4 ms·

Shouldn't I be seeing tons of job posting for R then? I don't get it.

by rbosinger 10y ago

saghm 10y ago
Not necessarily; looking at it another way, having lots of programmers who are interested in R might mean that the job market for them is fairly saturated, meaning recruiters don't have to advertise as much or as long
Turing_Machine 10y ago
It's worth clicking through to the interactive page that lets you pick different criteria. R is at #6 measured by "trending", but only #12 measured by "jobs" (below assembly). Some of their methodology seems a little handwavy (which to be fair is no different than I've seen with other similar rankings). For instance, the number of questions asked on StackOverflow confounds the popularity of the language with the difficulty/ambiguity/poor documentation of the language (e.g. a poorly-documented language might well result in a disproportionate number of SO questions). Straight Google search results (as opposed to Google Trends, which they also use) would only seem to prove that a language was popular in the past. There are lots of Google search results for the Roman Empire, but that doesn't mean it's still a going concern. :-) CareerBuilder and Dice were headhunter cesspools, the last time I looked at them. I would be very wary of drawing any conclusions about popularity from those (or similar) sites. And so on.
tzs 10y ago
It could be that most R programmers have the kind of jobs where the language used is flexible and so might not be mentioned in a job listing. The jobs could be asking for statistical analysts or data scientists, and leave it up to the employee to decide if they want R or SciPy or some C++ toolkit or whatever. Compare to someone looking to hire a web developer. There you are much more likely to need the developer to use specific languages, and so those should be mentioned in the job listing.

4 ms·

Shouldn't I be seeing tons of job posting for R then? I don't get it.

by rbosinger 10y ago

Shouldn't I be seeing tons of job posting for R then? I don't get it.

saghm 10y ago
Not necessarily; looking at it another way, having lots of programmers who are interested in R might mean that the job market for them is fairly saturated, meaning recruiters don't have to advertise as much or as long
Turing_Machine 10y ago
It's worth clicking through to the interactive page that lets you pick different criteria. R is at #6 measured by "trending", but only #12 measured by "jobs" (below assembly). Some of their methodology seems a little handwavy (which to be fair is no different than I've seen with other similar rankings). For instance, the number of questions asked on StackOverflow confounds the popularity of the language with the difficulty/ambiguity/poor documentation of the language (e.g. a poorly-documented language might well result in a disproportionate number of SO questions). Straight Google search results (as opposed to Google Trends, which they also use) would only seem to prove that a language was popular in the past. There are lots of Google search results for the Roman Empire, but that doesn't mean it's still a going concern. :-) CareerBuilder and Dice were headhunter cesspools, the last time I looked at them. I would be very wary of drawing any conclusions about popularity from those (or similar) sites. And so on.
tzs 10y ago
It could be that most R programmers have the kind of jobs where the language used is flexible and so might not be mentioned in a job listing. The jobs could be asking for statistical analysts or data scientists, and leave it up to the employee to decide if they want R or SciPy or some C++ toolkit or whatever. Compare to someone looking to hire a web developer. There you are much more likely to need the developer to use specific languages, and so those should be mentioned in the job listing.