Wannabe

I found myself a bit curious as to what server side scripting languages people are using out there.  After mulling around google I found a few suggestions to do a job search to get an idea of the demand for different scripting languages.  I came across this post from August 25, 2008 and thought I would repeat the analysis by searching for “Ruby on Rails”, “PHP”, “ASP.NET” in the same job sites as the previous blogger.  These are all searched for in “San Francisco, CA” like the original post.

I was pretty surprised to see the dramatic difference in Hot Jobs than from the other two.  I thought it might have something to do with the cost of using the job site itself, so I decided to throw in Craigslist – which gave similar results(I did have to remove the “.” on craigslist – a bug?).  So maybe PHP employers are “cheaping out”  on their recruitment services.

PHP still comes out ahead *whew*, but it seems ruby is on the rise.  What is most distressing though is that the total amount of job listings is almost half of what it was two years ago!  A little scary.

ADDITION: JULY 1, 2011

Alright, it’s a year later and I’m back again to make the same comparison!   However, since last year Yahoo! Hot Jobs has gone out of business   That makes me pretty darn happy I decided to add in Craigslist last year, and now I’m also adding in the technology focused job site “Dice” in case another of the other jobs listing sites goes under for next year’s comparison.

This year I calculated the percentages for the totals to make the data a little easier to assess, and I used “ASP NET” for Craigslist like last year.  Monster is the only site that has RoR in the lead. It’s distressing, but according to this data, it looks like PHP has slowly been loosing ground at a steady pace of 1% a year.  RoR came up a lot between ’08-’10, but has lost a little ground this year.  ASP.NET has recovered a bit since last year, but still isn’t back to where it was in ’08.  Mashable dubbed 2011 as the year of Ruby, but these numbers arn’t too convincing.  I’d rather see PHP gaining ground, but it’s still strong at 66%.

As far as the total number of jobs goes – things are looking up since last year. Career builder and Craigslist both have more job listings then they did last year.  Dice and Craigslist have a lot more listings then the others, but I think they just use a larger search radius. One interesting point is that Monster is the only site to have less listings from last year, though I feel it may be more due to Monster rather than a reflection of the job market.  Monster may also deal more with higher paying jobs, which could be why their numbers are so different then the other sites.  These numbers might also be a reflection that, while there are less of positions available, RoR has a higher pay grade than PHP.  Which isn’t too much of a stretch considering that lack of support for RoR and that RoR has a steeper learning curve than PHP.