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Today’s Top Tech Skills

356 points by netcyrax 7y ago

ravenstine 7y ago
I don't really understand the desire for skills to be in high demand. Obviously, you want your skills to be in demand in some capacity. But putting so much emphasis on whether some tech skill is a winner on a scoreboard can give people the wrong impression about other languages and technologies that appear to either be unpopular or dying. It's reassuring that Java and SQL are still in high demand after all these years, but newbies looking at these charts might make the assumption that they might as well not bother learning other things like Elixir, PHP, Rust, Ruby, etc., because they're not that popular, even though those jobs exist, will continue to exist, and pay well. Also, it's disturbing that Scum is the 13th most demanded "skill".
- Felk 7y ago
  Is that a freudian typo?
- deepaksurti 7y ago
  >> Scum I don't if it was an intentional typo, but the `pun` might actually apply in many projects, unfortunately I must say.
- pm90 7y ago
  This sounds horrible but maybe the people who would take these lists seriously are precisely the kinds of people who are careerist programmers. And they really just want the maximum value from their “investment” in learning programming. In college I didn’t learn Java at all because it didn’t seem very fun. Python did and I learned that. Then Go came along which was easy to pick up. But once you know a general purpose language well, it doesn’t take long to learn another one (maybe not the most performant code right away but that’s what code reviews by peers are for).
  - dvtrn 7y ago
    Is there anything inherently wrong with that? They know where the butter for their bread comes from and make it work for them and reap from it. As far as individual career choices go, seems like a winning move.
    - pm90 7y ago
      This is a good question. I think I don’t want to work with careerists. Programming is a kind of labor that seems to have different properties than other kinds of labor, which can be quantified effectively and used to make accurate predictions. The sheer complexity of the field makes promising things a fools errand. The Agile manifesto is an acknowledgment of this unpredictability, and the approach they take is to quantify only the immediate next goals instead of predicting months ahead. Careerists tend to like predictable slices of work which they can accomplish during work hours and go home and do whatever. Unfortunately, most high impact projects require a bit more involvement: not to give up all free time, but to be more flexible. A commitment to do the right thing (very easy to cut corners and ignore best practices) but to deliver on time. Careerists tend to prioritize their quanta of work and how to get it done during work hours rather than focusing on getting it done well. They have to be coached into best practices. They need to be asked to meet deadlines, or disagree to deadlines if they feel it’s inadequate. For these reasons, I personally do not like working with careerists.
  - abernard1 7y ago
    > This sounds horrible but maybe the people who would take these lists seriously are precisely the kinds of people who are careerist programmers. While I agree with the sentiment, I think there's a flipside to this. Certain communities cough cough ahem have the luxury of not caring at all about skills in broad demand, hopping from technology to technology because the market allows it. I've seen a lot of "expert beginnerism" from that group of people, and a little bit of disdain for the people who do schlep work day in and day out to make a living. In my experience, a lot of the people who work with the boring technology have more seniority and depth because they're not relearning the window dressing that is syntax/framework/language constantly. If anything, I think these reports (from Indeed... real data, not some meaningless top ten) just indicate that employers don't really care about whatever's hot right now, and that a surprising amount of the economy is powered by unglamorous tech.
- kweinber 7y ago
  Library depth and growth are side-effects of a language ecosystems popularity. It doesn’t mean that all libraries are good ones, but remember the open-source rallying cry “many eyes make all bugs shallow”? Yeah, that tends to be true. Also, in-demand technologies tend to have a larger talent-pool to choose from. Not everyone is good, but you have a much better time finding the right skills and cultural fit if the talent pool is larger. A great example counter example is elixir... A technology with a lot of advocacy but almost no demand. Slow library growth, almost no programmers with production experience, and almost no market demand... which is a self-perpetuating cycle. Choosing a technology like that for your stack is like buying an obsolete car with impossible to find parts.
  - deleted 7y ago
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- bsaul 7y ago
  because price ( aka salary / fee) is a function of supply and demand and it grows the more the skill is in demand. As simple as that. Let’s say you want to start a career as a freelance for example : what skill to you put forward ? You may say « but jobs requiring elixir are probably more interesting than sql/java ». I agree, but that is if there’s one position open at the time you’re looking , in the area you’re looking and with other qualifications matching
  - sidlls 7y ago
    It isn't that simple. Most "Java + SQL" jobs are run of the mill cost-center type jobs at companies that aren't tech companies. Their salaries, benefits, and locales are generally poor relatively to other software engineering jobs. The demand is high, and so is the supply of labor, but that isn't the whole picture.
    - NikolaNovak 7y ago
      I would agree with that picture. In other comments on this thread, I've indicated Java & SQL are the #1 demands on any project I've ever worked on. At the same time though, none of those people have earned anything remotely what I tend to see on HN in general, and SF area in particular. From my limited experience, it feels like a good, experienced, hardened, senior Java developer in Toronto, Canada (not a tiny/cheap place), makes about half what a hot-startup-technology intermediate makes in SF :-\
      - nostrebored 7y ago
        Canada is particularly bleak in terms of SDE salary though. My offers in South Africa were higher than average salaries in Vancouver.
      - sidlls 7y ago
        Tech "hubs" like the Bay Area are rare: most software developers earn far less, and our salaries shouldn't be taken for a typical salary. The vast majority of software developers will never see six figures (adjusted for inflation) unless they move to management, just like most of their white-collar peers.
phit_ 7y ago
the lack of PHP is surprising to me, but I guess there isn't that many PHP full time roles to fill?
- x3ro 7y ago
  I can't speak for the US market, which this data apparently focusses on, but in Germany I think that PHP is still in fairly high demand, but definitely not nearly as well compensated as the more "enterprisey" technologies (eg Java/React)
- tooop 7y ago
  Either it is specific to USA or the data is weird, https://www.codingdojo.com/blog/the-7-most-in-demand-programming-languages-of-2019 https://www.codingdojo.com/blog/the-7-most-in-demand-program... reports that in January (based on the same Indeed.com site) PHP is behind C#. PHP is powering >75% websites it just makes no sense to not even be in the Top20
  - SkyPuncher 7y ago
    It's because the complexity of those sites is low. My understanding is a large portion of that 75% is Wordpress sites. A very, very small portion of Wordpress sites do much development past a theme (many CSS/HTML) and installing some plugins. If you have extensive Wordpress work, it's likely better to use a different starting point (and a different language).
vbtemp 7y ago
What about most compensated tech skill. Highly doubt SQL and Java rank highly there.
- formercoder 7y ago
  You think? A huge chunk of work at Google is Java.
  - twic 7y ago
    The median pay might be quite low for Java, because there are also a hojillion poorly-paid enterprise wageslaves toiling away in the cubicle farms. But the absolute number of people earning a lot (100k, 200k, whatever you think that is) might well be higher for Java than for anything else, because it's used in some significant big tech companies and in finance. So, if you're of average ability, learning Java might not juice your pay much, but if you're highly talented, it might.
    - formercoder 7y ago
      I also think that the people at that wage consider programming language choice as a means to an end rather than a core skill.
- bradleyjg 7y ago
  I don’t think that’s well specified enough to measure. But assuming you mean something like median comp of a job that requires X, I’d imagine the top of the list would all be things that are pretty obscure. Suppose there’s one hedge fund that wants an expert in k and is willing to pay whatever it takes. Does that mean people should go out and learn k?
- antoncohen 7y ago
  Here you go, programming languages and their salaries: https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2019#top-paying-technologies https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2019#top-paying-te...
- 7y ago
deleted 7y ago
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eddieh 7y ago
I have to wonder if Java would be in demand if not for Android?
- pavlov 7y ago
  Java is still enormously popular on the back-end.
- zhte415 7y ago
  Enterprise, Finance, Telecoms, Internet, embedded. It's pretty ubiquitous. Even the chip on your bank card uses it.
- pron 7y ago
  Here are some companies that run much, if not most, of their backend on Java: Amazon, Apple, Google, Netflix and Twitter, not to mention pretty much every government, military, bank, hospital, airport, and utility company.
  - enitihas 7y ago
    I thought Google was mostly C++, with Java being at best second to C++.
- eddieh 7y ago
  To everyone replying: I think demand is rather different than popularity, ubiquity, or even supply of jobs. Even the link refers to Python being the top language of 2019, but "researchers at [...] Indeed" (note: a single job listing source) found SQL & Java to be included in listings marginally more frequently than Python.
- NikolaNovak 7y ago
  Yup. The "Enterprise" world which is probably majority of IT but gets the least amount of chat on HN, is all Java in the back end. :-\
  - pjmlp 7y ago
murukesh_s 7y ago
Java is still undisputed in the enterprise. Node.js was a contender but lost steam. May be .net once it becomes truly platform neutral have a chance to take on Java. Until then most probably it will remain widely popular.
- _bxg1 7y ago
  I figured that was mostly due to legacy code at this point; is it undisputed for new code too?
  - dharmab 7y ago
    There are few competitors that have strong, static typing, great test tooling and broad library support.
    - _bxg1 7y ago
      I guess "great test tooling" and "broad library support" are subjective, but there are several contenders these days that I would say might fit those criteria
      - apta 7y ago
        > "great test tooling" and "broad library support" are subjective Not really the case when it comes to Java (and the JVM in general). It objectively has great test tooling, and a very diverse library ecosystem, not to mention monitoring, introspection, management, tunability, etc. are second to none. The only other ecosystem that arguably comes close is .NET.
        _bxg1 7y ago
        The point is the words "great" and "broad" are relative.
      - kamaal 7y ago
        >>there are several contenders these days that I would say might fit those criteria Even if you get the basic 'Batteries Included' part right, you still won't match up ubiquity in terms of being able to hire developers(in big numbers), common knowledge base, maintainability of code bases. Java code bases tend to be around for long. And people of all skill levels can get started with minimal handholding. Also note not all companies have the revenue streams of top internet companies. And they can't afford to flush hundreds of millions of dollars, and man years of personnel time down the sewers to arrive at hiring the perfect candidate for the job. Almost always most companies need candidates who can get job done, for whatever salary they can offer. And they can't afford to rewrite their code every two years, so they care deeply about things like easy hiring, and code maintainability on the longer run. Apart from these things Java itself is a great piece of tech, and has passed the test of time over so many technology trends. If you are starting a backend project, Java is more or less the best and the top tech choice at this point, and has been for long now.
_bxg1 7y ago
It remains weird and disturbing to me that "AWS" is treated as a skill. Not "cloud system management", but "AWS". Edit: I do understand why it can be lucrative to have expertise with a specific cloud provider. It's just the status quo of these services being their own unique silos that disturbs me: I would personally be wary of making "ability to effectively use Amazon's servers" a pillar of my career.
- dharmab 7y ago
  No weirder than putting "Java" instead of "Object Oriented Programming"
  - TeMPOraL 7y ago
    Not really. Using Java doesn't come with having to have a relationship with a company (beyond the the JDK EULA nobody reads or cares about anyway).
  - _bxg1 7y ago
    Yes, it is. I can build anything in Java and run it on any computer owned by anybody. AWS isn't a technology, it's just Amazon's computers and the constraints and interfaces they wrap around them.
    - sgt 7y ago
      One could then argue that Java is owned by Oracle, and could be called Oracle Java, an Oracle technology. I tend to agree with you though, AWS is more of a company's interpretation of the cloud hosting technologies. It's too close for comfort, to be honest. I prefer to self host, but I tend to host in the cloud due to financial constraints.
      - _bxg1 7y ago
        I don't have any problem with cloud hosting, as long as there's portability. I wouldn't want to design my architecture to be completely specific to one hosting provider.
yamrzou 7y ago
I’m thinking about the future. What skills will dominate the software market 10-20 years from now? - Big companies use C++ heavily, besides being the language for deep learning/GPU programming. Will Rust/Go replace it anytime soon? - Will React still dominate front end development? - What about Python and the data analysis ecosystem?
- laichzeit0 7y ago
  Old, boring, battle tested.
- mattlondon 7y ago
  React might go away, but javascript/typescript will probably be a good bet for the next 10 years (who knows beyond that). I'd like to think that people will come to their senses about Python and use sensible languages for ML + data once they relearn all the problems that software engineers learnt about it all that time ago (fast development != reliable/maintainable development, fast development != easily-scaled development with teams of 10+ etc)
  - mrlala 7y ago
    >but javascript/typescript will probably be a good bet for the next 10 years Honestly how is javascript (and thus typescript) ever going away at this point? I honestly mean _ever_. Like until the day I die. Almost the entire web is using it. Frameworks like React, Angular, Vue have made it so I basically don't care that much about javascript. Most of my code is server-side and the client is largely handled by Angular as a framework so the amount of JS I have to write in my angular components is so minimal. All that being said, I personally am not a fan of javascript.. at all. The learning curve to know what's going on is horrific in my opinion, and code is not meant to be written clearly but have a small footprint which is terrible. It's too flexible.. though typescript has solved 90% of that. Even if something like Blazor completely transforms the web, it seems like there will ALWAYS be the case for streamlined simple sites that only need very simple javascript transformations.. Anyway- unfortunately I think javascript is here for the next billion years!
iamsb 7y ago
I have always found this quite amusing that every company I have ever applied to for a job has SQL in required skills and yet not a single one of them has ever interviewed me on it.
- nogabebop23 7y ago
  It's because they have a database on the back end and you need to be able to write "SELECT * FROM [foo]" to get data. I'd actually be really pissed if a company asked me to write a query like "count these orders by month in a single row" not because I couldn't do it but because I'm confident I'd screw up the syntax a couple of times. I think they should ask more conceptual questions around set theory or storage structure, epsecially since they all want "SQL, SQL Server, Oracle, Postgres, etc". Nobody can stay on top of all the platform specifics, but someone who knows their stuff can answer the udnerlying problems.
- innocentoldguy 7y ago
  I've had the same experience. Furthermore, I haven't worked at a company who actually uses SQL since the early 2000s. Since then, every company has used some kind of ORM.
- commandlinefan 7y ago
  I always get the same single question: “explain the difference between an inner join and an outer join”. They seem to figure if I can answer that, I know everything I need to know.
dathinab 7y ago
In the recent two or so years I was surprised to see how many people don't _really_ know about SQL. Sure they can write a simple insert and update query and maybe a join, assuming they can just ignore that there actually are different types of joins. But if you ask them about other _still fundamental_ knowledge like a _rough_ idea about what the different transaction isolation level are/mean/imply for you, they fail hard. Realizing this allowed me to understand why: 1. There is so many used ORM(ish) libraries which make it in practice harder to access the database for anything but trivial queries. 2. NoSqlish databases seem to have became so successful even in application where non of there "benefits" (wrt. scalability and similar) matter and you would normally prefer to avoid some of there drawbacks (e.g. eventual consistency, no "system wide-ish" transaction, enforcement of correct schemata and some parts of data consistency). (Sure there are other reasons for there success, too. Like being fancy, modern or no clear requirements analysis and therefore no idea about scaleability requirements ...). I mean if SQL and relational databases are for you just structs with a bit more basic types then JSON but which in turn are flat requiring annoying foreign key references and a bunch of ceremony around this with very little added benefits then yes it makes so much more sense to just use a nosql database and be done with. (PS: Yes I'm aware that for certain use-cases the resulting databases can be very complex and hard to use, what I mean is that it's a skill you have to learn to use efficiently and a scarily large amount of people a came in contact with in the recent years not only don't have that skill but are not aware that, if they don't want to mess up larger databases they work on, they will have to learn that skill.)
- jackcodes 7y ago
  You really don’t need to know transaction isolation to do the vast majority of work on a typical web app.
  - taffer 7y ago
    I wouldn't say so. Concurrency bugs, like lost updates, can be very subtle and hard to debug, and common databases don't prevent these kinds of bugs by default.
    - 7y ago
omarhaneef 7y ago
The surprise is not that Java, C and C# are still ranked highly but that their share grew in the last 10 years. It underscores the difference between (at least my) perception and the market reality.
- alkonaut 7y ago
  I think that there is a misconception about how the industry looks. Many of us don’t do web services and sites or anything even related to those such as adtech. We do boring software that runs in government basements, dishwashers, cars, intranets. We do huge desktop software with thousands of man years in them like cad packages. Probably most significantly we do boring integrations in ERP/CRM systems. Just Sharepoint alone is its own massive galaxy in the developer universe. The two branches “Enterprise” and “Government” are underrepresented in the discussions but not on the job market, I think that’s where the perceived difference comes from. Also we shouldn’t forget C# has a resurgence on many fronts not least unity and as a very good nodejs replacement these days.
benbristow 7y ago
How come C# is on the rise 11% but .NET is on the down -15%? Seems a bit odd to me
- hutattedonmyarm 7y ago
  Maybe .net does not include .net Core? .net standard falling would make sense then
- moomin 7y ago
  Well, it seems likely a lot of that is just measurement error, but there’s a lot of arenas where you’ve got “not quite .NET” environments. I’m thinking Unity and Mono for iPhone/Android.
- rdiddly 7y ago
  It speaks to the limitations of the survey and ones like it, where the mention count is being used as a proxy for demand.
AlchemistCamp 7y ago
I've always been frustrated by the promotion of this kind of list. Yes, it matters what the demand for a given skill is but that knowledge is virtually meaningless without also having information about the supply side! If 1,000,000 companies desire talent $foo which 2,000,000 workers have, it's not going to lead to as many opportunities or as much leverage as talent $bar that 300,000 companies desire but only 50,000 workers have.
- NikolaNovak 7y ago
  I believe for many years, that kind of supply/demand relative comparison typically determined that COBOL was the skill to have :) I've been on projects with COBOL (yay!:), and there's always a complete dearth of skilled people...
  - thewarrior 7y ago
    That would suggest that a better metric would be to look at the supply demand imbalance and also look at the growth rates for future demand. For anyone looking at this list it’s probably the places where demand is growing fastest that you want to target. From those you could split things into stuff that’s mainstream and upcoming. Mainstream would be Python, AWS and JavaScript as per this list. The fastest growing areas as per this list are Machine Learning, Azure and Docker. A common pattern here is that the in demand skills cluster around front end + full stack (including ops) or data engineering + ML
    - AlchemistCamp 7y ago
      > ...and also look at the growth rates for future demand. I would say that looking at the growth rate of future demand is a poor way to go about it unless you're also looking at the growth rate of future supply, for the same reasons mentioned in my original comment.
- ianbicking 7y ago
  There's also a question of skill liquidity: if there's a very low supply and a low demand - even though the demand might be multiples of the supply - it puts everyone in a tough place. The employee doesn't have the leverage they might hope for because finding a compatible employer is very hard.
samvher 7y ago
Seems to me that Java is also still one of the most supplied tech skills. So this does not necessarily make it a market you want to be in. Good SQL skills don't tend to be that common though, but I think a lot of the demand is more for CRUD-level operations than for complex analytics or performance-sensitive stuff.
- vips7L 7y ago
  Most people don't know Java as well as they think they do.
  - vbezhenar 7y ago
    Do they need that though? Will they be paid for that expert Java knowledge?
    - vips7L 7y ago
      What kind of question is this? Expert engineers will be paid for that knowledge in any language. Tons of complex, high performance, and high scale applications are written in Java. Half of FAANG runs on Java. Contrary to what HN thinks the world doesn't only run on python, go, and rust.
      - samvher 7y ago
        Half of FAANG runs on Java. This is interesting and indeed not what I expected. Care to elaborate? I’m curious which components end up being built in Java.
ummonk 7y ago
There is demand from the average company treating "IT" as a cost center, and there is demand from top tech companies and startups which treat their software engineers as valuable. The latter are much less demanding of Java and SQL as required skills prior to joining, and I'd even say Go seems to be at least as popular as Java amongst top startups.
jmartrican 7y ago
In Java I'm a big fan of using SQL directly versus ORM. To that end I highly recommend JOOQ. I library that allows for object oriented SQL. Its not ORM, so you still compose SQL, you just get a lot objects and methods to allow you to construct your SQL in an OO, and functional, programming type way. It also is a DB first approach. Where you construct your DB schemas and tables first, then use JOOQ to create objects that match your DB schemas. These objects allow you to reference the tables and fields of your DB in an OO way. From that point of view it may seem like ORM, but you use SQL to interact with the your DB. Two of the things I really about JOOQ is that you stay in-tuned to SQL, which as we all know is very powerful and popular. Second, your SQL can get constructed in a procedural way based on input. So you can added to based on , for example, if query param were provided. The creator of JOOQ, Lucas, has done good videos out there comparing SQL to ORM. What's cool about those videos is he does not mention JOOQ, maybe at the end. The videos are just comparing ORM to SQL and makes the case for SQL being way more powerful than ORM.
- ellius 7y ago
  My team (Spring Boot / Angular greenfield app in an enterprise) has a guy that transitioned over from .NET and is totally new to the Java ecosystem. He has 30+ years experience with SQL and can't stand entity frameworks or make them do the best-practice stuff he knows we should be doing, but with JOOQ he's had a lot of success bringing his extensive knowledge base to bear on our project.
  - pjmlp 7y ago
    I fully understand him. Dapper or ADO.NET, and with my Java hat on, myBatis.
- pjmlp 7y ago
  Other alternative worth mentioning is myBatis.
- bcoughlan 7y ago
  With jOOQ you still don't write SQL, you write the DSL and still spend a lot of time looking up docs for how to write the query in the DSL, when all you really want is to write the SQL query without the ugliness of JDBC. To this end I highly recommend JDBI. If the Java proposal for multi-line strings ever gets done it will make writing SQL queries a lot nicer.
rongenre 7y ago
Good applications tend to get the database right first - since you can always re-write the mid-tier code relatively easily. It's pretty much essential to any developer. Further it's a ridiculous superpower if you're not a developer - it's so empowering for anyone on the business side with questions to just go look in the db.
- dudul 7y ago
  I actually fully disagree. I find it much easier to "fake" the DB in the first stages (like just store shit in memory) where you explore and understand what your system must do, the questions it should answer with data from the DB, etc. Then, just replace your fake repo with an actual DB and you're done. And it goes with what you're saying: changing a schema is not as easy as changing the code. So start by really understanding what you need to do, and then build the schema at the end.
  - scarface74 7y ago
    I agree and especially with C#, your LINQ expressions will be the same whether you are working with in memory lists, Entity Framework for RDMS’s or Mongo for Nosql. Your queries will be translated appropriately either way.
- exdsq 7y ago
  Weird, this is completely opposite to what a lot of people I've worked with have said. What do you think about having business logic in the DB layer too? I saw someone on another post recommending that which, again to the people I have worked with, is an antipattern.
  - vbezhenar 7y ago
    Somewhat related quote: Linus Torvalds: "Bad programmers worry about the code. Good programmers worry about data structures and their relationships." IMO proper database design is extremely important. Code is fluid. You can replace it. Data is not that fluid, it's much harder to change it. Database should contain checks to ensure that bad data won't be saved. I don't think that complete business logic should be in database. Keep data in database, keep your code in your application. Database is responsible for data storage and some data validation to prevent misbehaved apps storing obviously bad data. Application is responsible for everything else.
jugg1es 7y ago
Curious how C# is up but .NET is down. Are they differentiating between .NET Core and .NET Framework?
jt2190 7y ago
> * SQL and Java are the top two tech skills employers want, according to millions of US job postings on Indeed.com between 2014 and 2019. > * Python is the third most common skill, posting strong growth driven partly by data science jobs. > * Amazon Web Services (AWS), at number six, has had even more spectacular growth. Source: Indeed Tech Skills Explorer: Today’s Top Tech Skills https://www.hiringlab.org/2019/11/19/today's-top-tech-skills/ https://www.hiringlab.org/2019/11/19/today's-top-tech-skills...
suyash 7y ago
Java is the #1 programming language in the world, proven again!
deleted 7y ago
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nelsnelson 7y ago
If they are the most demanded skills in tech, then do practitioners command the highest compensation for those skills?
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abledon 7y ago
I got back into java recently and am appreciating how you can define an interface reference type super class then swap out the different data structure subclasses as their implementation. E.g. make a queue refer to either PriorityQueue or LinkedList. Or make a Map a HashMap or TreeMap. It kind of provides an "aha!" moment in deeper understanding of why there are so many Datastructures and why it actually matter to pick 1 over the other if in the end they are both implementing the same functionality. With python/js , yes those DS are still there but they are most of the time hidden for your convenience (which is great sometimes when you just wanna pump out some idea). The Accidental joy of Java (with its verbosity) is that by pushing the DS choice to time of reference setting, it makes me have to actually think about the choice more and what it would mean.
- lostcolony 7y ago
  That's my contender for both biggest pro, and biggest con, of Java. Because where it breaks down is where the implementations are not clear, the tradeoffs are not clear, and the interfaces are not abstract enough to switch between (for instance, this useful library gives you a Future, and this other one requires a CompletableFuture).
- jkoudys 7y ago
  If you're looking to go lower (systems) level, or even if you're not, rust is worth checking out then too. It's the best experience I've had letting you require only the interface that does what you need, and it's also great at letting you make a type "from" something. e.g. you could require something be a HashMap, or merely that it can be converted `Into` a HashMap (a free action if it's already a HashMap).
  - crematoria 7y ago
    Yep, sum and linear types are two of the biggest improvements of Rust over, say, C++. The third would probably be that it's a lot smaller than C++.
dang 7y ago
I've tried several times to switch the URL to https://www.hiringlab.org/2019/11/19/today's-top-tech-skills/ https://www.hiringlab.org/2019/11/19/today's-top-tech-skills..., which is the source that this one is copying from, but our software insists on escaping the apostrophe to %27 and hiringlab.org won't unescape it, resulting in a 404. I don't think I've seen that before. Edit: never mind, taking out the apostrophe works! URL changed from https://spectrum.ieee.org/view-from-the-valley/at-work/tech-careers/sql-java-top-list-of-most-indemand-tech-skills https://spectrum.ieee.org/view-from-the-valley/at-work/tech-..., which points to this.
- pvg 7y ago
  The escape rules vary in small maddening ways and trying to figure out if your implementation is doing the right thing from specs will make you give up forum moderating and join the merchant marine, in the best case. Fortunately, that's the sort of thing Google can afford so it's safest to just check what their RFC-compliant utility libraries do: https://guava.dev/releases/28.0-jre/api/docs/com/google/common/net/UrlEscapers.html#urlPathSegmentEscaper-- https://guava.dev/releases/28.0-jre/api/docs/com/google/comm... The apostrophe is not escaped in URI path segments.
  - dang 7y ago
    Thanks; I've added non-apostrophe-escaping to our list.
Yessing 7y ago
I don't understand why java wins? despite: - the mess with ".equals()" and "==". - arrays don't accepts generics. - no (non-verbose) partial application - awfully verbose syntax that clutters the screen with unimportant things making important things hard to spot. - the confusing leaky abstraction with Integer and int.
- akerro 7y ago
  Because there are programming languages people hate and programming languages people don't use.
  - Yessing 7y ago
    I'm asking why use java? it's not easy. it's not fast to run. it's not fast to write. it's not fast to read. it's not memory efficient. it's not fun (yeah, subjective but I'm yet to hear someone saying that he had a blast writing java)
    - akerro 7y ago
      >it's not easy. it's not fast to run. it's not fast to write. it's not fast to read. it's not memory efficient. it's not fun Was 2010 last time you used Java? All these things were addresses in lat 5 releases. I like Java for: * stability * fast to run code * fast to write code * mature libraries * good access to many good programmers (bad programmers write bad code which runs slow, is run slow and is read slow) Try Java13 with modern GC (ZGC or Shenandoah) or GraalVM. It's really fun, fast, modern. 4 years ago I was into Kotlin and Go, this year I'm back on Java.
p1esk 7y ago
Never once in the last 20 years I went to indeed.com when I was looking for a job.
- m_alfoy 7y ago
  Sorry if I come across as stupid but where do you usually look? I’m only in my first role but I’m thinking to start trying to attract offers from elsewhere. UK based if that matters on site recommendations
  - empath75 7y ago
    Linkedin
  - w1ntermute 7y ago
    My phone's contacts list. Make friends with as many people at your current company as possible, and when they leave, make sure to keep in regular touch with them. I enforce self-discipline on this by putting regular touchpoints in my GTD app. I try to get coffee with or talk on the phone to former coworkers once every 4-6 months, depending on how well I know them.
  - p1esk 7y ago
    At first it was all through friends or connections. Then I found a job as the first engineer in a two person startup, posted on Craigslist (that was back in 2009). Eight years later that startup was sold for half a billion dollars. Today I would go directly to websites of companies I’m interested in, then find someone on LinkedIn who works there. But - first you better make sure you’re someone they would want to hire! Casually mentioning some cool project you put on Github, relevant to what they are doing, helps a lot in my experience.
    - symplee 7y ago
      How reproducible is this? There are only so many companies that can make it to that level of success, and only so many pigeons to fill those holes.
    - deleted 7y ago
OkGoDoIt 7y ago
I remember in years past these analyses would often have mention of Objective-C. Now I rarely see Objective-C or Swift mentioned at all. Is iOS development not as big as it used to be? Do people use react native or Xamarin or other cross-platform tool chains more?
hughpeters 7y ago
Python's growth is staggering and I'm happy to see that it's challenging Java. There are certainly some use cases where Java has some big advantages but there are so many use cases where Python can get the job done with much less time and code. Plus I personally enjoy writing python more than Java. I'm also curious where Go stacks up in this. In Stack Overflow's 2019 Survey [https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2019#technology https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2019#technology] Go and Ruby were neck and neck at 8-9%. With Kubernetes and microservices getting so popular I'd expect Go's popularity to grow and maybe pass Ruby.
m3kw9 7y ago
Is mobile omitted or that it didn’t make the top 20 or so
julius_set 7y ago
Can’t take Indeed seriously when they’ve omitted a major part of the industry which is: - mobile https://www.techrepublic.com/article/the-top-5-most-in-demand-developer-skills/ https://www.techrepublic.com/article/the-top-5-most-in-deman... https://www.monster.com/career-advice/article/job-skill-mobile-app-development https://www.monster.com/career-advice/article/job-skill-mobi... https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2019 https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2019
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356 points by netcyrax 7y ago

I don't really understand the desire for skills to be in high demand. Obviously, you want your skills to be in demand in some capacity. But putting so much emphasis on whether some tech skill is a winner on a scoreboard can give people the wrong impression about other languages and technologies that appear to either be unpopular or dying. It's reassuring that Java and SQL are still in high demand after all these years, but newbies looking at these charts might make the assumption that they might as well not bother learning other things like Elixir, PHP, Rust, Ruby, etc., because they're not that popular, even though those jobs exist, will continue to exist, and pay well. Also, it's disturbing that Scum is the 13th most demanded "skill".

Felk 7y ago
Is that a freudian typo?
deepaksurti 7y ago
>> Scum I don't if it was an intentional typo, but the `pun` might actually apply in many projects, unfortunately I must say.
pm90 7y ago
This sounds horrible but maybe the people who would take these lists seriously are precisely the kinds of people who are careerist programmers. And they really just want the maximum value from their “investment” in learning programming. In college I didn’t learn Java at all because it didn’t seem very fun. Python did and I learned that. Then Go came along which was easy to pick up. But once you know a general purpose language well, it doesn’t take long to learn another one (maybe not the most performant code right away but that’s what code reviews by peers are for).
- dvtrn 7y ago
  Is there anything inherently wrong with that? They know where the butter for their bread comes from and make it work for them and reap from it. As far as individual career choices go, seems like a winning move.
  - pm90 7y ago
    This is a good question. I think I don’t want to work with careerists. Programming is a kind of labor that seems to have different properties than other kinds of labor, which can be quantified effectively and used to make accurate predictions. The sheer complexity of the field makes promising things a fools errand. The Agile manifesto is an acknowledgment of this unpredictability, and the approach they take is to quantify only the immediate next goals instead of predicting months ahead. Careerists tend to like predictable slices of work which they can accomplish during work hours and go home and do whatever. Unfortunately, most high impact projects require a bit more involvement: not to give up all free time, but to be more flexible. A commitment to do the right thing (very easy to cut corners and ignore best practices) but to deliver on time. Careerists tend to prioritize their quanta of work and how to get it done during work hours rather than focusing on getting it done well. They have to be coached into best practices. They need to be asked to meet deadlines, or disagree to deadlines if they feel it’s inadequate. For these reasons, I personally do not like working with careerists.
- abernard1 7y ago
  > This sounds horrible but maybe the people who would take these lists seriously are precisely the kinds of people who are careerist programmers. While I agree with the sentiment, I think there's a flipside to this. Certain communities cough cough ahem have the luxury of not caring at all about skills in broad demand, hopping from technology to technology because the market allows it. I've seen a lot of "expert beginnerism" from that group of people, and a little bit of disdain for the people who do schlep work day in and day out to make a living. In my experience, a lot of the people who work with the boring technology have more seniority and depth because they're not relearning the window dressing that is syntax/framework/language constantly. If anything, I think these reports (from Indeed... real data, not some meaningless top ten) just indicate that employers don't really care about whatever's hot right now, and that a surprising amount of the economy is powered by unglamorous tech.
kweinber 7y ago
Library depth and growth are side-effects of a language ecosystems popularity. It doesn’t mean that all libraries are good ones, but remember the open-source rallying cry “many eyes make all bugs shallow”? Yeah, that tends to be true. Also, in-demand technologies tend to have a larger talent-pool to choose from. Not everyone is good, but you have a much better time finding the right skills and cultural fit if the talent pool is larger. A great example counter example is elixir... A technology with a lot of advocacy but almost no demand. Slow library growth, almost no programmers with production experience, and almost no market demand... which is a self-perpetuating cycle. Choosing a technology like that for your stack is like buying an obsolete car with impossible to find parts.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
bsaul 7y ago
because price ( aka salary / fee) is a function of supply and demand and it grows the more the skill is in demand. As simple as that. Let’s say you want to start a career as a freelance for example : what skill to you put forward ? You may say « but jobs requiring elixir are probably more interesting than sql/java ». I agree, but that is if there’s one position open at the time you’re looking , in the area you’re looking and with other qualifications matching
- sidlls 7y ago
  It isn't that simple. Most "Java + SQL" jobs are run of the mill cost-center type jobs at companies that aren't tech companies. Their salaries, benefits, and locales are generally poor relatively to other software engineering jobs. The demand is high, and so is the supply of labor, but that isn't the whole picture.
  - NikolaNovak 7y ago
    I would agree with that picture. In other comments on this thread, I've indicated Java & SQL are the #1 demands on any project I've ever worked on. At the same time though, none of those people have earned anything remotely what I tend to see on HN in general, and SF area in particular. From my limited experience, it feels like a good, experienced, hardened, senior Java developer in Toronto, Canada (not a tiny/cheap place), makes about half what a hot-startup-technology intermediate makes in SF :-\
    - nostrebored 7y ago
      Canada is particularly bleak in terms of SDE salary though. My offers in South Africa were higher than average salaries in Vancouver.
    - sidlls 7y ago
      Tech "hubs" like the Bay Area are rare: most software developers earn far less, and our salaries shouldn't be taken for a typical salary. The vast majority of software developers will never see six figures (adjusted for inflation) unless they move to management, just like most of their white-collar peers.

phit_ 7y ago

the lack of PHP is surprising to me, but I guess there isn't that many PHP full time roles to fill?

x3ro 7y ago
I can't speak for the US market, which this data apparently focusses on, but in Germany I think that PHP is still in fairly high demand, but definitely not nearly as well compensated as the more "enterprisey" technologies (eg Java/React)
tooop 7y ago
Either it is specific to USA or the data is weird, https://www.codingdojo.com/blog/the-7-most-in-demand-programming-languages-of-2019 https://www.codingdojo.com/blog/the-7-most-in-demand-program... reports that in January (based on the same Indeed.com site) PHP is behind C#. PHP is powering >75% websites it just makes no sense to not even be in the Top20
- SkyPuncher 7y ago
  It's because the complexity of those sites is low. My understanding is a large portion of that 75% is Wordpress sites. A very, very small portion of Wordpress sites do much development past a theme (many CSS/HTML) and installing some plugins. If you have extensive Wordpress work, it's likely better to use a different starting point (and a different language).

vbtemp 7y ago

What about most compensated tech skill. Highly doubt SQL and Java rank highly there.

formercoder 7y ago
You think? A huge chunk of work at Google is Java.
- twic 7y ago
  The median pay might be quite low for Java, because there are also a hojillion poorly-paid enterprise wageslaves toiling away in the cubicle farms. But the absolute number of people earning a lot (100k, 200k, whatever you think that is) might well be higher for Java than for anything else, because it's used in some significant big tech companies and in finance. So, if you're of average ability, learning Java might not juice your pay much, but if you're highly talented, it might.
  - formercoder 7y ago
    I also think that the people at that wage consider programming language choice as a means to an end rather than a core skill.
bradleyjg 7y ago
I don’t think that’s well specified enough to measure. But assuming you mean something like median comp of a job that requires X, I’d imagine the top of the list would all be things that are pretty obscure. Suppose there’s one hedge fund that wants an expert in k and is willing to pay whatever it takes. Does that mean people should go out and learn k?
antoncohen 7y ago
Here you go, programming languages and their salaries: https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2019#top-paying-technologies https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2019#top-paying-te...
7y ago

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eddieh 7y ago

I have to wonder if Java would be in demand if not for Android?

pavlov 7y ago
Java is still enormously popular on the back-end.
zhte415 7y ago
Enterprise, Finance, Telecoms, Internet, embedded. It's pretty ubiquitous. Even the chip on your bank card uses it.
pron 7y ago
Here are some companies that run much, if not most, of their backend on Java: Amazon, Apple, Google, Netflix and Twitter, not to mention pretty much every government, military, bank, hospital, airport, and utility company.
- enitihas 7y ago
  I thought Google was mostly C++, with Java being at best second to C++.
eddieh 7y ago
To everyone replying: I think demand is rather different than popularity, ubiquity, or even supply of jobs. Even the link refers to Python being the top language of 2019, but "researchers at [...] Indeed" (note: a single job listing source) found SQL & Java to be included in listings marginally more frequently than Python.
NikolaNovak 7y ago
Yup. The "Enterprise" world which is probably majority of IT but gets the least amount of chat on HN, is all Java in the back end. :-\
- pjmlp 7y ago

murukesh_s 7y ago

Java is still undisputed in the enterprise. Node.js was a contender but lost steam. May be .net once it becomes truly platform neutral have a chance to take on Java. Until then most probably it will remain widely popular.

_bxg1 7y ago
I figured that was mostly due to legacy code at this point; is it undisputed for new code too?
- dharmab 7y ago
  There are few competitors that have strong, static typing, great test tooling and broad library support.
  - _bxg1 7y ago
    I guess "great test tooling" and "broad library support" are subjective, but there are several contenders these days that I would say might fit those criteria
    - apta 7y ago
      > "great test tooling" and "broad library support" are subjective Not really the case when it comes to Java (and the JVM in general). It objectively has great test tooling, and a very diverse library ecosystem, not to mention monitoring, introspection, management, tunability, etc. are second to none. The only other ecosystem that arguably comes close is .NET.
      - _bxg1 7y ago
        The point is the words "great" and "broad" are relative.
    - kamaal 7y ago
      >>there are several contenders these days that I would say might fit those criteria Even if you get the basic 'Batteries Included' part right, you still won't match up ubiquity in terms of being able to hire developers(in big numbers), common knowledge base, maintainability of code bases. Java code bases tend to be around for long. And people of all skill levels can get started with minimal handholding. Also note not all companies have the revenue streams of top internet companies. And they can't afford to flush hundreds of millions of dollars, and man years of personnel time down the sewers to arrive at hiring the perfect candidate for the job. Almost always most companies need candidates who can get job done, for whatever salary they can offer. And they can't afford to rewrite their code every two years, so they care deeply about things like easy hiring, and code maintainability on the longer run. Apart from these things Java itself is a great piece of tech, and has passed the test of time over so many technology trends. If you are starting a backend project, Java is more or less the best and the top tech choice at this point, and has been for long now.

_bxg1 7y ago

It remains weird and disturbing to me that "AWS" is treated as a skill. Not "cloud system management", but "AWS". Edit: I do understand why it can be lucrative to have expertise with a specific cloud provider. It's just the status quo of these services being their own unique silos that disturbs me: I would personally be wary of making "ability to effectively use Amazon's servers" a pillar of my career.

dharmab 7y ago
No weirder than putting "Java" instead of "Object Oriented Programming"
- TeMPOraL 7y ago
  Not really. Using Java doesn't come with having to have a relationship with a company (beyond the the JDK EULA nobody reads or cares about anyway).
- _bxg1 7y ago
  Yes, it is. I can build anything in Java and run it on any computer owned by anybody. AWS isn't a technology, it's just Amazon's computers and the constraints and interfaces they wrap around them.
  - sgt 7y ago
    One could then argue that Java is owned by Oracle, and could be called Oracle Java, an Oracle technology. I tend to agree with you though, AWS is more of a company's interpretation of the cloud hosting technologies. It's too close for comfort, to be honest. I prefer to self host, but I tend to host in the cloud due to financial constraints.
    - _bxg1 7y ago
      I don't have any problem with cloud hosting, as long as there's portability. I wouldn't want to design my architecture to be completely specific to one hosting provider.

yamrzou 7y ago

I’m thinking about the future. What skills will dominate the software market 10-20 years from now? - Big companies use C++ heavily, besides being the language for deep learning/GPU programming. Will Rust/Go replace it anytime soon? - Will React still dominate front end development? - What about Python and the data analysis ecosystem?

laichzeit0 7y ago
Old, boring, battle tested.
mattlondon 7y ago
React might go away, but javascript/typescript will probably be a good bet for the next 10 years (who knows beyond that). I'd like to think that people will come to their senses about Python and use sensible languages for ML + data once they relearn all the problems that software engineers learnt about it all that time ago (fast development != reliable/maintainable development, fast development != easily-scaled development with teams of 10+ etc)
- mrlala 7y ago
  >but javascript/typescript will probably be a good bet for the next 10 years Honestly how is javascript (and thus typescript) ever going away at this point? I honestly mean _ever_. Like until the day I die. Almost the entire web is using it. Frameworks like React, Angular, Vue have made it so I basically don't care that much about javascript. Most of my code is server-side and the client is largely handled by Angular as a framework so the amount of JS I have to write in my angular components is so minimal. All that being said, I personally am not a fan of javascript.. at all. The learning curve to know what's going on is horrific in my opinion, and code is not meant to be written clearly but have a small footprint which is terrible. It's too flexible.. though typescript has solved 90% of that. Even if something like Blazor completely transforms the web, it seems like there will ALWAYS be the case for streamlined simple sites that only need very simple javascript transformations.. Anyway- unfortunately I think javascript is here for the next billion years!

iamsb 7y ago

I have always found this quite amusing that every company I have ever applied to for a job has SQL in required skills and yet not a single one of them has ever interviewed me on it.

nogabebop23 7y ago
It's because they have a database on the back end and you need to be able to write "SELECT * FROM [foo]" to get data. I'd actually be really pissed if a company asked me to write a query like "count these orders by month in a single row" not because I couldn't do it but because I'm confident I'd screw up the syntax a couple of times. I think they should ask more conceptual questions around set theory or storage structure, epsecially since they all want "SQL, SQL Server, Oracle, Postgres, etc". Nobody can stay on top of all the platform specifics, but someone who knows their stuff can answer the udnerlying problems.
innocentoldguy 7y ago
I've had the same experience. Furthermore, I haven't worked at a company who actually uses SQL since the early 2000s. Since then, every company has used some kind of ORM.
commandlinefan 7y ago
I always get the same single question: “explain the difference between an inner join and an outer join”. They seem to figure if I can answer that, I know everything I need to know.

dathinab 7y ago

In the recent two or so years I was surprised to see how many people don't _really_ know about SQL. Sure they can write a simple insert and update query and maybe a join, assuming they can just ignore that there actually are different types of joins. But if you ask them about other _still fundamental_ knowledge like a _rough_ idea about what the different transaction isolation level are/mean/imply for you, they fail hard. Realizing this allowed me to understand why: 1. There is so many used ORM(ish) libraries which make it in practice harder to access the database for anything but trivial queries. 2. NoSqlish databases seem to have became so successful even in application where non of there "benefits" (wrt. scalability and similar) matter and you would normally prefer to avoid some of there drawbacks (e.g. eventual consistency, no "system wide-ish" transaction, enforcement of correct schemata and some parts of data consistency). (Sure there are other reasons for there success, too. Like being fancy, modern or no clear requirements analysis and therefore no idea about scaleability requirements ...). I mean if SQL and relational databases are for you just structs with a bit more basic types then JSON but which in turn are flat requiring annoying foreign key references and a bunch of ceremony around this with very little added benefits then yes it makes so much more sense to just use a nosql database and be done with. (PS: Yes I'm aware that for certain use-cases the resulting databases can be very complex and hard to use, what I mean is that it's a skill you have to learn to use efficiently and a scarily large amount of people a came in contact with in the recent years not only don't have that skill but are not aware that, if they don't want to mess up larger databases they work on, they will have to learn that skill.)

jackcodes 7y ago
You really don’t need to know transaction isolation to do the vast majority of work on a typical web app.
- taffer 7y ago
  I wouldn't say so. Concurrency bugs, like lost updates, can be very subtle and hard to debug, and common databases don't prevent these kinds of bugs by default.
  - 7y ago

omarhaneef 7y ago

The surprise is not that Java, C and C# are still ranked highly but that their share grew in the last 10 years. It underscores the difference between (at least my) perception and the market reality.

alkonaut 7y ago
I think that there is a misconception about how the industry looks. Many of us don’t do web services and sites or anything even related to those such as adtech. We do boring software that runs in government basements, dishwashers, cars, intranets. We do huge desktop software with thousands of man years in them like cad packages. Probably most significantly we do boring integrations in ERP/CRM systems. Just Sharepoint alone is its own massive galaxy in the developer universe. The two branches “Enterprise” and “Government” are underrepresented in the discussions but not on the job market, I think that’s where the perceived difference comes from. Also we shouldn’t forget C# has a resurgence on many fronts not least unity and as a very good nodejs replacement these days.

benbristow 7y ago

How come C# is on the rise 11% but .NET is on the down -15%? Seems a bit odd to me

hutattedonmyarm 7y ago
Maybe .net does not include .net Core? .net standard falling would make sense then
moomin 7y ago
Well, it seems likely a lot of that is just measurement error, but there’s a lot of arenas where you’ve got “not quite .NET” environments. I’m thinking Unity and Mono for iPhone/Android.
rdiddly 7y ago
It speaks to the limitations of the survey and ones like it, where the mention count is being used as a proxy for demand.

AlchemistCamp 7y ago

I've always been frustrated by the promotion of this kind of list. Yes, it matters what the demand for a given skill is but that knowledge is virtually meaningless without also having information about the supply side! If 1,000,000 companies desire talent $foo which 2,000,000 workers have, it's not going to lead to as many opportunities or as much leverage as talent $bar that 300,000 companies desire but only 50,000 workers have.

NikolaNovak 7y ago
I believe for many years, that kind of supply/demand relative comparison typically determined that COBOL was the skill to have :) I've been on projects with COBOL (yay!:), and there's always a complete dearth of skilled people...
- thewarrior 7y ago
  That would suggest that a better metric would be to look at the supply demand imbalance and also look at the growth rates for future demand. For anyone looking at this list it’s probably the places where demand is growing fastest that you want to target. From those you could split things into stuff that’s mainstream and upcoming. Mainstream would be Python, AWS and JavaScript as per this list. The fastest growing areas as per this list are Machine Learning, Azure and Docker. A common pattern here is that the in demand skills cluster around front end + full stack (including ops) or data engineering + ML
  - AlchemistCamp 7y ago
    > ...and also look at the growth rates for future demand. I would say that looking at the growth rate of future demand is a poor way to go about it unless you're also looking at the growth rate of future supply, for the same reasons mentioned in my original comment.
ianbicking 7y ago
There's also a question of skill liquidity: if there's a very low supply and a low demand - even though the demand might be multiples of the supply - it puts everyone in a tough place. The employee doesn't have the leverage they might hope for because finding a compatible employer is very hard.

samvher 7y ago

Seems to me that Java is also still one of the most supplied tech skills. So this does not necessarily make it a market you want to be in. Good SQL skills don't tend to be that common though, but I think a lot of the demand is more for CRUD-level operations than for complex analytics or performance-sensitive stuff.

vips7L 7y ago
Most people don't know Java as well as they think they do.
- vbezhenar 7y ago
  Do they need that though? Will they be paid for that expert Java knowledge?
  - vips7L 7y ago
    What kind of question is this? Expert engineers will be paid for that knowledge in any language. Tons of complex, high performance, and high scale applications are written in Java. Half of FAANG runs on Java. Contrary to what HN thinks the world doesn't only run on python, go, and rust.
    - samvher 7y ago
      Half of FAANG runs on Java. This is interesting and indeed not what I expected. Care to elaborate? I’m curious which components end up being built in Java.

ummonk 7y ago

There is demand from the average company treating "IT" as a cost center, and there is demand from top tech companies and startups which treat their software engineers as valuable. The latter are much less demanding of Java and SQL as required skills prior to joining, and I'd even say Go seems to be at least as popular as Java amongst top startups.

jmartrican 7y ago

In Java I'm a big fan of using SQL directly versus ORM. To that end I highly recommend JOOQ. I library that allows for object oriented SQL. Its not ORM, so you still compose SQL, you just get a lot objects and methods to allow you to construct your SQL in an OO, and functional, programming type way. It also is a DB first approach. Where you construct your DB schemas and tables first, then use JOOQ to create objects that match your DB schemas. These objects allow you to reference the tables and fields of your DB in an OO way. From that point of view it may seem like ORM, but you use SQL to interact with the your DB. Two of the things I really about JOOQ is that you stay in-tuned to SQL, which as we all know is very powerful and popular. Second, your SQL can get constructed in a procedural way based on input. So you can added to based on , for example, if query param were provided. The creator of JOOQ, Lucas, has done good videos out there comparing SQL to ORM. What's cool about those videos is he does not mention JOOQ, maybe at the end. The videos are just comparing ORM to SQL and makes the case for SQL being way more powerful than ORM.

ellius 7y ago
My team (Spring Boot / Angular greenfield app in an enterprise) has a guy that transitioned over from .NET and is totally new to the Java ecosystem. He has 30+ years experience with SQL and can't stand entity frameworks or make them do the best-practice stuff he knows we should be doing, but with JOOQ he's had a lot of success bringing his extensive knowledge base to bear on our project.
- pjmlp 7y ago
  I fully understand him. Dapper or ADO.NET, and with my Java hat on, myBatis.
pjmlp 7y ago
Other alternative worth mentioning is myBatis.
bcoughlan 7y ago
With jOOQ you still don't write SQL, you write the DSL and still spend a lot of time looking up docs for how to write the query in the DSL, when all you really want is to write the SQL query without the ugliness of JDBC. To this end I highly recommend JDBI. If the Java proposal for multi-line strings ever gets done it will make writing SQL queries a lot nicer.

rongenre 7y ago

Good applications tend to get the database right first - since you can always re-write the mid-tier code relatively easily. It's pretty much essential to any developer. Further it's a ridiculous superpower if you're not a developer - it's so empowering for anyone on the business side with questions to just go look in the db.

dudul 7y ago
I actually fully disagree. I find it much easier to "fake" the DB in the first stages (like just store shit in memory) where you explore and understand what your system must do, the questions it should answer with data from the DB, etc. Then, just replace your fake repo with an actual DB and you're done. And it goes with what you're saying: changing a schema is not as easy as changing the code. So start by really understanding what you need to do, and then build the schema at the end.
- scarface74 7y ago
  I agree and especially with C#, your LINQ expressions will be the same whether you are working with in memory lists, Entity Framework for RDMS’s or Mongo for Nosql. Your queries will be translated appropriately either way.
exdsq 7y ago
Weird, this is completely opposite to what a lot of people I've worked with have said. What do you think about having business logic in the DB layer too? I saw someone on another post recommending that which, again to the people I have worked with, is an antipattern.
- vbezhenar 7y ago
  Somewhat related quote: Linus Torvalds: "Bad programmers worry about the code. Good programmers worry about data structures and their relationships." IMO proper database design is extremely important. Code is fluid. You can replace it. Data is not that fluid, it's much harder to change it. Database should contain checks to ensure that bad data won't be saved. I don't think that complete business logic should be in database. Keep data in database, keep your code in your application. Database is responsible for data storage and some data validation to prevent misbehaved apps storing obviously bad data. Application is responsible for everything else.

jugg1es 7y ago

Curious how C# is up but .NET is down. Are they differentiating between .NET Core and .NET Framework?

jt2190 7y ago

> * SQL and Java are the top two tech skills employers want, according to millions of US job postings on Indeed.com between 2014 and 2019. > * Python is the third most common skill, posting strong growth driven partly by data science jobs. > * Amazon Web Services (AWS), at number six, has had even more spectacular growth. Source: Indeed Tech Skills Explorer: Today’s Top Tech Skills https://www.hiringlab.org/2019/11/19/today's-top-tech-skills/ https://www.hiringlab.org/2019/11/19/today's-top-tech-skills...

suyash 7y ago

Java is the #1 programming language in the world, proven again!

deleted 7y ago

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nelsnelson 7y ago

If they are the most demanded skills in tech, then do practitioners command the highest compensation for those skills?

deleted 7y ago

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abledon 7y ago

I got back into java recently and am appreciating how you can define an interface reference type super class then swap out the different data structure subclasses as their implementation. E.g. make a queue refer to either PriorityQueue or LinkedList. Or make a Map a HashMap or TreeMap. It kind of provides an "aha!" moment in deeper understanding of why there are so many Datastructures and why it actually matter to pick 1 over the other if in the end they are both implementing the same functionality. With python/js , yes those DS are still there but they are most of the time hidden for your convenience (which is great sometimes when you just wanna pump out some idea). The Accidental joy of Java (with its verbosity) is that by pushing the DS choice to time of reference setting, it makes me have to actually think about the choice more and what it would mean.

lostcolony 7y ago
That's my contender for both biggest pro, and biggest con, of Java. Because where it breaks down is where the implementations are not clear, the tradeoffs are not clear, and the interfaces are not abstract enough to switch between (for instance, this useful library gives you a Future, and this other one requires a CompletableFuture).
jkoudys 7y ago
If you're looking to go lower (systems) level, or even if you're not, rust is worth checking out then too. It's the best experience I've had letting you require only the interface that does what you need, and it's also great at letting you make a type "from" something. e.g. you could require something be a HashMap, or merely that it can be converted `Into` a HashMap (a free action if it's already a HashMap).
- crematoria 7y ago
  Yep, sum and linear types are two of the biggest improvements of Rust over, say, C++. The third would probably be that it's a lot smaller than C++.

dang 7y ago

I've tried several times to switch the URL to https://www.hiringlab.org/2019/11/19/today's-top-tech-skills/ https://www.hiringlab.org/2019/11/19/today's-top-tech-skills..., which is the source that this one is copying from, but our software insists on escaping the apostrophe to %27 and hiringlab.org won't unescape it, resulting in a 404. I don't think I've seen that before. Edit: never mind, taking out the apostrophe works! URL changed from https://spectrum.ieee.org/view-from-the-valley/at-work/tech-careers/sql-java-top-list-of-most-indemand-tech-skills https://spectrum.ieee.org/view-from-the-valley/at-work/tech-..., which points to this.

pvg 7y ago
The escape rules vary in small maddening ways and trying to figure out if your implementation is doing the right thing from specs will make you give up forum moderating and join the merchant marine, in the best case. Fortunately, that's the sort of thing Google can afford so it's safest to just check what their RFC-compliant utility libraries do: https://guava.dev/releases/28.0-jre/api/docs/com/google/common/net/UrlEscapers.html#urlPathSegmentEscaper-- https://guava.dev/releases/28.0-jre/api/docs/com/google/comm... The apostrophe is not escaped in URI path segments.
- dang 7y ago
  Thanks; I've added non-apostrophe-escaping to our list.

Yessing 7y ago

I don't understand why java wins? despite: - the mess with ".equals()" and "==". - arrays don't accepts generics. - no (non-verbose) partial application - awfully verbose syntax that clutters the screen with unimportant things making important things hard to spot. - the confusing leaky abstraction with Integer and int.

akerro 7y ago
Because there are programming languages people hate and programming languages people don't use.
- Yessing 7y ago
  I'm asking why use java? it's not easy. it's not fast to run. it's not fast to write. it's not fast to read. it's not memory efficient. it's not fun (yeah, subjective but I'm yet to hear someone saying that he had a blast writing java)
  - akerro 7y ago
    >it's not easy. it's not fast to run. it's not fast to write. it's not fast to read. it's not memory efficient. it's not fun Was 2010 last time you used Java? All these things were addresses in lat 5 releases. I like Java for: * stability * fast to run code * fast to write code * mature libraries * good access to many good programmers (bad programmers write bad code which runs slow, is run slow and is read slow) Try Java13 with modern GC (ZGC or Shenandoah) or GraalVM. It's really fun, fast, modern. 4 years ago I was into Kotlin and Go, this year I'm back on Java.

p1esk 7y ago

Never once in the last 20 years I went to indeed.com when I was looking for a job.

m_alfoy 7y ago
Sorry if I come across as stupid but where do you usually look? I’m only in my first role but I’m thinking to start trying to attract offers from elsewhere. UK based if that matters on site recommendations
- empath75 7y ago
  Linkedin
- w1ntermute 7y ago
  My phone's contacts list. Make friends with as many people at your current company as possible, and when they leave, make sure to keep in regular touch with them. I enforce self-discipline on this by putting regular touchpoints in my GTD app. I try to get coffee with or talk on the phone to former coworkers once every 4-6 months, depending on how well I know them.
- p1esk 7y ago
  At first it was all through friends or connections. Then I found a job as the first engineer in a two person startup, posted on Craigslist (that was back in 2009). Eight years later that startup was sold for half a billion dollars. Today I would go directly to websites of companies I’m interested in, then find someone on LinkedIn who works there. But - first you better make sure you’re someone they would want to hire! Casually mentioning some cool project you put on Github, relevant to what they are doing, helps a lot in my experience.
  - symplee 7y ago
    How reproducible is this? There are only so many companies that can make it to that level of success, and only so many pigeons to fill those holes.
  - deleted 7y ago

OkGoDoIt 7y ago

I remember in years past these analyses would often have mention of Objective-C. Now I rarely see Objective-C or Swift mentioned at all. Is iOS development not as big as it used to be? Do people use react native or Xamarin or other cross-platform tool chains more?

hughpeters 7y ago

Python's growth is staggering and I'm happy to see that it's challenging Java. There are certainly some use cases where Java has some big advantages but there are so many use cases where Python can get the job done with much less time and code. Plus I personally enjoy writing python more than Java. I'm also curious where Go stacks up in this. In Stack Overflow's 2019 Survey [https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2019#technology https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2019#technology] Go and Ruby were neck and neck at 8-9%. With Kubernetes and microservices getting so popular I'd expect Go's popularity to grow and maybe pass Ruby.

m3kw9 7y ago

Is mobile omitted or that it didn’t make the top 20 or so

julius_set 7y ago

Can’t take Indeed seriously when they’ve omitted a major part of the industry which is: - mobile https://www.techrepublic.com/article/the-top-5-most-in-demand-developer-skills/ https://www.techrepublic.com/article/the-top-5-most-in-deman... https://www.monster.com/career-advice/article/job-skill-mobile-app-development https://www.monster.com/career-advice/article/job-skill-mobi... https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2019 https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2019

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