or compare

May Highlights

With the midway point of 2020 fast approaching, and the world in the midst of perhaps the largest shift in employment in my lifetime, it seems like an appropriate time time to take a peek at how software job trends are looking through the lens of Ask HN: Who is hiring?, a regular, monthly collection of software development job postings. The summary posts on hntrends.com usually focus on specific technologies that are gaining or losing adoption, but first let's look at how Covid-19 is affecting this specific job board.

From my two perspectives, this data and my own job it should be no surprise that Software Development jobs have been significantly impacted by Covid-19. As companies halt hiring and announce furloughs and layoffs, the trend is showing clearly on Ask HN: Who is hiring?. April and May both dropped sharply, 39% decreases over the same month in 2019. May is traditionally the peak month of the year for postings on HN, let's hope the summer and fall can rebound to beat May this year.

Now, onto the tech changes, or lack thereof. React still reigns supreme in the number 1 spot with Python and AWS holding steady in second and third place, respectively. This is the same top three as April as well as the same top three as last May.

Looking further through the rankings, it looks like TypeScript is the one making the biggest push in 2020, just like it was in 2019. TypeScript has held the #5 spot nearly all of 2020. In fact 4 of the top 10 are JavaScript related as JavaScript continues its dominance of the web stack.

Onto the rankings...

Top 10 Programming Languages

  1. Python
  2. TypeScript
  3. JavaScript
  4. Go
  5. Java
  6. Ruby
  7. C++
  8. Rust
  9. Kotlin
  10. C#

Compare Top 10 Programming Languages

Server-side Frameworks

Compare Rails, node.js, PHP and Django

JavaScript Frameworks

Compare React, Angular, Vue, and Ember

SQL Databases

Compare Postgresql, MySQL and SQL Server

NoSQL Databases

Compare Mongodb, Elasticsearch, Cassandra and DynamoDB

Big Data

Compare Storm, Hadoop and Spark

Messaging

Compare Kafka, RabbitMQ, SQS and Kinesis

DevOps Tools

Compare Terraform, Chef, Puppet, Ansible and CloudFormation

Virtualization and Container Tools

Compare Docker, Kubernetes, Mesos and Terraform

Cryptocurrency and Blockchain

Compare Blockchain, Bitcoin and Ethereum

Cloud Providers

Compare AWS, GCP and Azure

Deep Learning

Compare TensorFlow, PyTorch and Keras

Rankings and movers

Tech Rank Last Month Change Last Year Change
React 1 1 0 1 0
Python 2 2 0 2 0
AWS 3 3 0 3 0
Full Stack 4 7 +3 8 +4
TypeScript 5 5 0 12 +7
node.js 6 10 +4 4 -2
JavaScript 7 8 +1 7 0
Postgresql 8 4 -4 6 -2
golang 9 12 +3 10 +1
Java 10 13 +3 11 +1
DevOps 11 9 -2 5 -6
Machine Learning 12 6 -6 9 -3
Docker 13 19 +6 13 0
AI 14 11 -3 17 +3
Ruby 15 18 +3 18 +3
iOS 16 15 -1 21 +5
Android 17 14 -3 15 -2
GraphQL 18 17 -1 31 +13
Kubernetes 19 16 -3 14 -5
Rails 20 20 0 16 -4
Tech Mentions Rank Last Year Mentions Last Year Rank Change
Spring 8 64 3 133 +69
Asp 5 73 3 131 +58
Oracle 6 69 4 123 +54
Haskell 6 67 6 98 +31
Express 9 58 8 87 +29
REST 17 33 17 54 +21
Bitcoin 5 75 6 96 +21
Distributed Systems 16 34 17 55 +21
Rust 19 31 20 51 +20
Apollo 6 68 8 84 +16
Tech Mentions Rank Last Year Mentions Last Year Rank Change
webpack 0 204 9 79 -125
RDS 0 222 6 100 -122
Git 1 168 13 62 -106
HTML5 0 181 7 88 -93
Web Services 1 162 8 85 -77
Redshift 1 172 6 101 -71
S3 1 129 12 69 -60
Apache 1 151 6 95 -56
SQL 5 79 39 27 -52
Embedded Systems 1 139 6 97 -42