Note: Indeed.com‘s graphs strike again. Bumped into a few interesting graphs, so I created a a “Job Graphs” static page to hold links to a bunch of interesting ones.
In the new sidebar widget (“Oldies but Goodies” — here’s a link for you RSS readers), I saw a link to my old post Brief Reality Check on Ruby Jobs. The relentless motion of time and Indeed’s helpful auto-updating is making that post a bit dated (Ruby jobs are almost surpassing Cobol jobs right now), but it reminded me of another fun post along the same lines.
Headlined as Grails vs. Rails: A fun comparison, the author tosses out this graph:
That’s all fun and good, but it’s relative — it’s just showing job growth. The absolute numbers paints a slightly bleaker picture for Grails.
Here’s the auto-updated versions of those graphs, should you be interested.
My running theory is that people aren’t hiring that many Grails developers per se because it’s easy enough to hire or retrain your good Java developers to work in Groovy and Grails. On the other hand, Ruby and Rails are pretty much their own technological island, so you have to hire Rails developers by name.
3 Comments
There’s some truth in what you’re concluding. Also, there are some Java positions I’ve seen where they’re advertising for “Rails or Grails” experience. So, that’s going to add in to the “Rails” numbers, even though it’s pretty likely that the actual work would end up being Grails work.
On the flip side, search for “struts” and you’ll find 8000 positions. Search for “Grails” and you get 129. “groovy +java” is a bit better – 232. Still a bit on the bleak side, regardless of how you slice the numbers. Would love to see these numbers go up much higher (obviously)
Also, FWIW, searching for “ruby” is around 4200 and “cobol” is around 3400, so I think ruby has surpassed cobol, at least per indeed.com.
The crude name I have for this sort of comparison is “dick size wars”. I mean, comparing the number of ruby jobs to the number of cobol jobs is exactly what I mean: who cares if there’s more ruby jobs than cobol jobs or not: do you really want any of those cobol jobs? Really? Stuck maintaining some thirty year old batch-oriented corporate payroll processing job whose architecture is best described as a big ball of mud (and you need to become the main swamp guide), in a language that is synonymous with stupidity in the programming world? Or get involved in some startup doing the next generation must-use web application?
Which would you rather have on your resume in five years time? Which would you rather being doing today? All jobs are not created equal.