SWT does give your Java program that nice "C++ feel" you always wanted.) This isn't really Java's fault, it's Sun's for providing horrible GUI APIs like Swing/AWT. They make it way too obvious to everybody that you implemented your program with Java. Even though MS marketing still has its head stuck up its ass with this "XML web services" hype, the relative ease of writing simple desktop applications for Windows is a major thing that .NET brings to the table. Actually, that was a nice thing about J++/WFC a few years ago. Having to choose between VB or C++ w/MFC just sucked. (Although there are certainly alternatives: Python/Tkinter, Mozilla/XUL, etc.)

      -Java/J2EE skills (and server programming skills in general) may turn out to be insufficient for paying the rent/mortgage (tech slump, telecommuters from Calcutta, etc.), and not many people (yet) have .NET on their resumes. Although .NET will quickly succumb to this too. But a programmer who knows both is that much more employable than one who knows only Java. Still, and this cannot be emphasized enough, companies want expertise in their field. Knowing a programming language isn't enough- you should also know the gritty details about a specific industry (trucking, pharmaceuticals, retail, online pornography, accountancy, whatever). If you're a nervously employed Java programmer, learning .NET might not help you as much as becoming an expert in whatever your company does- even if that is the boring part of your job. By gaining industry expertise, you help yourself stick out from all the $7/hr people in India who are itching to replace you.

  • by papasui ( 567265 ) on Saturday January 04, 2003 @07:39PM (#5016531) Homepage
    HTML coder who can optomize the website to survive a /. DoS.
  • PHP??? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Reservoir Penguin ( 611789 ) on Saturday January 04, 2003 @07:40PM (#5016534)
    Where is it? PHP has become the defacto standard for developing new websites. There are certainly more PHP jobds then Python ones. It would also be interesting
    to learn about employment oportunities for ppl with older skills like Cobol, Fortran, Assembler.
    • Re:PHP??? (Score:3, Informative)

      Where is it? PHP has become the defacto standard for developing new websites.

      If it has, it surely isn't reflected in available PHP jobs. Last time I looked on Dice there were 50 Java and 25 ASP jobs for every 1 PHP job.

  • At what price? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Qender ( 318699 ) on Saturday January 04, 2003 @07:40PM (#5016536) Homepage Journal
    If only we had some numbers on the average pay for each position, I'de be willing to bet that while Java is real popular, you would get much higher pay for fortran.

    Maybe the price of the programmers is also affecting which language people are hiring for.
  • There's some web site somewhere that has been keeping track of this ever month (week?) over the past few years. (Sorry, I've forgotten the URL, and can't find it with Google.)

    My recent experience is that, for every C++ job, there are between two and two-and-a-half Java jobs.
  • by IIRCAFAIKIANAL ( 572786 ) on Saturday January 04, 2003 @07:41PM (#5016546) Journal
    I question the usefulness of this article - it seems to be a snapshot in time and it doesn't even say when these numbers were collected. It could change dramatically next week.

    It would be much more interesting to see these statistics over a wide range of time. Applicability of the languages would be interesting too (ie/ what types of jobs are looking for what type of developers).

    And it doesn't really detail if some languages tend to cluster (ie/ VB coders tend to have to know x as well).
  • Here's a K5 article in the submission queue that talks about the ethics of slashdotting a site:
    K5 Article [kuro5hin.org]

    And on-topic, I hope that Java/Oracle/Perl/Web/Unix relevant languages are popular. If only I could see the list.

  • Don't forget Ted Shieh's prior work tracking jobs for different programming langauges [liquidmarkets.com]. Its more than a bit out-dated now but anything longitudinal is valuable.
  • by Shivetya ( 243324 ) on Saturday January 04, 2003 @07:43PM (#5016555) Homepage Journal
    Gee, typical.

    Lets broaden the search to languages commoningly used in minis and mainframes. Perhaps the results will be more relevant?
  • Quick Mirror (Score:4, Informative)

    by WrongWay ( 26772 ) on Saturday January 04, 2003 @07:44PM (#5016563)
    heres a quick mirror.... site went down quick....

    http://wrongway.mafia.org/mirrorthis.html
  • what? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by sulli ( 195030 ) on Saturday January 04, 2003 @07:45PM (#5016573) Journal
    no COBOL?
  • by DeadSea ( 69598 ) on Saturday January 04, 2003 @07:48PM (#5016595) Homepage Journal
    Job openings are crammed with requirements that are not necessary. Applicant should have 5 years experience with C#. Applicant should be fluent in Perl, Lisp, Scheme, and Fortran (Yeah I'm sure you'll use all those).

    Furthermore, the searcher omitted C. C is still a very popular language for embedded applications. Everybody I know around here that got hired recently got hired to write C or assembly for hubs, cell phones, TVs or printers. I program almost entirely in C for work but I program in Java for fun.

    These job sites are not the way to go. I'd say a survey of recent CS grads, and people that recently got new jobs would give much different results. Even a slashdot survey saying "Which language do you use most at work?" would be better.

  • by wackybrit ( 321117 ) on Saturday January 04, 2003 @07:48PM (#5016600) Homepage Journal
    It h-has become a disturbing trend in recruitment circles to advertise jobs you don't actually have, in order to mine résumés for potential employer contacts. I know that this is especially common in the UK. I'd bet that less than half of these jobs are real.

    Another worrying trend is that I know people who've responded to job ads, and even gone for interview, and have been told that the job doesn't exist, but that they wanted a healthy batch of résumés on file for when the economy picks up(!!)

    Th-th-the best people to ask are the freelance workers, the people actually here on Slashdot. What languages are most in demand?

    In the main, as a programmer myself, I find that specific, er, languages are not demanded so much. People want solutions, unh, not languages. That said, from the REAL ads I see (I'm in numerous freelance work groups), PHP and MySQL are way way way at the top of the tree, followed by Java.
  • damn... (Score:2, Funny)

    by abelaye ( 533580 )
    ...looks like the site's been slashdotted. i really am curious to know what the numbers are for QBasic.

    bwahahaha!

    that gorilla game kicked ass....wonder if it's been ported?

    -- anthony
  • Java way up there? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by MBCook ( 132727 ) <foobarsoft@foobarsoft.com> on Saturday January 04, 2003 @07:50PM (#5016607) Homepage
    The list looks quite logical to me, except for Java being so high up. Is that right? I would expect it to be 2nd or 3rd, 4th at most, but not 1st. I'd say that "java" serches were including "javascript" and that accounted for it, but if you look at his searches they are "java AND NOT javascript", so unless the search script is majorly borked (a technical term ;) I'm still confused.

    Also, it would be very interesting to see C and C++ both, instead of just C++. I bet there are still tons of jobs for C programers. Also, why not search for "c-sharp" along with "c#", you know, do an OR. That might make a difference. And where is objective C?

    Last but not least, where are some other languages? What about...

    • Assembly/machine code
    • Chef
    • Yacc
    • Basic (not visual, just plain 'ol basic ;)
    • Awk
    • C (not ++, not +, not #, just C)
    • Pascal
    • Eiffel
    • BASH
    • (V)HDL
    • Objective-C
    • (Visual) FoxPro
    • VBScript (Javascript is there, so why not?)
    • Brainfuck (ok, just had to include this. Google says it exists)

    Obviously, most aren't serious. The "real" ommisions are in bold. Please no "FoxPro is important you insensitive clod!" replies.

    • Last but not least, where are some other languages? What about... blah blah, long pointlesss list deleted

      Look, the languages that matter are C++, Java, SQL, FORTRAN and COBOL. I'm sorry the trendy open-source language "de jour" isn't there, and I'm sorry this week's academic favorite isn't either. The fact is, no-one gets paid for their "elite" Haskell or Glish or elisp "skills". Slahsbots can whine about this 'til the sun implodes, it won't make a difference. Learn a corporate standard or, to put it simply, don't bother looking for a job. End of story.
  • by rufusdufus ( 450462 ) on Saturday January 04, 2003 @07:52PM (#5016616)
    There are more openings for gas station attendant than there are for lube-job specialist. There are far fewer jobs available for those who actually build engines, and very rare is the actual automobile design engineers.

    What about pay scale? Who gets paid more, Java developers or Fortran developers?
  • In the UK (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Alien54 ( 180860 ) on Saturday January 04, 2003 @07:53PM (#5016620) Journal
    http://www.jobstats.co.uk [jobstats.co.uk] has some interesting info, more broad based, for the UK.

    The UK graph for Total Demand for Staff is fascinating as well (on the front page, scroll below the fold)

  • by Pinball Wizard ( 161942 ) on Saturday January 04, 2003 @07:54PM (#5016623) Homepage Journal
    Why do specific languages seem to be more important to employers than CS concepts. Someone with a good background in CS should be able to work in a number of languages and be able to pick up new ones quickly.

    Seems to me its more important to know algorithms, data structures, how to implement parsers, how to optimize databases(or knowing when its better to use a custom data structure rather than a database), etc.

    But the job ads almost universally ask for knowledge of the specific language. I've worked with C++, Java, VB, Perl, SQL, XML, Javascript, and others, but in my experience knowing what to do with these languages far outweighs knowing the language itself. Why don't recruiters see this?

    • by Ars-Fartsica ( 166957 ) on Saturday January 04, 2003 @08:42PM (#5016861)
      This isn't a troll. I have found again and again working in industry that it is far more important to be very very good in the language of your code than to have a general grasp of concepts. Chances are your team will not be switching to a new language midstream, or trying to create a sorting routine faster than quicksort. Really, when is the last time you coded up new algorithms of a nontrivial nature? Often knowing the libraries is more important.

      Becoming a language guru will inevitably involve deeper issues anyway, as true language gurus often delve into the implementation tools (compilers, VMs) for their given language.

      "Big thinkers" on the other hand, tend to be just that. Lots of talk and little action. The bottom line is that you are trying to push out code to make money.

      • by g4dget ( 579145 ) on Saturday January 04, 2003 @10:26PM (#5017364)
        I have found again and again working in industry that it is far more important to be very very good in the language of your code than to have a general grasp of concepts. Chances are your team will not be switching to a new language midstream, or trying to create a sorting routine faster than quicksort. Really, when is the last time you coded up new algorithms of a nontrivial nature? Often knowing the libraries is more important.

        And, right there, you have an explanation of why most software teams fail, most commercial software products suck, and so many people keep buying junk development tools: software teams in industry don't have a clue what they are doing. They are just plugging together a bunch of library routines. They don't know whether to use quicksort or mergesort. They are mystified by what a garbage collector does and how to tune code to perform well. They have no clue what happens when they write "new object". TCP/IP might as well be ESP.

        Thank you for demonstrating this point so clearly for us all. PS: Would you mind telling us where you work, as a warning?

      • great way to stay in an ever shrinking box.
        All the best programmers I have ever worked with have one thing in common, the understand the concepts of programming.
        I've seen people pick up and MASTER a new language in a matter of weeks.
        They are ussually the best at getting the job done, as opposed to figuring out how to work with a broken model because they don't know anything about basic concepts.
    • by jerdenn ( 86993 )
      Why do specific languages seem to be more important to employers than CS concepts. Someone with a good background in CS should be able to work in a number of languages and be able to pick up new ones quickly.

      Seems to me its more important to know algorithms, data structures, how to implement parsers, how to optimize databases(or knowing when its better to use a custom data structure rather than a database), etc.


      I get really tired of hearing this one. Joel Spolsky wrote a bit on this [joelonsoftware.com]. As you note yourself, "...in my experience knowing what to do with these languages far outweighs knowing the language itself." However, this doesn't usually consist of optimizing sorting algorithms, but more frequently understanding and knowing the details of vendor APIs (ISAPI, MAPI, SAPI, Win32, .NET, Java class libraries, STL, etc). This is something that is only learned through the pain of time spent using these tools. It's not just the language that is being looked at, but experience with the technologies involved.

      -jerdenn
      • Well, I wasn't necessarily making the point that people should hire people who know only the concepts but not the languages, but that they shouldn't do the reverse(hire people who know the languages but not the concepts) And I still believe its the concepts that are the most important thing as a result of having learned several languages.

        Another Spolsky article [joelonsoftware.com] points out the dangers of say, someone who knows Visual Basic, but doesn't know how to get around its limitations. Yes, you should know the language and the API's you are working with. But you should also know whats going on under the hood.

      • by JaredOfEuropa ( 526365 ) on Saturday January 04, 2003 @10:16PM (#5017315) Journal
        A very insightful remark, and I heartily recommend reading Joel Spolsky's article. Knowing the language is just one thing, knowing the APIs, and for some languages (especially VB and VBA) knowing the limitations and bugs, and how to get around them, is key. It is a common oversight when staffing a team, as well. This is where the difference in productivity of good vs average programmers (read: the Mythical man-month) is measured in factors of 10-100! It is, as Joel describes, the difference between solving a freaky bug in 3 minutes vs. 1 hour.

        What has my main frustration been so far, when I held the post of development team leader? Not having a good mix of juniors and seniors! That, or having seniors who do not wish to allocate time to spend with the junior coders, reviewing their code and coaching them. The result? People are re-inventing the frikkin' wheel over and over again. This is most apparent in relation to APIs and the shortcomings of a language... but it applies to conceptual stuff like data structures and algorithms as well. You generally do not need an all-star team to be succesful, but it's worth gold to have one or two developers that know the ins and outs of the language, the database used, and the APIs.
    • While I agree that a solid understanding of computer science theory is what separates a SW engineer from a hacker, you should not dismiss the important of experience in a particular language.

      Different languages are fundamentally different in terms of capabilities, style and design philosophy. Use any one language for long enough and it will fundamentally change the way you think and work, partly due to the realities of the language, partly due to the unique culture of the developer community that surrounds it. Put a bunch of experienced VB, C and Perl developers in the same room and pretty soon the gulf between them will be apparent.

      Furthermore, when a job ad requires 5 years proficiency in C++ on Windows, the implication is that you would be intimately familiar with MFC and Win32 API. It takes a lot of experience to truly harness these beasts effectively, not least because they are so imperfect and unruly! In the real world, developers don't spend all their time implementing the bubble-sort routines they learned in a CS course.

      The "language matters much less than theory" refrain is only true for junior positions where nobody knows anything anyway.
    • by sql*kitten ( 1359 ) on Saturday January 04, 2003 @09:21PM (#5017016)
      Seems to me its more important to know algorithms, data structures, how to implement parsers, how to optimize databases(or knowing when its better to use a custom data structure rather than a database), etc.

      Problem is, no CS graduates do know this. Sure, they know how to implement a compiler from scratch in 68000 assembly language, but none of them know how to exploit SUNPro or VC++ features properly. Loads of them know about parsers, none of them know how to code to make things easy for a debugger. Loads of them know about fancy research OO databases, none of them know how to design an RDBMS.

      But the job ads almost universally ask for knowledge of the specific language. I've worked with C++, Java, VB, Perl, SQL, XML, Javascript, and others, but in my experience knowing what to do with these languages far outweighs knowing the language itself. Why don't recruiters see this?

      Speaking from experience, I always try to hire physics, engineering or philosophy graduates for programming positions. CS graduates are worse than useless because before you can deploy them on a project you have to make them unlearn all the crap their professors (who haven't been in industry for 25 years) have taught them.
      • Total BS... (Score:4, Insightful)

        by bubbha ( 61990 ) on Sunday January 05, 2003 @01:45AM (#5018238) Homepage
        Problem is, no CS graduates do know this.

        Absolute hogwash. I've been in this business for 20 years and interviewed developers for probably 100 openings. When I see no formal computer science education I put that resume on the bottom of the pile. Not all entry-level CS majors are ready to hit the ground running but at least you know that they have been exposed to a broad range of programming and software engineering topics. And in my experience, it's the physics and EE folks that I have had the most problems with.

        I believe the biggest problem in our industry today is bad IS management. In my experience, IS managers without formal CS education are the reason that IS fails to meet business expectations. And I sense a lot of 'tude from the poster...probably does not have a CS degree and wants to get back at those who do.
    • by Anonymous Brave Guy ( 457657 ) on Saturday January 04, 2003 @09:41PM (#5017102)
      Why do specific languages seem to be more important to employers than CS concepts. Someone with a good background in CS should be able to work in a number of languages and be able to pick up new ones quickly.

      This is a common argument, and there is obviously some element of truth to it, but it's still flawed for two big reasons.

      1. You can pick up the basics of new languages quickly. Learning a serious language well, including a grasp of its idioms and at least an overview of the major library components, takes a few months, or longer if you don't have good supervision/training.
      2. It's relatively easy to transfer from one language to another where they follow the same paradigms (procedural, OO, functional, whatever) but learning a whole new paradigm also takes months.

      If you think you can take a Java programmer, even one with several years of experience, and get him to program industrial strength C++ with a good book and a couple of weeks of on-the-job practice, I think you're mistaken. He'll write code that compiles, but it won't use the RAII idiom to avoid resource leaks, base classes won't have empty virtual destructors, large class hierarchies won't be divided into a sensible arrangement of files resulting in hideous dependencies at build times, he'll pass random boolean parameters to functions where enumerations are appropriate, etc.

      Similarly, you try taking a guy who's used to C and getting him to write functional code using high-level functions, currying and lazy evaluation. The mindset just isn't there, and takes time to develop, not a copy of Learn This Fab Language In 30 Seconds.

      The experience issue just isn't as straightforward as some (mostly theoretical, with a heavy CS background) people make out. Experience with general programming technique is very important, but experience with the actual tools still counts for a lot, too.

      And before anyone flames, be aware that I'm a professional developer with experience using several diverse languages, and a CS qualification from a well-regarded university, so I don't have any axe to grind against CS here.

  • by Mike McTernan ( 260224 ) on Saturday January 04, 2003 @07:59PM (#5016650)

    The results show the demand for people with different language skills, but gives little insight into the type of jobs that are available, or the languges that they use.

    Much more interesting would be a breakdown of the different tech sectors vs languages used, although I'm guessing that most of it would be fairly obvious (Web stuff using mainly php and perl, C for embedded etc...)

    From the question, it sounds like The Viking is trying to work out which language will give him the most job opportunies. My advice would be to select at least a couple of tech sectors to refine the search and then re-generate the stats. It might be that there are lots of very similar opportunities for VB programmers which The Viking would find to be boring as shit. Better to find a language with the maximal spread across different job types :)

  • C# is HOT (Score:3, Insightful)

    by rodac ( 580415 ) on Saturday January 04, 2003 @08:09PM (#5016707) Homepage
    C# is all the hype now and it is hot.

    Similar to a few months after JAVA was released,
    you can get a GOOD job according to the ads that want people with 8-10years experience with C#

    If you can also say something like "I program XML in C#" then you are all set.

    On a different point, the downturn in IT industry is good. This just means that hopefully only skilled people can work there and no more ex-busdrivers hacking webpages.
  • Delphi (Score:3, Informative)

    by UGG ( 155703 ) on Saturday January 04, 2003 @08:17PM (#5016748)
    HotJobs 64
    Monster 158
    Dice 58

    Which puts Delphi around the 1-2% range so it deserves to be counted.

    How useful is a list for one day anyway, especially one just after the holidays? Showing how the trends change over a year would be more interesting.
  • by Anand_S ( 638598 ) on Saturday January 04, 2003 @08:38PM (#5016841)
    I guess I should drop Turtle Graphics/Logo from my resume.
  • COBOL (Score:4, Interesting)

    by wideBlueSkies ( 618979 ) on Saturday January 04, 2003 @09:01PM (#5016934) Journal
    Why no COBOL?

    I know that it's not a popular language amongst younger programmers. But there are millions and millions of lines of COBOL code running big companies mission critical applications. Trading systems, ledger, customer statements etc.

    A lot of the old developers are going to be retiring in the next decade. But the companies are still around, and will still need to run their books every night. COBOL programmers are going to be making a LOT of money soon.

    I'm a distributed guy now, but I still do a couple of mainframe projects a year to keep my skills sharp. It's a link to my past, and an investment in my future.

    Say what you will about mid range/high end hardware performance these days. Nothing is faster for business processing than good ol' IBM 390 systems (The mainframe for you youngins). And it's not going away. As server level hardware gets faster, the mainframe hardware does the same. It's an older tech, but it's still advancing.

    • Re:COBOL (Score:3, Funny)

      by sql*kitten ( 1359 )
      A lot of the old developers are going to be retiring in the next decade. But the companies are still around, and will still need to run their books every night. COBOL programmers are going to be making a LOT of money soon.

      Because no COBOL programmer worth his/her salt would bother with an online job board. It's all word-of-mouth between people whose contacts in the industry stretch back 20-30 years. Make friends with the old geezers... the beers you buy them are worth their weight in gold.
  • by Above ( 100351 ) on Saturday January 04, 2003 @09:13PM (#5016990)

    On the surface this may look like which programming languages are popular, but that's not the case. Rather this a measure of programming languages where demand exceeds the supply of programmers. For all we know there are a billion Algol programmers in the world, and exactly the same number of jobs, so there are no openings.

    The data is still interesting, and since when demand exceed supply the price rises (hey, I took economics) this might be useful for people wishing to maximize their income. I wouldn't use it to decide the most popular languages. Total jobs in a language (filled and unfilled), or total lines of code produced each year would be better measures.

    Anyone have those numbers?

  • PL/SQL? (Score:4, Informative)

    by Mannerism ( 188292 ) <keith-slashdotNO@SPAMspotsoftware.com> on Saturday January 04, 2003 @09:14PM (#5016992)
    We hates it, nasty PL/SQL, but master makes us use it...

    699 on monster
    581 on dice

    Looks like we're not alone.
  • by TekPolitik ( 147802 ) on Saturday January 04, 2003 @09:24PM (#5017033) Journal

    To decide what the best prospects for employment are you need to look at not only how many jobs there are using a particular language, but how many applicants there are for those positions. There's far more Java programmers on the market than anythings else, so that as an employer of people who write in C++, and people who write in Java, I find I can fill the Java position far more quickly.

    Also, a lot of the application space covered by Java competes with the application space covered by Visual Basic rather than that covered by C or C++. That is, Java is being used for pretty end-user stuff, particularly if it's web based or an in-house project, whereas you use C or C++ for applications that require high performance (and these applications do still exist), and for shrink-wrapped software deloyed widely. There is some overlap, and some other things I haven't taken into account here.

    Java is not necessarily used for platform independence. In fact even remaining on the same platform you have to special case things for different versions of the JVM, unless you have control of that, which you probably don't.

    So, the questions are:

    1. What type of software do you want to develop? If a specific type, target the language that is dominant for that type of software
    2. If your primary concern is immediate employability, how many jobs are open for the languages you're considering, and how many applicants are there for those jobs? Choose the one that has the best ratio.
  • How's he counting? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by CaptainCarrot ( 84625 ) on Saturday January 04, 2003 @09:24PM (#5017036)
    I find it very surprising that there are no jobs listed at all for C programmers. Is he perhaps lumping C and C++ into one category?
  • Delphi!?!? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by cronostitan ( 573676 ) on Saturday January 04, 2003 @09:40PM (#5017090)
    I really miss Delphi/Pascal/Kylix !?!?!? This list is far from complete since these languages are used a lot in rapid development....
  • by ellem ( 147712 ) <ellem52@g3.14159mail.com minus pi> on Saturday January 04, 2003 @10:04PM (#5017243) Homepage Journal
    The people posting the jobs are insane, incompentent, idiotic or all of the above.

    Favorite post:

    Must have Exchange 2000 on Solaris 8.
  • by Gary Franczyk ( 7387 ) on Saturday January 04, 2003 @10:19PM (#5017335)
    Java is just the buzzword that almost all IT managers think that their applicants should have.

    I have seen dozens of job postings for positions like System Administrator and Database Administrator that had NOTHING to do with Java, and yet, somehow, Java finds its way onto the list of requirements. I've seen several of my managers post job openings requesting Java experience while our department did absolutely no Java work whatsoever.
  • by edashofy ( 265252 ) on Saturday January 04, 2003 @11:08PM (#5017553)
    I was once given some code by a guy who had been writing code since far before my own birth and was learning Java. In there, I found a table:

    public static final int X_00 = 0;
    public static final int X_01 = 1;
    ...
    public static final int X_FF = 255;

    I asked him what was up with that. His reply? "Java doesn't have hex support built in." My reply: "Uhm, yeah it does. Always did, in fact." His reply: "Oh, well, I never found it."

    Knowledge of the language and its libraries are extremely important.

  • by DunbarTheInept ( 764 ) on Sunday January 05, 2003 @07:18AM (#5019081) Homepage
    Typically the languages mentioned in the ad for a position are a superset of the languages you actually use in the job. There are several reasons I can think of for why this is done:
    1. The employer thinks they MIGHT begin using some of those other languages in the future and wants someone who could transition if that happened.
    2. The employer is thinking that the more languages the programer knows, the more likely it is that the programmer is competent in general, so listing many languages gets you better applicants (or so the employer thinks).
    3. The employer is trying to woo applicants by putting the latest trendy language buzzwords into the job description regardless of what the job really entails.
    4. ***Big one*** The employer is playing to the one-upmanship resume inflation game, asking for a lot of unreasonable things because the applicant will probably list a lot of unreasonable things as experience. Applicants eggagerate their qualifications and apply to jobs that they aren't really up to, so if you inflate the job requirements to compensate, you get applicants that are right at the level you wanted. But then the applicants exaggerate further, so the employees exaggerate further, and so on and so forth until eventually employers will be asking for N years of experience with language Foo, where N is about three times the typical human lifespan, and Foo is a language first implemented last year.

    That last one bothers me a lot. It means you *have to* become part of the problem in order to get noticed. Being honest on your resume means not getting any calls. Employers assume you are exaggerating whether you are or not, so if you don't exaggerate they picture you being a lot less qualified than you are. At least that's the way it seemed the last time I was looking to change jobs, which admittedly was over six years ago so things may have changed.

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