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This doesn't show exactly demand. One thing about data science job listings is that some requirements aren't descriptive of the job itself. It's common to put i

by jstx1 5y ago

This doesn't show exactly demand. One thing about data science job listings is that some requirements aren't descriptive of the job itself. It's common to put in something like "Python/R" or "Python/R/Julia" as a way to show that they want experience with at least one of them, but then the job is almost always Python; and not having Python experience is an immediate disadvantage because so many other candidates know it. I don't know about the Australian market but in my job search in the UK last year, 100% of the jobs I came across were Python jobs even if there was a long tail of other languages in the job descriptions. If someone sees this visualisation and decides to focus on R/SAS/MATLAB or anything even lower on the list, they're making a career mistake in the current data science market. (tl;dr - scraping job listings can lead to misleading results)

nomilk 5y ago
For sure, Job listings are a proxy and should be taken with salt. 3501 python jobs, 2490 R jobs still indicates strong demand for R though, even if it's not going as bananas as python right now. I suspect a lot of python jobs would hire a good 'R person' knowing they'll be up to speed in a month or two, and vice versa. Similar to other CS domains, where strong fundamentals are much more important than whatever language you learned them in.
- jstx1 5y ago
  > 3501 python jobs, 2490 R jobs still indicates strong demand for R though My point is that out of those 2490 job listings that mention R, the number of jobs that require you to actually write R more than any other language will be closer to 0 than it is to 2490. Some of them will still actually use R but it's a much much smaller number than the visualisation leads you to believe.
  - nomilk 5y ago
    The data seems to support your idea. Although there were 2370 jobs that mentioned both python and R, there were about 9 times as many 'python only' jobs (261) as there were 'R only' jobs (31): https://i.imgur.com/vkjGSyU.png https://i.imgur.com/vkjGSyU.png

by jstx1 5y ago

nomilk 5y ago

For sure, Job listings are a proxy and should be taken with salt. 3501 python jobs, 2490 R jobs still indicates strong demand for R though, even if it's not going as bananas as python right now. I suspect a lot of python jobs would hire a good 'R person' knowing they'll be up to speed in a month or two, and vice versa. Similar to other CS domains, where strong fundamentals are much more important than whatever language you learned them in.

jstx1 5y ago
> 3501 python jobs, 2490 R jobs still indicates strong demand for R though My point is that out of those 2490 job listings that mention R, the number of jobs that require you to actually write R more than any other language will be closer to 0 than it is to 2490. Some of them will still actually use R but it's a much much smaller number than the visualisation leads you to believe.
- nomilk 5y ago
  The data seems to support your idea. Although there were 2370 jobs that mentioned both python and R, there were about 9 times as many 'python only' jobs (261) as there were 'R only' jobs (31): https://i.imgur.com/vkjGSyU.png https://i.imgur.com/vkjGSyU.png