Kito D. Mann's Blog

Job Stats, Indeed

So, I recently ran across an excellent job search site called Indeed.com. It's one of these hip new vertical search engines, with a focus on jobs, of course. One of Indeed's best features is its Job Trends graph. Type in a search term, and you get a graph of the percentage of matching job posts since March 1st of last year. Indeed can even compare multiple terms on the same graph.

Since I'm pretty heavily immersed in the world of Java web frameworks, I had to run the following query:

((jsf and java) or "javaserver faces" or "java server faces"), ruby on rails, tapestry and java, webwork

(Since JSF also stands for "Joint Strike Fighter", you have to qualify it :-)).

Here are the results:

So, what does this tell us? JSF is doing pretty well, thank you much. And Ruby on Rails? It's growing extremely fast. Note that just about any graph will show a dip at the beginning of the year.

So, what about Struts and JSF?

((jsf and java) or "javaserver faces" or "java server faces"), struts

Inertia is a powerful thing.

And what about all of these other frameworks like Wicket and Rife:

wicket and java, rife and java

It's a different order of magnitude, but it's interesting to see that there are jobs that actually mention Wicket and Rife.

What's important to note is that job postings often contain multiple terms. For example, if you search for rife and java today, the same job shows up from three different sources with the JSP, JSF, Struts, Spring, Tiles, and Rife all included as "Java based technologies".

So, let's compare this to "java", and just pretend that the postings aren't about the coffee or the island:

Note that we're now getting into the single digits -- finally. And what about other languages?

java, c#, c++, perl, visual basic

Let's look at a few languages with smaller percentages:

delphi, ruby, python

It's too bad Borland killed off Delphi (figuratively).

Fun stuff, indeed.

Comments

• Very interesting. Especially the graph on the languages themselves...

  Posted by: johanley on April 05, 2006 at 08:26 AM

• Hah, C#.

  Why Tapestry and JSF out of curiousity?

  Posted by: ilazarte on April 05, 2006 at 08:37 AM

• Well, I'm on the JSF EG, and I'm always following its adoption (I do training, mentoring, etc for JSF too). Tapestry is interesting because JSF is similar to it in lots of ways.

  Posted by: kito75 on April 05, 2006 at 09:25 AM

• If we pull "and java" part out of the search expression, we will see different results for JSF.
  Struts still rules them all and the shape of Struts and JSF graphs is about the same, which means that acceptance of JSF does not seem to correlate with acceptance of Struts.

  Posted by: michael_jouravlev on April 05, 2006 at 05:03 PM

• Missed the part about Joint Strike Fighter. I guess then, that the slump in the graph (see links in my previous post) can be explained by drastic reduce of the airforce ;-)

  Posted by: michael_jouravlev on April 05, 2006 at 05:07 PM

• IOW Rails is growing at about the same rate JSF is, and the rest of the market is pretty much static apart from a statistically insignificant decrease in C++.

  Posted by: jwenting on April 05, 2006 at 10:48 PM

• Hi,

  I did a little refinent to see to how many DISTINCT job offers a percentage of ,say, 0.01 % do actually represent.
  Result : 0.01 % corresponds to roughly 200 distinct job offers.
  So for Java that floats somewhere around 2%, this represents 40.000 offers and for ruby, tapestry and webwork all three on a trend toward the 0.01 % line, this is not insignificant !

  Laurent.

  Posted by: privatelab on April 06, 2006 at 02:00 AM

• Looks like Borland decided for a spin off instead of a sell.

  http://community.borland.com/article/0,1410,33464,00.html

  Posted by: jdavi on April 06, 2006 at 02:28 AM

• Thanks for the link, jdavi. It's nice to know that they're doing a spin-off instead of just waiting until someone buys them. And it's nice to hear that people haven't seen a big drop in Delphi-related product sales.

  I'm sitll going to switch to Eclipse from JBuilder for now. We'll see what Peleteon (the Eclipse-based JBuilder) looks like.

  Posted by: kito75 on April 07, 2006 at 12:34 PM

• Nothing JSF 'round the Detroit area.
  Plenty of Struts though.

  Posted by: phlogistic on April 10, 2006 at 06:34 PM

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