Tracking the most popular programming languages, databases and software development tools on whoishiring
Change is happening fast in the software developer hiring landscape. Let's jump in and take a look at the results from May's Hacker News "Ask HN: Who is hiring?" thread.
First, in a positive sign, there were 431 postings (as of May 21), which marks a 12% increase over April. April's total was the lowest in over 7 years, so it's good to see some growth in job opportunites.
The main theme from April's Ask HN: Who is hiring? thread is that the downward trend on postings continues. April had 384 job postings, down almost 13% from March. This is the lowest total since December of 2015. Year over year, April 2023 is down 51% from April 2022.
The Software Developer job industry is facing many changing dynamics, and the data from the "Ask HN: Who is hiring?" thread on Hacker News is a great way to track the changes. From the overall drop in job postings, the return of work to the office, to the rise in AI technogies poised to cause disruption to the way we work.
What a difference a year makes. The number of job postings in the "Ask HN: Who is hiring?" thread for November bounced back a bit from October's near all-time low, but was still way down from last year. For November, there were 555 postings (top level comments), up 13% over October. But, postings are down year-over-year, 45%, from November 2021.
Python is once again the top programming language after losing to TypeScript the last two months. Previous to the last two months' defeat, Python had been the top programming language for six years. Will it stay on top again, or will this battle between Python and TypeScript go back and forth into the future?
For May, at the top of the rankings, everything stayed pretty much the same as it was in April. Remote hiring is still very popular, with 75% of postings including it. On the techonology front, React is still the only tech term in the top 5, with about 26% of postings including it.
These charts show what's popular and trending in programming languages, frameworks and technologies used to develop modern software applications as indicated by Hacker News activity. Using the HN Search API and a dictionary of software terms, all of the the comments (job postings) in the "whoishiring" submissions from April 2011 to the latest month were processed to count the number of times each software term was mentioned.
