C Programming Jobs Not Trending Downward

dutter · #1 (**permalink**) 02-09-2006, 12:48 PM

It's all over for C. Ruby and Python have replaced C as the programming language of choice for developers who aren't churning out Visual Basic daily. At least, that's what the rumor mill suggests.

The awful truth about C programming can be found online, by anyone with a few minutes to search. C programming jobs have entered the La Brea tar pits, where Internet time and the elements of other languages will combine to drag them to a slow death.

Before you break out the flamethrower, it's not me saying this. It's the buzz, the whispers, the trendy Web 2.0 developers, talking about the demise of poor unlamented C programming.

The searches don't bear out a demise of C programming demand, at least not today.

So how do the job markets compare for C, Python, and Ruby? Actually, it isn't even close right now.

In a purely unscientific exercise, I performed some searches at the job vertical search engine SimplyHired, which returns results from a variety of sources.

For aspiring Ruby programmers, a whopping 325 job postings appear, 123 of which were listed as full-time gigs. That's a nationwide search of the United States.

Python fares better, with 2,322 job listings and 890 of them full-time. Forget about being the top Python snake-handler at Google, though. They hired Guido van Rossum, Python's inventor, in December 2005.

C programming? Try 23,770 listings, 10,008 full-time ones out of that group. About a third of those postings mention Java as well, in 7,801 total listings with 3,332 full-timers in the bunch.

I know there will be people who will take issue with the programming market and job availability. If you're a programmer with a particular point of view on the job market for your skills, post a response here. I would like to revisit this topic again.

vivekar · #2 (**permalink**) 02-10-2006, 12:51 PM

What about the prospects for new languages like C#. Is it included in your search results?

PHP? What happened? Is it still for hobby programmers?

I code C# for Work and PHP for hobby. ;-)

MTRoughNeck · #3 (**permalink**) 02-10-2006, 06:57 PM

Kinda tough to right kernel code in Python ;-)

Easywebdev · #4 (**permalink**) 02-11-2006, 01:29 AM

Heh, I was going to reply with a long winded post about how the majority of the open source community is based on C (for small programs that make up a linux OS (barring the kernel) then c++ is overkill) and was wording my post when I read the above post. No more to be said I think.

BatmanG8 · #5 (**permalink**) 02-13-2006, 06:41 PM

I've been collecting quotes and links to articles about the job markets and issues that affect the job markets for several years, with the article links reaching back to the early 1990s:

summary and index

data and graphs

Dice also publishes a bit of a snap-shot of advertising there. The Conference Board has been keeping a job ad index for decades, and recently added a separate count of on-line job ads.

It's difficult to pry useful info out of the BLS data, but one industry sub-category I regularly track and graph are production workers employed by pre-packaged software product "publishers".

A lot of what I see via the on-line sites are postings by body shops or otherwise for temp gigs as opposed to real full-time permanent career employment. Then there are blocks of ads by government contractors.