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Comment by soneca | Hacker News Reader

I am suspicious of that mirrored graph between Java and JavaScript. I see no real world reason for they behave in such symmetrical and substituting way month over month. Are you sure there is not a parsing error when analyzing those two languages?

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A lot of HR people still don't know the difference in 2022, it's quite common to see job ads listed as Java/Javascript, then you only find out when talking to them they specifically mean one or the other.

Yeah or "C/C++" (and then sometimes finding out its actually a C# job).

Or "fluent in Java, Python, C/C++, fortran" and then find out it is an excel spreadsheet with occasional macro job

This pisses me off the most because it makes decent searching/filtering impossible.

Many job ads seem to do things like confuse C and C++ (and then you read the ad further and find its a C# project), or just slap a long list of technologies, I won't be surprised if these ads confuse Java and JavaScript too and list them together.

Since those are percentages it could simply mean that a great amount of Java positions opened up in that period, stealing percent points from other categories. This explains the symmetry, but not the causes.

May it be a huge amount of positions have been incorrectly labeled for Java instead of JavaScript (you know… Ham / Hamster) and then corrected a month later?

Or the absolute number of Java listings is pretty much constant (permanent, big corps that just leave listings online all the time), and as smaller web companies add JS listings, and remove JS listings, that fluctuation makes the Java percentage move in inversion to the more volatile JS listings.

yeah, I saw many offers with "java script", so it seems like many Java jobs could in fact be JavaScript

Couldn't this also be due to personalization? Algorithms could be showing more of one language and consequently less of another.

I read this as javascript possibly being the language of recent growth: It's relatively young, very much en vogue, and so new startups are likely to use it disproportionally (because the guys who have been around for a while will not just switch their millions of lines of code to js because it's now become a thing).

But startups are also more likely to falter quickly in a recession than the old guard. And that's where java (or c#) is overrepresented.

I thought the same! :-)

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