Thu

Aug 3
2006

Tim O'Reilly

Tim O'Reilly

Job Trends: Web 2.0, AJAX and Ruby

In my posting Ruby Book Sales Pass Perl, I also showed some treemaps highlighting the growth of calls for Ruby skills in the job market. I mentioned the fact that Web 2.0 also was bright green in the jobs treemap. But I thought I'd give a little more detail on how these job categories are growing.

In order to understand the job growth graphs, you need to keep in mind that the number of job listings vary from month to month. Accordingly, we set the "job market size" to an arbitrary value at the start of our data in June 2005, and then show the increase (or decrease) relative to that number. So what we're comparing in the graph below is the relative month-to-month growth of the overall job market (in red) to the relative month-to-month growth of the specific technology job market (in blue). We're not comparing the absolute size of those markets.

Here's the growth in jobs calling for Web 2.0 expertise, with June 2006 up about 4200% over June 2005:

web2jobtrend.png

Note how the Web 2.0 drumbeat begins at around the time of our second Web 2.0 Conference in the fall of 2005.

Here are the graphs for AJAX and Ruby. Note that these are not on the same scale as the graph for Web 2.0. AJAX job postings are up about 1400%, and Ruby job postings up about 500%:

ajaxjobtrend.png

rubyjobtrend.png


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Comments: 5

  Kevin Farnham [08.03.06 11:33 PM]

An interesting set of graphs would be Overall Online Job Market divided into two categories: the comparison market in the graphs and "other". In other words, we see a bulge in the Overall Online Job Market that peaks in May 2006. Now, what amount of that Overall Online Job Market increase was due to the Web 2.0 Online Job Market? Is the entire Overall Market increase due to the new Web 2.0 Market increase?

Another way of asking it: what does the bar graph for the non-Web-2.0 job market look like? Has that risen as well, or is Web 2.0 responsible for more than 100% of all the increase in the Overall market over the data period?

  Tim O'Reilly [08.04.06 09:11 AM]

Kevin -- nice idea, but it won't work. These trends we're spotting are tiny compared to the entire job market. (You might have noticed my comment on another post where someone pointed to the indeed job trend graphs, which I think are useless because you can't see any detail, because they simply show the jobs as a percent of all jobs, and when the biggest programming category (java) is at 2%, and it goes down from there, there's not much to see.)

The reason we do it this way is to highlight the rate of change. That's way more important for trendspotting than the absolute volume.

  Kevin Farnham [08.04.06 12:53 PM]

This still answers part of my question, since it implies that the increase in the overall job market in 2006 is significant and not due solely to the effect of Web 2.0 hiring.

Another sign of good news is Dice.com, which lists 91,825 available tech jobs today. That's the highest level I've seen since the 2000+ bust. Dice's tech jobs count was in the 140,000 range before the bust, then fell below 30,000 for a while. Of course, the Dice.com count isn't an objective signal, since it depends on lots of factors including Dice's fortunes. But it's a number that's been there consistently for us to track.

  Fahd Mirza [02.23.07 01:02 AM]

When Web 3.0 is coming out?

  Tom Murphy [05.28.07 10:46 AM]

Are you analysing , on Job Title or Job Description (or both) ? We're analysing our stats on ITjobfeed.com , check http://www.itjobfeed.com/it-job-trends.asp .
We've noticed a big difference between analysing only Job Titles. And seemingly more accurate.

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