May 2020 Hacker News Hiring Trends
With the midway point of 2020 fast approaching, and the world in the midst of perhaps the largest shift in employment in my lifetime, it seems like an appropriate time time to take a peek at how software job trends are looking through the lens of Ask HN: Who is hiring?, a regular, monthly collection of software development job postings. The summary posts on hntrends.com usually focus on specific technologies that are gaining or losing adoption, but first let's look at how Covid-19 is affecting this specific job board.
From my two perspectives, this data and my own job it should be no surprise that Software Development jobs have been significantly impacted by Covid-19. As companies halt hiring and announce furloughs and layoffs, the trend is showing clearly on Ask HN: Who is hiring?. April and May both dropped sharply, 39% decreases over the same month in 2019. May is traditionally the peak month of the year for postings on HN, let's hope the summer and fall can rebound to beat May this year.
Now, onto the tech changes, or lack thereof. React still reigns supreme in the number 1 spot with Python and AWS holding steady in second and third place, respectively. This is the same top three as April as well as the same top three as last May.
Looking further through the rankings, it looks like TypeScript is the one making the biggest push in 2020, just like it was in 2019. TypeScript has held the #5 spot nearly all of 2020. In fact 4 of the top 10 are JavaScript related as JavaScript continues its dominance of the web stack.
Onto the rankings...
Compare Top 10 Programming Languages
Compare Rails, node.js, PHP and Django
Compare React, Angular, Vue, and Ember
Compare Postgresql, MySQL and SQL Server
Compare Mongodb, Elasticsearch, Cassandra and DynamoDB
Compare Storm, Hadoop and Spark
Compare Kafka, RabbitMQ, SQS and Kinesis
Compare Terraform, Chef, Puppet, Ansible and CloudFormation
Compare Docker, Kubernetes, Mesos and Terraform
Compare Blockchain, Bitcoin and Ethereum
| Tech | Rank | Last Month | Change | Last Year | Change |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| React | 1 | 1 | 0 | 1 | 0 |
| Python | 2 | 2 | 0 | 2 | 0 |
| AWS | 3 | 3 | 0 | 3 | 0 |
| Full Stack | 4 | 7 | +3 | 8 | +4 |
| TypeScript | 5 | 5 | 0 | 12 | +7 |
| node.js | 6 | 10 | +4 | 4 | -2 |
| JavaScript | 7 | 8 | +1 | 7 | 0 |
| Postgresql | 8 | 4 | -4 | 6 | -2 |
| golang | 9 | 12 | +3 | 10 | +1 |
| Java | 10 | 13 | +3 | 11 | +1 |
| DevOps | 11 | 9 | -2 | 5 | -6 |
| Machine Learning | 12 | 6 | -6 | 9 | -3 |
| Docker | 13 | 19 | +6 | 13 | 0 |
| AI | 14 | 11 | -3 | 17 | +3 |
| Ruby | 15 | 18 | +3 | 18 | +3 |
| iOS | 16 | 15 | -1 | 21 | +5 |
| Android | 17 | 14 | -3 | 15 | -2 |
| GraphQL | 18 | 17 | -1 | 31 | +13 |
| Kubernetes | 19 | 16 | -3 | 14 | -5 |
| Rails | 20 | 20 | 0 | 16 | -4 |
| Tech | Mentions | Rank | Last Year Mentions | Last Year Rank | Change |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Spring | 8 | 64 | 3 | 133 | +69 |
| Asp | 5 | 73 | 3 | 131 | +58 |
| Oracle | 6 | 69 | 4 | 123 | +54 |
| Haskell | 6 | 67 | 6 | 98 | +31 |
| Express | 9 | 58 | 8 | 87 | +29 |
| REST | 17 | 33 | 17 | 54 | +21 |
| Bitcoin | 5 | 75 | 6 | 96 | +21 |
| Distributed Systems | 16 | 34 | 17 | 55 | +21 |
| Rust | 19 | 31 | 20 | 51 | +20 |
| Apollo | 6 | 68 | 8 | 84 | +16 |
| Tech | Mentions | Rank | Last Year Mentions | Last Year Rank | Change |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| webpack | 0 | 204 | 9 | 79 | -125 |
| RDS | 0 | 222 | 6 | 100 | -122 |
| Git | 1 | 168 | 13 | 62 | -106 |
| HTML5 | 0 | 181 | 7 | 88 | -93 |
| Web Services | 1 | 162 | 8 | 85 | -77 |
| Redshift | 1 | 172 | 6 | 101 | -71 |
| S3 | 1 | 129 | 12 | 69 | -60 |
| Apache | 1 | 151 | 6 | 95 | -56 |
| SQL | 5 | 79 | 39 | 27 | -52 |
| Embedded Systems | 1 | 139 | 6 | 97 | -42 |