Job Trends Via Twitter Activity
Written by Sue Gee   
Friday, 08 February 2013

How would you go about looking for your next programming job? Jobs Tractor suggests searching Twitter and results for 2012 show that PHP and Java have most vacancies.

The jobs marketplace has always been a diverse landscape. If you want to avoid job agencies and have already tried the many online job boards then Jobs Tractor provides another option. Built by Robin Warren it searches Twitter for developer jobs and presents visitors with vacancies that are local to them, aiming to provide "real people with real vacancies not agencies and not the jobs boards you already know".

 

Jobs Tractor currently has about 4000 jobs a week to display. About four times as many again are discarded as being from agencies or jobs boards. It also publishes monthly trends and has now collated the statistics to produce a chart that give an idea of the programming languages that were most in demand during 2012.

 

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Commenting on these 2012 totals Robin Warren writes:

Unsurprisingly the totals over the year showed the general trend we've observed month to month. PHP and Java up on top with over 12k jobs each and very little distance between them.

Objective C is next around 9k in total. As we get to number 4 (SQL) we're already close to 5k which shows just how much Java and PHP are dominating the stats. Android skills came in at number 5 with close to half the number of jobs which had been listed for Objective C.

 Ruby, JavaScript and C# are all pretty close to each other at around 3.5k to 4k jobs each. There is then a bit of a drop off to below 2k jobs at the bottom of the table.

 

A second chart shows the change in demand for different languages at the end of 2012 compared to the beginning of the year.

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Robin Warren's analysis is:

JavaScript was the big winner over the year with an increase of 1.6%. The low pegging of JavaScript (7 overall in the the annual results) is often a surprise in developer circles, who have perhaps been seeing browser apps eating the desktop for some time are also reading about JavaScript gaining ground on the server. The steady upward trend JavaScript has been seeing for surely the last several years could be set to continue for some time to come.

Ruby also grew it's share by 0.7%, interestingly the exact amount of ground lost by PHP. Android skills and Objective C both grew by 0.6%, showing gradual but still steady growth. I imagine as tablet adoption grows we'll see further importance for these skills in the future.

ActionScript was the unsurprising biggest loser of 2012, dropping 1.6% but was followed closely by Java dropping 1.4%. I'm not sure what to make of the drop in Java's fortunes, other technologies are likely replacing it on the server (outside of the enterprise at least) and perhaps it's own ecosystem is devouring it with people moving to Scala and Groovy and other JVM languages. Any desktop ambitions must surely now be dead as well although I don't know that the desktop ever accounted for a significant part of Java development.

PHP was the next closest loser but dropped only 0.7% vs Java's 1.4%.

You need to bear in mind that this looks only at part of the jobs landscape. Banks and big businesses probably aren't using Twitter as their preferred recruitment medium. Even so this is an interesting look at the jobs landscape.
 
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More Information

Jobs Tractor

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Last Updated ( Friday, 08 February 2013 )