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Year | Total | Jan Feb Mar Apr May Jun Jul Aug Sep Oct Nov Dec
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2001 | 280 | 0 2 8 21 40 34 33 29 34 30 35 14
2002 | 413 | 34 33 35 16 45 26 37 46 33 42 31 35
2003 | 560 | 43 36 56 56 21 39 44 64 53 52 52 44
2004 | 949 | 75 58 78 88 74 88 82 87 65 87 85 82
2005 | 1429 | 93 110 120 135 135 125 115 113 106 132 144 101
2006 | 1857 | 164 138 157 151 166 153 140 176 152 172 179 109
2007 | 1966 | 182 156 181 190 177 168 176 165 145 179 148 99
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I'm not affiliated with jobs.perl.org, and this is only the simplest of analyses. I didn't try to correct for duplicate posts where the same job was re-advertised. jobs.perl.org has their own stats, although Dave Rolsky seemed to think my numbers might be better. I don't know if I believe him. :)
I don't attempt to draw any conclusions about the popularity (up or down) of Perl from these numbers. In general, I think that the continual uptrend is more about people finding out about the free service than the same market having more jobs.
I made this same report in 2006 too, and there are some interesting links in the comments. Also interesting is renodino's graphs about jobs on Dice and the code he wrote to make them, along with the discussion about the usefulness of any conclusions.
Re:More jobs ...
brian_d_foy on 2008-01-02T03:12:35
I haven't done anything tricky to pull apart the actual jobs, but I expect the number of unique job sources is up too.:) works for me
TeeJay on 2008-01-02T12:19:25
"I'm pretty sure the number of happily employed Perl programmers is up"
I reckon so, my current client has grown from 1 perl developer to 4 man team, with 1 head of technology with strong Perl, myself as a contractor and 2 developers new full time perl developers.
My last client grew from 1 php developer and 1 database/perl developer to 1 php/perl developer and 3 (4 before I left) perl developers - in fact while I was there, I was training a new graduate in Perl.
Both clients are doing pretty interesting stuff in very different areas, aviation and online classifieds - one dealing with critical legacy data feeds (mixed with some newer XML feeds and service), the other dealing with a massive database and hugely busy website (that's working a small cluster of top end (for Lintel) servers very hard)
anyway - I've posted repeatedly on use.perl about how the perl Jobs market is growing and stifled only by the time it takes to train new blood.. http://use.perl.org/user/TeeJay/journal/29915 Re:works for me
chudpi on 2008-01-02T21:58:38
"perl Jobs market is growing and stifled only by the time it takes to train new blood"Yes, there has certainly been a lot of stability in Perl jobs recently. It's good to be busy, but the difficulty of finding qualified Perl programmers combined with the steep learning curve for the rest carries with it the temptation to develop new projects in other languages and keep the slim Perl staff busy with maintenance of existing code.
That is a dangerous trend, which I observe in my company. I hope many of you are seeing the opposite.Re:works for me
kaare on 2008-01-03T09:45:49
Actually, I see the opposite trend. More and more new projects starting in Perl, thanks to new and better modules. Again, a tribute to CPAN.
My fear is that the pool of well behaving Perl developers is drying out, and companies have to depend on people coming from the Java world with lower standards for code quality.Re:works for me
chudpi on 2008-01-03T17:30:03
That's very encouraging to hear indeed.
And an interesting point regarding the shrinking numbers of well behaved Perl developers. Why do you think that is?Re:works for me
chromatic on 2008-01-03T19:32:00
From the rumors I hear, well-behaved Perl developers aren't willing to work in, for example, London for 30k quid.
Re:works for me
kaare on 2008-01-03T22:44:31
Sorry, it should read "free well behaved Perl developers"Meaning that it's hard to find Perl people for jobs now; they (we) are all busy.
Re:works for me
TeeJay on 2008-01-03T10:22:02
What steep learning curve?
do you think the current crop of experienced perl developers battled a steep learning curve, or got hooked because the curve was so shallow and easy to climb?
I haven't had any difficulty in training new perl programmers, the excellent Learning Perl and Perl Cookbook can get a complete newbie up to speed and productive quite quickly with only minimal review and supervision.
Just an FYI RE: The Dynamic Languages Jobs Barometer: The current numbers vs. baseline numbers have been way off the last week, presumably due to the holidaze. It'll be interesting to see how they rebound, tho.
Also, here's someone who's looking for a job. Perhaps someone can help this poor Rails refugee out ?
