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Comment by liquidcool | Hacker News Reader

Since I started dabbling in recruiting, I've been doing rough tracking of job data for a number of technologies/stacks, broken down by region (LA, OC, and SV). When I checked outstanding jobs earlier this month, these were the rankings (most to least jobs):

SV: PHP, Java EE, Node.js, RoR, Spring/Hibernate, C#/.NET, Python/Django, Scala/Play, Groovy/Grails

LA: PHP, C#/.NET, Java EE, RoR, Spring/Hibernate, Node.js, Python/Django, Scala/Play, Groovy/Grails

OC: C#/.NET, PHP, Java EE, Spring/Hibernate, Node.js, RoR, Groovy/Grails, Python/Django, Scala/Play

And numbers show that SV has 4-5x jobs of LA, which has 2x jobs of OC. This is all to say that research is critical if you're choosing a technology based on getting a job locally.

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Considering all the bad mouthing that goes on, I'm surprised to see PHP at #1 in SV and LA.

Just proves that you need to ignore the haters and go with the language that works for you/your situation.

*have used PHP for the last 7 years but now switching over to Python/Flask.

I should probably narrow the query a bit (I'm using a job board aggregator), but there are a number of startups built on PHP, most notably Facebook. Yahoo uses it in places, and don't forget all the companies who need a WordPress, Magento, Drupal, etc. developer. These technologies run multi-million dollar businesses. And after years of consulting, I can tell you business owners don't care what's under the hood if it solves their problem with good ROI.

Where you checked the outstanding jobs matters as well - something like Monster.com likely has a different group of companies using it that other sources.

Also, don't FB and Google (and other firms) mostly have their own recruiters?

I search job board aggregators and do my level best to filter out agency recruiters. I don't trust the exact job numbers, of course, but I trust the rankings because the deltas are large enough.

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Do you have any insights what languages have the best jobs to number of developers ratio?

I always see lots of Java or PHP jobs, but I know there are tons of devs in those languages as well.

(And what / where is OC? I assume SV is Silicon Valley, LA - is Los Angles, is that a tech hub in the US?)

Getting the ratio of developers to jobs is tricky. I could check LinkedIn or a resume database, but they lag a bit since most only update them before job hunting. Still, probably not a horrible metric.

Another metric is salary. Also imperfect data, but right now the stand out is Java/Spring/Hibernate. Not too surprising as an "enterprise" technology, and probably also includes more people with degrees than frequently self-taught language like (say) PHP.

It's important to note that it's not the technology that gets you the job, but how well you stand out from the other candidates.

Sorry, it's California-centric since I'm in LA; OC is Orange County, one county south. OC is not a tech hub, per se, but has a lot of industry, and is home to Blizzard, Oculus, and a number billion dollar companies that naturally write a lot of software. If you were asking if LA is a tech hub, I'll say yes. It's growing, and Southern California graduates more engineers than any other metro area in the US, so it's attracting more tech companies. Google has offices in LA and OC, and just bought 12 acres for a new campus.

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