Programming Language Job Trends Part February 2014

Programming Language Job Trends 2014

on February 20th, 2014 | Filed in: CareerYes, it is job trends time again! I am changing the list of languages a bit because I wanted to start including more languages. So, we are now up to 3 different posts just for languages. In Part 1, we look at Java, C++, C#, Objective C, and Visual Basic. I have decided to drop the “Traditional” label as most languages are used in various different scenarios, and traditional vs web was just a bad representation. Part 2 (PHP, Python, JavaScript, Ruby, and PERL) and Part 3 (Erlang, Groovy, Scala, Lisp, and Clojure) will be posted in the next few days as well. 

So, you can see that much of this graph has a very negative trend over the past two years. Java has obviously been in a fairly steady decline since 2012. C++ and C# are now following the same trend, which is heading downward as well. Oddly, Visual Basic has stayed constant. Objective C was rising into 2013 but has a slight decline towards the end of the year. I am surprised by the Java decline given the rise of the Android platform, but I am guessing that the job postings are talking more about Android itself than Java. The fact that Objective C is not rising is somewhat surprising but likely has to do with the breadth of the industry. There are probably more jobs and iOS development maintains a certain percentage of them.

Now, let’s look at SimplyHired’s short term trends:

SimplyHired’s data continues to be somewhat outdated, at over 6 months old, so we are not really looking at current trends. Most of the trends look flat for the last six months with a slight uptick in July or August. Overall, the trends do not really tell us much of interest in the short term. I will continue to review the SimplyHired data to ensure it provides value, but if it continues to lag too much, it may not be useful.

Finally, here is a review of the relative scaling from Indeed, which provides an interesting perspective on relative job growth:

Objective C has been dominating the relative growth for a few years now, but you can see that it started to decline a bit in 2013. It is difficult for an established language to continue 500% growth for several years, but the Objective C growth may finally be slowing down. Only C# is showing positive growth, although it is minimal. Visual Basic, Java and C++ are all showing negative trends at the end of 2013.