Technology landscape keeps changing and I thought it would be interesting to find out which technical skills are currently in demand. Analyzing job ads is a good way to understand employer side of the job market. Hence I decided to process a segment of job posts. I selected San Francisco Bay Area ads. SF Bay Area is often a trend setter and technologies which become popular here often gain broader adoption. While not being a good proxy for current demand in other regions, Bay Area findings can be viewed as a leading indicator for other geographies.
Here are the key insights:
- Java continues to lead the pack among the development languages followed closely by PHP. Python, Ruby and (surprisingly) C++ come next.
- MySQL is by far the most commonly mentioned relational database. Microsoft SQL Server comes next.
- NoSQL movement is gathering momentum. Hadoop is first on the list of NoSQL databases followed by Cassandra and Redis. To be clear, mentions of SQL outnumber noSQL by a factor of 4 to 1.
- Linux has little contest among the operating systems.
- “social” appears in almost 30% of all ads winning popularity (or hype?) contest. “mobile” appears almost as often.
- Android goes head to head with iPhone, both outnumbering Blackberry by a factor of 5 to 1.
- jQuery is the most commonly mentioned JavaScript framework.
- Spring and Hibernate continue to be the most commonly mentioned Java frameworks.
- subversion outranks git (just) among the source code management systems.
- Selenium is the most frequently mentioned testing tool.
- Drupal is the most often mentioned CMS tool.
- Lucene is a frequently mentioned search engine.
List of the top 50 skills most commonly featured in the job ads is shown below. To view a full list please click here.
- Fig 1. Top 50 Technical Skills in Demand
Methodology:
- Run a term frequency analysis on job posts which appeared on craigslist in the SF Bay Area Internet Engineering category between 1st and 28th of February 2011.
- Count reflects number of posts a term appears in. Multiple mentions of the same term in a single post count as one.
Robert Tekiela
Very interesting Bob! Many questions spring to mind…
1) Do you think craigslist is representative of the bay area job market or does it lean towards Javascript, HTML, CSS, Lynux, PHP, Mysql.
2) The bay area as trend setter is also interesting. How long does it take for the rest of the world to catch up i wonder? Not long I would think
3) Was there any indication of the spread of solution/ product types. SaaS vs desktop applications vs infrastructure solutions like databases.
1) craigslist is pretty popular with hiring managers in the Bay Area but it is possible that it is more reflective of startup needs than enterprise needs
3) Saas is often featured in the ads. Analytical needs are pretty common as well. Desktop applications are rarely mentioned.