Hired CEO: blockchain programmers are 517% hot
Yes it’s March, not last Christmas… but there’s still time to look at the state of software for the year ahead.
If anything, getting to the first quarter of this year’s post-apocalyptic Brexit maelstrom may have given us enough time to assess the road ahead in software engineering.
Hired CEO Mehul Patel thinks it’s fine to still be talking about the road ahead — his firm specialises in providing a ‘career marketplace’ [that means searchable job listing website] for technology professionals that is heavily focused on coders to help them assess their ‘market worth’ on the recruitment scene.
Patel says that his firm has looked at interview requests and job offers facilitated on the Hired marketplace to attempt to gauge industry trends.
No surprise, blockchain is hot… demand for blockchain engineers is up a whopping 517 percent year-over-year and demand for security engineers is up by 132 percent.
Although this data is US-focused, we can reasonably guess that most of these trends apply to developed countries in Europe, parts of Asia and elsewhere.
There are some interesting fluctuations.
For example, gaming engineers are the highest paid group in New York, while demand for natural language processing engineer salaries are soaring in Toronto.
Languages
“Our data shows that candidates with experience in Go are the most attractive by far. This is likely because the language is new and supply is limited, which allows talent that has Go skills to stand out. When we surveyed developers on our platform to see which languages they actually use, Go was nowhere near the top — only 7% said they primarily work with it,” said Patel.
Typescript is also a winner — but not by much. Go, Scala and Ruby are all close behind.
Patel and team also conclude that no one likes R; it is consistently the least in-demand language across markets.
“Around the globe, there are countless communities who rally around the importance of open source, however, our data reveals that this group of loyal users is smaller than you’d expect. Only 9 percent of our survey respondents said they frequently contribute to open source, while 53% have never contributed to open source before,” said Patel.
The team also found that software engineers are interested in pair programming, a development approach in which two programmers work together at one workstation.
Hired’s full software market analysis is available free here.