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Comment by Throwaway8588 | Hacker News Reader

Except the most employable technology keeps changing every few years.

TypeScript and Go and Rust are the hot ones now and they were barely on the radar a year ago.

Ofc I am inserting them into work projects as I need to learn them.

I definitely wouldn't put Go and Rust on the same basket. Go is definitely boring at this stage (as in, it's proven and widely used - everyone knows its problems etc)... But Rust is still evolving, specially its libraries (if you follow the Rust ecosystem, you'll know what I mean), and I am not aware of it being used for lots of critical projects (though it's popping up everywhere where innovation is not frowned upon).

Rust may be “hot” but there are far more Java jobs than Rust jobs and I highly doubt that’s going to change anytime soon. And indeed Java developers have been highly employed for quite some time.

True, most transitions won’t be permanent but it really sucks to miss the ones that are (Angular and React eating everything).

Agreed. I personally love the "hot" tech, but anyone claiming there are more jobs for those skills than the tried & trued is being disingenuous

I think it depends on where you want to work. If you check out the YC job boards, they want TypeScript, Go, and GraphQL.

I've found in general the places that use Java don't look for a Java developer. Its like they just assume you can pick it up. You might see things like knowledge of OOP, SQL, etc. on the job listing. For example, lots of large companies like Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Twitter, Netflix, etc. have a ton of Java, but their job descriptions don't really mention it.

On the other hand, if a place needs Typescript, or GO, they'll mention it.

I think job descriptions are just marketing materials for developers at a lot of places. Advertising your COBOL just gets you people that want to make more COBOL.

Every job I take, whatever the oldest crappiest technology mentioned in the footnotes is, ends up being 90% of my job.

Sure. If I want to only work with the hot tech then yes, my choices are limited to companies using hot tech. But the reality is that the vast majority of development jobs are using the old standbys.

Yeah, every time I job hunt it’s 10x the enterprise Java opportunities (don’t really want those) versus Ruby, Go, and even native mobile. I don’t have .net in my work history but gather it’s similar for that. Between them they’re a huge percentage of all software dev jobs, writing boring bigco software for bad-for-FAANG-but-good-for-everywhere-else pay.

[edit] oh and the small/startup space is overwhelmingly Node + some front end framework + a bunch of cloud shit they probably don’t need and have mis-used and mis-configured. Take out Node, .net, and Java and hell, the next biggest segment I see is probably low-paid PHP (Wordpress mostly) work followed distantly by Ruby (mostly Rails, ugh), Python, and native mobile. Go, Rust, Haskell, Clojure, all that, rare as can be.

I was curious about the relative time range, when something is considered "hot", and how long it takes to become "boring". Looking up the public release dates..

Listed as "boring":

- Postgres 1986

- Python 1989

- MySQL 1995

- PHP 1995

Relatively "hot":

- Go 2007

- Rust 2010

- TypeScript 2012

- GraphQL 2012

- React 2013

TypeScript is in the top spot for the last 3 years at least.

mainly because typescript at least makes a bunch of warts of dealing with large frontend javascript systems bearable.

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