

An Analysis of Market Demand for Web Programming Languages (October 2012) - marcamillion
http://blog.5kmvp.com/analysis-of-market-demand-for-web-programming

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zissou
What about the wages/salaries + the rest of the labor supply side? Comparing
the raw quantity of job postings (labor demand) across cities doesn't have
much value. The suggestion you received in your last post about collecting
this data over time was the best one you've gotten. Building on that, you need
some way to proxy for the number of relevant job seekers in each location (and
for each programming language in perfect world) because 10 times more jobs in
city A than city B doesn't matter if there are 10 times more potential workers
in city A. The other piece that you could think about adding is a way to
detect when a job match occurred. Although it's far from perfect, a start
would be doing something like inferring from recently removed Craigslist posts
that "Hey this post that used to be here is now gone. They must have found a
job candidate." Obviously it's a strong assumption since posts can be removed
for a number of reasons, including ones that would lead to a false-positive
under the assumption I just described. On the other hand, one metric you'd get
out of your data if you setup the system this way is the length of time jobs
across programming languages and cities remain active (e.g. "Jobs for Python
developers in Austin, TX appear to get filled N times faster than jobs for C#
developers.") If nothing else, this time-based metric could be used to explain
the supply side -- cities that fill jobs for a certain language faster on
average may be doing so because there are more potential employees in that
area. You could even use Google Trends data to see how trends for searches for
"python jobs" or whatever in each city affects the story.

It's something to think about and play around with. I've read published
economics research papers that used the "post removed" assumption in the
market for used products on Amazon.com -- when a unique URL for a used product
would disappear, the authors concluded that to be a sale [at the price it was
last observed at].

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marcamillion
Well...the suggestions sound good - but they are a bit outside of what I am
trying to capture.

All I am trying to do is to get a sense for the absolute demand (especially
relative to other types of gigs) for web development gigs.

I think the only way to get a sense of Wages/Salaries would be to start
looking at 'Jobs' - which is outside of the scope of the analysis I am doing.

One flaw with the 'post removed' though is that sometimes the posts are
removed because of spam (i.e. it was created by a spammer or someone with
fraudulent intent). So I am not sure how much of a valid proxy that may be
here...especially given that another real assumption for people removing posts
is that they get inundated with unqualified leads - so they remove it to stop
the inbound flood.

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owenjones
I see you have 'closure' listed under client side languages, are you referring
to Clojure?

In which case it is most definitely server-side, unless you meant
Clojurescript?

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marcamillion
I meant 'Clojurescript' - the Clojure to JS compiler.

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paulhauggis
My experience is much different (and I've looked in many different sections on
craigslist).

Python, PHP, Java, and C# were the top. Ruby was almost non-existent.

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marcamillion
Well...you agree with my findings on the PHP, Java & C#. Those are some of the
more popular. Python & Ruby are less represented than the tech blog press
leads you to believe.

Either way, one of the things I am looking forward to discovering is seeing if
there are fluctuations throughout the year - simple cohort analysis and such.

