Main image of article May 2014: The Creators

Before there’s the need to hire sales, digital marketing and finance professionals, companies need creators. And, there’s no doubt this job market has been good to tech’s chief creators – our software developers.

DiceByNumbersIn the first quarter of 2014, the unemployment rate for software developers was 2.8 percent, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. That compares to five percent in the second quarter of 2009 (the quarter in which the recession ended) and 5.5 percent in the first quarter of 2010.

To put that demand in some perspective, employers searched Dice thousands of times (1) to start the year just looking for software developers, engineers, architects and leads. A look inside those searches reveals the combination of skills and experience hiring managers look for, along with the titles.

Top10

The number one request by a large margin: Java/J2EE. For a programming language that started to be commercialized about 20 years ago, it’s stranglehold on modern development is unshakable, including as a framework for the emerging Hadoop and as a part of Android (#31) and many other requests on the list.

Experience is clearly of value, with many hiring managers seeking senior developers (#5). In my own hiring, I’ve taken to matching less experienced developers with a more experienced counterpart as a way to build our team in a tight market. And I’m not the only one. New grads shouldn’t fret, hiring managers searching for “computer science” (#33) should equate to demand for those with recent diplomas.

Today’s biggest needs surround the core, but it will change as the next generation of technologies realize their promise. Visit here for America’s Hiring Managers' Top 40 Software Development requests.

Shravan Goli
President, Dice

*A single job posting may reflect more than one skill, location or type of position; therefore total figures for those attributes may be greater than total jobs posted.

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Image: Dice