
Ask HN: What stacks dominate in remote jobs? - throw31337
I work as a dev in UK for 6 years now, mostly JVM (Scala, Java), SQL, Javascript, some Python and Rust. I am now very interested in starting working remotely, so I&#x27;m curious what stacks are popular in remote jobs? What should I concentrate my attention towards from purely realistic and practical perspective?<p>Obviously if I could choose I&#x27;d prefer something like Scala&#x2F;Big Data or Rust&#x2F;Real time, but something tells me Ruby&#x2F;Rails and Python&#x2F;Django or something with Javascript will be way more popular?
======
xando
I’m not too sure if the question is meaningful. But since I’m running
[https://whoishiring.io](https://whoishiring.io) and scrapping all major
sources with jobs for developers, I have a lot of data related. I can put some
numbers here.

Top 10 from all sources (that I'm looking at) since August 2015.

    
    
      Javascript 27.69%
      SQL 22.41%
      Ruby 17.71%
      Python 17.60%
      AWS 13.85%
      Ruby On Rails 13.83%
      AngularJS 11.47%
      Java 10.89%
      PHP 10.57%
      React 10.46%
    

(top 100
[https://gist.githubusercontent.com/xando/1853d5e48f94abe2f13...](https://gist.githubusercontent.com/xando/1853d5e48f94abe2f13351f60377ac1c/raw/7407d378a00fa82d455065900fb9486220d04745/remote_stack.txt))

Top 10 from “Hacker News Who is Hiring” since 2011

    
    
      Javascript 24.17%
      Python 22.38%
      SQL 18.63%
      Ruby 18.13%
      Ruby On Rails 17.00%
      AWS 12.38%
      AngularJS 10.82%
      Java 10.13%
      PostgreSQL 9.72%
      React 9.53%
    

(top 100
[https://gist.githubusercontent.com/xando/d1daca52b797e725175...](https://gist.githubusercontent.com/xando/d1daca52b797e725175be29fcb8eecd5/raw/0470129110e0d0b54aa6ebb4dd43e831ef429c17/hn_remote_stack.txt))

edit: where 100% equals all jobs tagged as remote.

~~~
Buetol
It would be useful to compare the proportions difference between non-remote
and remote instead of the absolute popularity.

Example: Since SQL dominates most job offers already, it's gonna dominate also
remote jobs offers. What you want is to look at technologies that are more
predominant in remote than non-remote.

~~~
xando
Actually a lot of people ask me about different angles for the data. For this
reason I'm trying to build a stats / trends page. So feedback / requirements
welcome.

~~~
Buetol
I think it would be better to just let people download the raw data (like the
database dump). Then people can do their analysis on top (like, I could
produce the stats I just told you about)

~~~
lsiebert
Actually what would be cool would be to release the data, and hold a contest
related to it. Maybe one award track for interesting analysis, one for
presentation of data. You could probably get some companies to sponsor it, as
it's cheap advertising that people will be interested in viewing. Plus someone
might be able to write up a paper on it for journal publication.

------
atemerev
From my experience (working 100% remotely for some years), I'd say that the
sweet point lies in relatively "exotic" stacks, like Scala, Erlang, maybe even
Rust.

It's not that there are more remote jobs in Scala than in Javascript. However,
people who hire Scala developers seem to accept that when you need a top Scala
team, you have to bring people from all over the world, i.e. they are fully
committed to building a great fully remote team, not bringing remote
developers as an afterthought (in general, you wouldn't want to take a role of
remote engineer in a mostly non-remote team, especially if you are one of the
first ones).

And Python/Javascript developers are dime a dozen (maybe not, they are still
expensive, but much more numerous, and usually there isn't a problem to hire
locally).

~~~
lj3
What about legacy systems that were once popular but aren't anymore, like PHP?
I know there's a lot of wordpress development demand out there and fewer and
fewer skilled devs who are willing to learn and/or work with PHP.

~~~
atemerev
PHP is still too mainstream these days.

However, if you are an experienced Perl programmer, you'll have better luck.

But _starting_ with Perl or PHP is probably not the best course of action;
this is a path for already experienced developers.

------
pieterhg
I make Remote OK, which aggregates most job boards for remote jobs. I have
data for the last 2 years of jobs.

I quickly made this page for you to see what stacks/tags are most popular:
[https://remoteok.io/stats.php](https://remoteok.io/stats.php)

Top stacks:

    
    
      Ruby		1,759 jobs	(9%)
      Node JS	953 jobs	(5%)
      PHP		779 jobs	(4%)
      Meteor JS	645 jobs	(3%)
      Python	552 jobs	(3%)
      Java		525 jobs	(3%)
      C++		374 jobs	(2%)
      Linux		313 jobs	(2%)
      C		268 jobs	(1%)
      Rails		266 jobs	(1%)
      Scala		242 jobs	(1%)
      Wordpress	226 jobs	(1%)
      Jquery	212 jobs	(1%)
      Mongodb	136 jobs	(1%)
      .NET		119 jobs	(1%)
      Drupal	115 jobs	(1%)
      Photoshop	100 jobs	(1%)
    

Top tags:

    
    
      Dev		8,919 jobs	(46%)
      Senior	2,619 jobs	(13%)
      Exec		2,045 jobs	(10%)
      Ruby		1,759 jobs	(9%)
      Marketing	1,469 jobs	(8%)
      Full Stack	1,293 jobs	(7%)
      Mobile	1,036 jobs	(5%)
      UI		881 jobs	(5%)
      Sys Admin	789 jobs	(4%)
      Backend	722 jobs	(4%)
      Devops	674 jobs	(3%)
      Admin		641 jobs	(3%)
      Python	552 jobs	(3%)
      Full Time	546 jobs	(3%)
      CSS		513 jobs	(3%)
      Medical	437 jobs	(2%)
      PM		426 jobs	(2%)
      C++		374 jobs	(2%)
      Cloud		370 jobs	(2%)
      Ops		346 jobs	(2%)
    

I think these are fairly similar to non-remote positions but I'm not sure.
It's predominantly dev/tech jobs any way.

~~~
khoury
Hey, check your trends page, might be a bug?
[https://remoteok.io/trends](https://remoteok.io/trends)

~~~
pieterhg
Yep it's kinda broken, will fix now :)

------
gregjor
I don't think this is a meaningful question. No stacks "dominate" in remote
jobs just as no stacks dominate in on-site jobs. Most remote jobs are just
working from home or somewhere else for the same companies that have people
on-site.

If you want to work remotely what you should focus on is honing the business
value you can offer, because that's what companies pay for. No company,
whether they hire remote or not, ever needs 2,000 more lines of Ruby or
Javascript in the next month. What they need are people who can solve business
problems. If you can do that, where you happen to do it from becomes
irrelevant.

I have been freelancing remotely for almost ten years. I concentrate on fixing
business problems. The "stack" rarely matters. Technologies come and go, and
over-specialized programmers go with them.

~~~
throw31337
Maybe I didn't express myself clearly enough - this is all about the
practicality of starting remoting. I agree with your point of solving business
problems - that is obvious and I am a quite a generalist (with certain
preferences) when it comes to tech. I am just trying to be realistic here - I
don't find it easy to find a job on site and my guess is finding a remote one
is way more difficult with all the devs around the world from developing
countries knocking down salaries. I thought most companies tend to hire with
focus on certain experience?

~~~
gregjor
Low-end competition on places like UpWork is mostly piecework, doing small and
very specific jobs at sometimes extremely low rates. I don't compete in that
market and I don't advise it.

If you want to freelance remotely I advise lining up clients before you start
traveling or living abroad, because it's harder to do that remotely. Unless
you like churning your customers or doing piecework, you need to aim for long-
term relationships. I focus on small- and medium-size companies that don't
have in-house IT/programming staff, they are used to outsourcing already. They
often have a backlog of work and a history of bad experience with freelancers,
so if you gain their trust and show an interest in their business (not just
what tech they happen to use) you can find plenty of work.

If you want to find a startup that's hiring remote staff there are online job
boards specifically for that.

The business problems I address in my freelancing is taking over legacy
applications (usually web sites, and often not very old or even finished)
where the original developers have left. This happens a lot -- small
businesses are terrible at putting together requirements and specs, terrible
at hiring, and don't usually attract the kind of people who want to get hired
at Google and Snapchat. I only need a handful of clients to keep myself flush.

My blog (see my profile) has some more specific articles you may find helpful.

~~~
sasha0
How do you find small businesses with these technical issues? Using
networking?

~~~
gregjor
About half word of mouth and referrals. I work through an agency now and get
customers through them. Once in a while I get a lead/customer from articles on
my blog.

Every business has a backlog of bugs and enhancements they don't have
resources for, so it's not so much a matter of finding them as it is
persuading them you can help. Listening and understanding their business
problems is the key.

------
FuNe
You can see the current trends by looking at job listings. E.g.
[http://stackoverflow.com/jobs?sort=i&allowsremote=true](http://stackoverflow.com/jobs?sort=i&allowsremote=true)

Another good source of info is: [https://github.com/lukasz-madon/awesome-
remote-job](https://github.com/lukasz-madon/awesome-remote-job)

I think it has more to do with the company itself and less with the tech stack
though. There are companies that get remote working (not necessarily new or
startups) and others that they don't.

~~~
V-2
> _Another good source of info is:_ [https://github.com/lukasz-madon/awesome-
> remote-job](https://github.com/lukasz-madon/awesome-remote-job)

 _Real HQ - Maker of Agent Pronto, software designed to help make home buying
and selling a better experience. We 've been remote since the start, now 50+
spread across the globe_

On [https://realhq.com/jobs/](https://realhq.com/jobs/) though:

 _Work Remotely

We’re looking for people who live in the United States._

Another company doesn't state that explicitly under
[http://www.surgeforward.com/careers/](http://www.surgeforward.com/careers/)
\- but they feature a map of stick figure "employees" spread over the US on
that site, a clear indication they're in the same camp

For many companies "remote work" is synonymous with "remote work for US
residents", and it's a totally different category from global point of view.
I'd like to see some source that dinstinguishes between the two

------
pimterry
From what I've seen, Rails and Node tend to be the big contenders, with quite
a few people starting to move things to Go now. That's just anecdotal though,
hard to get much concrete numbers on this sort of thing.

[https://remoteok.io](https://remoteok.io) aggregates remote jobs, and has
lots of them tagged by language, which might be a route to try and get more
substantial answers to this.

Let me know if you/anybody has a go at this actually, I might have a go myself
next week, if nobody else has in the meantime.

------
upbeatlinux
I don't think you should look at it from the standpoint of what's popular as
it really depends. Instead take a look at the company, team experience, road
map, learning opportunities, size and stage of company, etc.

If you enjoy learning and exploring parts of the stack in some depth ensure
that vision matches up with the role and it's responsibilities.

------
ChemicalWarfare
Well so let's say you're an "enterprise developer" with Java/Scala for the
backend and some JS skills. From the looks of it you also into the big data
stuff... Are you really willing to switch to (for example) PHP or Ruby on
Rails just to be able to work remote?

I'd say start looking for a remote job which requires your skill set. If you
start seeing a need for some new tech in your "portfolio" based on what you're
seeing out there - won't hurt to take a look at it, maybe do a "weekend POC"
type project push it to github and add that tech to your resume :)

------
dev_iq
I have worked as a PHP full stack developer several times remotely. LAMP/WAMP
stack is mostly in demand for most of the startups based in India. The next in
demand is Ruby on Rails, I believe. RoR is basically preferred by small
startups who want their product up and running quickly. I've built products
with RoR and it's really fast development. The only drawback is that it is
heavy on your pocket, so to speak.

One thing that you should definitely have in your kitty is JavaScript. OO JS
is gold. Next in line, AngularJS and ReactJS.

~~~
lj3
> One thing that you should definitely have in your kitty is JavaScript. OO JS
> is gold. Next in line, AngularJS and ReactJS.

Is it, though? There are so many JS developers out there that a company would
have little trouble hiring one locally. How would you stand out as being worth
the money and the communications overhead?

~~~
sotojuan
By being great and preferably experienced. Finding a solid JavaScript
developer who's also a great programmer in general is hard.

~~~
lj3
And how do you expect a potential employer to identify such people? It's not
an easy or trivial thing to determine who is a good dev and who is a bad dev.

~~~
dev_iq
Show samples of your previous work. Maintain an active Github account.

~~~
lj3
That's not going to set you apart from the legions of JS devs they can hire
locally who also have samples of their previous work and maintain an active
github account.

~~~
dev_iq
Agreed. I'm out of ideas here as to how you would stand out among the crowd. I
think it just comes down to the complexity and budget of the project. You hire
according to that. With so much IT projects around the world, if you make some
effort you surely get some work.

------
rizn
I'm also from E.Europe and I was in similar position. Was contracting as php
dev in UK/London, then moved back to my home country. As someone suggested,
the best thing is trying not to be 100% programmer, but also have a little bit
of business acumen and trying to get to know companies/people in London while
you're there. This way I managed to do some remote work (same rate as on-
site). Some companies are willing to pay you well as long as they know you
personally and have experience what you can do.

------
noelwelsh
We do a lot of remote work with Scala. I think we know each other, but if we
don't my work email is noel at underscore dot io.

------
dep_b
Doing Apple and Microsoft mainly (but basically anything when it's required,
like a PHP or Python API for an app or JS for a website), I'd say doing iOS
work is the main part of it in terms of offers.

iOS projects are or can be pretty small yet they require a great deal of
expertise to execute correctly. I worked on many projects solo or in
distributed teams.

Microsoft work is a bit harder to find (or doesn't get delivered on my
doorstep as often) but more often when you do land it you're going to be The
Only Guy That Knows How The System Works after a while since ASP.Net and
WinForms / WPF / etc applications are more often slowly evolving highly
specific and mission critical applications, so once you land them you're in a
better position than with those many one off iOS applications.

I guess Java and .Net are more or less interchangeable in that regard.

------
nwhatt
Outside of the software stack I'd imagine you'll struggle if your devops stack
is on-prem. Look for jobs that use cloud-based source management, cloud-based
CI, and are hosted in the cloud.

I wrote a general blog about working from home with some other things I use.
[https://www.redoxengine.com/blog/working-remotely-at-
redox](https://www.redoxengine.com/blog/working-remotely-at-redox)

------
anaolykarpov
I work remotely for a US company from Romania. I do web development in Perl.
And some jQuery for the frontend, but 90% backend dev using Perl.

------
foreverdev
It looks like I'm working with statistically 'wrong' stack for a wannabe
remote dev

~~~
throw31337
I get the same feeling. What's yours?

~~~
foreverdev
.net, javascript, sql :) web dev on MS stack

~~~
GFischer
I'm also a mostly Microsoft stack developer, and I looked at remote jobs, and
there are very little with this stack.

It's popular with enterprises, which are very much remote-adverse.

I didn't find a solution, although I'm doing a side project in React - now I
need to learn either Node or Ruby I guess (my backend is .NET based).

Node has Visual Studio and Azure support, so it would be the least painful I
guess.

------
allsystemsgo
I'm an iOS engineer and remote work is pretty hard to come by. :(

------
alpeb
I work with Scala remotely, and we're hiring! (send me a PM).

~~~
throw31337
You don't have your contact info on your profile.

~~~
notinreallife
maybe that was the joke

------
anc84
Is this question some cynic attempt to see what keywords are going to be
upvoted?

What does "remote" even mean here? A ukranian remotely working for a US
company? A brit remotely working for a chinese one?

Why would there be a difference in stack just because someone is not working
in-office but from somewhere else? The stack much rather depends on the field
of work, the technology involved and _maybe_ the _location_ of the parent
company (at which you might also be able to work non-remotely). ;)

~~~
throw31337
No, this is a very legitimate question. I am an Eastern European and having
spent 7 years in UK (and last two in London) I realized that all I do here is
bleed huge amounts of money for rent. I want to get a remote job and move back
to my homeland. This is all about maximizing my chances of getting such a job,
because I understand that remote is rather competitive market with developers
from developing countries knocking down salaries, etc. Just trying to be
realistic.

~~~
V-2
As long as you're already in London, I suppose the best way would be to start
working for a company on-site and then make an arrangement to continue the
collaboration remotely (assuming they do remote at all). It's always better if
someone gets to know you face to face first.

~~~
mountaineer22
I agree with this. Establish a face-to-face relationship and then begin
working offsite.

I assume you can find a London employer with similar values (rent is
ridiculous - let's hire remote devs, so we don't have to lease so much office
space).

------
IndianAstronaut
Surprised I am not seeing C# here. One of my remote gigs was the Microsoft
stack.

~~~
GFischer
I didn't see many when I searched. Where did you find it? Word of mouth or a
website? Thank you :)

------
christophilus
We're running Rails + React at Ruzuku. How's that for alliteration?

------
sprybear
Been seeing a number of JS / Angular related stuff as of late.

------
scalesolved
From my personal experience you are best off with Javascript and then either
Node/Python or Ruby as the backend, loads of jobs advertise for these.

Much easier to find front end work than backend remotely I think.

I work remotely using Java 8 (the good type :D)

------
tmat
we're starting to get quite a bit of both elixir and react in green jobs. lost
of rails in existing apps.

------
wprapido
PHP + JS here

------
chrishn
I'd say Ruby/Rails and JavaScript (Angular, React, Node) dominate the remote
market. Just check weworkremotely.

