Top programming languages from jobs advertised on Twitter | Hacker News Reader

Top programming languages from jobs advertised on Twitter

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42 pointsrobinwarren47 comments

One thing to consider is that the number of job postings may correlate negatively with project size. The strong representation of Objective C and Android may reflect that the life cycle for mobile applications is a lot shorter than for many other kinds of applications.

very intersting point. It'll be interesting perhaps to try and test that by correlating freelance, contract, fulltime with certain skills. Something I'll add to the list for future investigations.

Thanks.

Interesting...

Two Things:

1) I'm surprised by how low C# is. Actually, maybe this is more of a not-advertised-on-twitter thing rather than the popularity of the language, which makes the difference interesting.

2) Die flash Die!

it'll be interesting to see the fate of flash over the coming months I think

Well you can see the interest in Flex is waning since middle 2009 http://www.google.com/insights/search/#cat=0-5&q=flex%2C... . Compare that with JQuery : http://www.google.com/insights/search/#cat=0-5&q=flex%2C...

I read that YouTube, one of Flash's last big supporters, is working hard on an HTML5 video viewer

I thought YouTube already supported HTML5 players? I remember trying something, but perhaps it is in beta.

You can join their HTML5 player trial here: http://www.youtube.com/html5

Thanks!

YouTube has had HTML5 video for a while. I actually like the HTML5 viewer more than their flash one. You can start using it at http://www.youtube.com/html5.

The one thing they don't have are ads for the HTML5 videos, so things like music still have to be viewed with flash.

A big part of me has to ask: Why do we care? Any software engineer worth his/her weight should be able to pick up any language they need on they fly. A posting asking for a specific language is either catering to HR search terms or is indicative of the narrow mindedness of the managers writing it.

I personally care significantly more about the actual projects involved and in what part(s) of the project's life cycle the role encompasses. Even if it's a position coming into a well-established project (and is therefore firmly rooted in N language(s)), I don't care: I'll pick up whatever needs to be picked up when the job starts.

Sure, checking out today's most popular languages is fun and has it's own appeal, but aren't there better data sources?

If you lump Android into the Java category it makes the top of the list. Unless Android is a new language I haven't heard of.

yeah... I figured it did represent something distinct in peoples hiring intentions so was worth splitting out. From a straight language POV you'd be right but I think it would miss some interesting subtelty in the stats. Also, from talking to people hiring android devs I know they'd rather they had adnroid development experience, not just any old java experience.

Maybe I should put a few different versions together to allow for a straight language shoot out and then also capture some of the other interesting comparrisons separately.

Object C is a language that isn't specific to iOS development, too.

I'd be curious what % of Obj-c work done these days is iOS vs straight mac development vs other.

That's a good point, but I think it's segmented by skill-set, and Android development is seen as a significant subset perhaps.

True in other Java spheres as well. Someone writing servlets will have almost nothing in common, knowledge-wise, with someone writing Android apps. And then you have EJB, which is something else entirely.

It's like Java is English, and the job ads are for working on fantasy, sci-fi, and an encyclopedia. You have to know it, but it's a tiny fraction of what you need to know.

Have any idea why PHP is still the most widely used web app development language?

Interesting list, thanks for sharing.

no idea I'm afraid, a whole lot of stufff is built in it. Glad you find it interesting, I'll be updating the stats each month so maybe we can see if PHP is on a down trend or just holding the top spot solidly.

PHP is one of the most accessible languages. If you are a web hosting service then you almost always support PHP - it's usually installed by a control panel, with loads of extras compiled into it. So, it's good if you're looking for a cheap hosting deal.

Magazines and tutorials teach the language by default. There's loads of competing free products to easily set up a development environment on most platforms. Which means lots of people who can build with it, and therefore, lower salaries.

Good point about lower salaries. More access does lead to lower skilled developers being able to do more with it.

I think PHP's popularity has a lot to do with WordPress's popularity. For example, near half of the top 10k websites use it: http://www.wptavern.com/wordpress-powering-practically-half-...

Depending on the definition of "job", there might be many PHP jobs out there because WordPress gigs are typically shortlived deliverables (plugins, installs, etc.).

I actually stripped wordpress out as a skillset as I wasn't 100% certain I could match it to PHP programming skills. It did crop up a fair amount though, along with drupal and there's certainly a lot of those jobs about.

Language accessibility is certainly the big driver but another, maybe equally important factor is availability. I do a fair bit of work for my brother who deals with low-end hosted accounts. All of these servers have PHP available where it would be impossible to get a Java installation or any other complex deployment solution in. PHP is everywhere.

I would def have to say interesting because we are building off the same very concept. Not a jobs list, but what we call a social newspaper for the city. In fact, just submitted a thread myself, here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3295555

I had seen you post earlier when it made the top of HN, you are def doing some interesting work here.

Interesting to see both PHP continued dominance. It was also surprising to see how far down the list Python happened to be.Even though jobs aren't always determined by developers I expected the list to be a little more similar to this one:

https://github.com/languages

github is a closed bubble of developer's personal projects, not an accurate gauge of an industry looking for developers. apples/oranges imho.

How much of development is starting a new project from scratch vs. maintenance? Millions of apps are out there written in PHP, and they all need to be maintained.

Do the ruby and python categories account for postings that are just advertising for rails or django developers without the use of ruby or python in the tweet?

yep, I map django to python and RoR or rails to ruby. With care taken not to double count in a single tweet of course.

Would like to see this graph intersected the the size of the project and or pay-scale/budget for the salary/project. Let's not forget, quantity != quality.

not sure if I've got the data to work that out right now, but will consider it in future if I can work it out. Cheers, Robin.

This would be a very nifty graph. If SQL = MSSQL/Oracle, then the payscale would probably ranking it higher than the 3 languages above it. (I'm just taking into account all the recuiter emails that Ive seen over the last year...)

I'm curious: Most of the listings I see on JobsTractor are rather vague "This company is hiring a developer"-type things, and about 30% aren't actual job listings but links to tech-related articles. Are you actually following the links and tagging them based on their content? If so, that would probably be useful to incorporate into the UI.

I'm not following links at the moment, just pulling data out of the tweets themselves. I've had some success filterring spam out but intend to imropve that further as soon as I get a chance. There are some more fairly simple things I can do, but there's probably a limit to how good I can make that. As for the vagueness, I think that's in part down to the 140 char restriction, people choose to put the tweet out and hope people will click through to find out more. Hopefully if I start scraping the additional data it'll not turn the results upside down but just level most of them up.

Oh, I didn't mean that as a criticism. I understand why they're vague and all that — I'm just surprised you were able to get this kind of information and curious how you went about it, and thought it might be worth integrating into the front-end if it was anything fancy.

no problem, didn't assume it was criticism :)

I'm planing to start tagging each tweet with keywords, which in itself may help sift some spam out. But as you pointed out a number of them are very vague which is why I've held of allowing people to filter results for fear of them missing some which may be relevant to them. I'll probably just suggest a wider result set or search for them as appropriate.

So you can actually find out the trend of similar results from craigslist data here : http://craigtrend.com/#!/php/java/objective/sql/ruby/android...

Just press enter on the search to see the results graphed.

very intersting, thanks. That'll be good to compare against for future updates to the stats.

No problem. I built that in a day or two over the thanksgiving break. I'm glad people are finding it helpful.

Just for quick comparison, here are the results from November 2011:

  Java (875)
  Javascript (787)
  SQL (687)
  Python (546)
  PHP (443)
  Ruby (395)
  Android (306)
  Objective-C (139)

Javascript and Python are higher (than Twitter listings). PHP and Objective-C are lower.

Does anybody know what this list would look like for Facebook? I know they still use PHP files but I've been told they use their own mutant version of PHP that compiles into other languages, or something to that effect.

OPs link is not jobs advertised by twitter but advertised on twitter.

I dont think facebook is used much for advertising jobs.

Ah, my misunderstanding :P

I'm working on search modifiers like that for craigtrend. I'll keep you posted when they are up. :)

Looking forward to it, but I don't think Facebook would post job listings on Craigslist

I'm guessing that where you post has a lot to do with what gets posted, for example my guess would be that if you could do this on IRC you'd get C and Perl higher up.

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