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November Highlights

November's Ask HN: Who is hiring? thread showed continued growth with 375 postings, up 20% from the near all-time low in September, and up 10% over October's thread. This is a positive sign after months of declines. However, on a year-over-year basis, we're still way off of the 2022 numbers (down 30%) and the 2021 numbers dwarf where we are today (down 61% since November, 2021).

Technology-wise, everything remains relatively stable in November. Let's take a look at some areas of note.

Top 10 Programming Languages

Python, TypeScript, and Go remain in the Top 3 spots. One notable change in November is C++, jumping into the fourth spot. Not bad for the nearly 40 year old language.

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

Compare Top 10 Programming Languages

Artificial Intelligence (AI)

While not a big jump from month-to-month in November, AI still shows its strength as a big mover this year. AI edged closer to being mentioned in 20% of postings. AI has nearly doubled in the past 12 months.

Compare AI, Machine Learning, Deep Learning, and ChatGPT

Remote Work

Remote positions accounded for 61% of postings in November, getting back over 60% after a slight dip in October to 57%. Remote positions are still in the general area of where they've been for the past 6 months. Onsite and Hybrid have remained relatively steady.

Compare Remote vs Onsite vs Hybrid

Specialization

Specicalization keywords track the growth of different areas of engineering focus including Full-Stack, Front-end, and Back-end developers. Front-end in particular has been seeing steady drops over the past couple years. It peaked at just over 25% in January, 2022, but has dropped to 13% in November, 2023, a drop of 12%. Back-end has also been trending down over the last year with its own 10% drop from 28% to 18%. This could be a result of the industry broadening into more types of development. AI/ML and Data management come to mind as growing areas of focus and specialization.

Compare Full Stack, Front-end, Back-end, DevOps, and Data Science

Engineering Levels

While the title of Senior Software Engineer has been a consistent level across the industry for more than a decade, the titles of Staff Software Engineer and Principal Software Engineer (often referred to as Staff+ in many books and articles) have emerged over the last few years. From the data, we can see the growth in Staff level positions has really picked up over the last year, reaching 10% in October and falling back slightly to abouto 8% in November.

Compare Principal, Staff, Senior, and, Junior

Rankings and movers

Tech Rank Last Month Change Last Year Change
Remote 1 1 0 1 0
Senior 2 2 0 2 0
Full Stack 3 4 +1 3 0
Onsite 4 3 -1 9 +5
AI 5 5 0 14 +9
React 6 8 +2 5 -1
Back End 7 7 0 4 -3
Python 8 6 -2 6 -2
TypeScript 9 10 +1 7 -2
Hybrid 10 11 +1 16 +6
Front End 11 12 +1 8 -3
Machine Learning 12 9 -3 13 +1
Postgresql 13 16 +3 11 -2
Cloud 14 13 -1 12 -2
AWS 15 15 0 10 -5
Security 16 17 +1 17 +1
Open Source 17 18 +1 19 +2
Staff 18 14 -4 30 +12
golang 19 21 +2 15 -4
GitHub 20 29 +9 28 +8
Tech Mentions Rank Last Year Mentions Last Year Rank Change
Snowflake 7 56 2 149 +93
Tailwind 6 64 2 151 +87
OpenAI 6 60 2 144 +84
Observability 9 47 4 103 +56
Agile 6 62 4 104 +42
WebGL 7 57 4 91 +34
FastAPI 6 65 5 86 +21
ClickHouse 5 67 5 88 +21
Principal 14 31 15 48 +17
API 19 25 21 41 +16
Tech Mentions Rank Last Year Mentions Last Year Rank Change
iOS 10 40 31 27 -13
Rust 13 35 43 22 -13
Android 10 42 28 29 -13
Computer Vision 6 61 15 49 -12
React Native 9 49 23 39 -10
C# 8 53 20 43 -10
Kafka 5 70 12 60 -10
Mongodb 6 63 13 53 -10
Robotics 6 59 14 50 -9
Redis 10 43 24 35 -8
Explore the data in the interactive comparison chart above to discover trends for technologies that interest you.