Scala programming jobs

Every once in a while I query the job search engines to see what’s out there these days. I first did this in February, 2013, and have looked at them again every few months since then.

I especially like to look at Dice.com because most of those jobs are for contractors, and when businesses can't find full-time employees with certain skills -- such as new programming languages -- they hire contractors. This is also an indication of new projects that businesses are staffing up for.

Current Scala and Akka job data

I've only looked at Scala job posting data a few times, and here are the Dice.com results:

Dice "Scala" results
--------------------
June, 2014 - 411
July, 2013 - 309
Feb, 2013  - 230

By percentage, Akka job listings on Dice have jumped even more. I only have two data points, but here you go:

Dice "Akka" results
-------------------
June, 2014 - 93
July, 2013 - 18

The sections that follow show the other data I found this earlier this year and last year.

June, 2014

Here are the results of searching for “Scala” at each of the job search engines in June, 2014:

• careerbuilder.com - 122
• dice.com - 411
• monster.com - 41
• indeed.com - 1,583

I also searched for Akka jobs, and found these numbers:

• careerbuilder.com - 11
• dice.com - 93
• monster.com - 2
• indeed.com - 241

I don’t trust Indeed for data like this; they keep postings around forever and also have duplicates.

July, 2013

On July 1, 2013, I took the time to do a few more searches, this time for a variety of keywords, and this is what I found:

CareerBuilder:

• scala - 74
• play framework - 3
• akka - 3
• cassandra - 156
• hadoop - 438
• mongodb - 193
• java - 9,569
• javascript - 6,307

Dice.com:

• scala - 309
• play framework - 28
• akka - 18
• cassandra - 517
• hadoop - 1457
• mongodb - 706
• java - 17,710
• javascript - 11,179

Monster:

• scala - 109
• play framework - 16
• akka - 7
• cassandra - 216
• hadoop - 582
• mongodb - 369
• java - 1,000+ (they don’t list the exact number)
• javascript - 1,000+ (they don’t list the exact number)

Those big numbers for Java show where Scala can hope to get one day. (I only ran the JavaScript numbers because I was curious how they compared to Java.)

February, 2013

I did this first back in February, 2013. Back then I only searched for “Scala” programming jobs, and this is what I found:

• careerbuilder.com - 83
• dice.com - 230
• monster.com - 81
• indeed.com - 1,080

I don’t trust the data from indeed.com. They list jobs multiple times, and keep things online forever, so I don’t look at them any more, not for data like this.

As mentioned earlier, Dice lists contracting jobs, so with a new technology like Scala, I think they’re a decent indicator of the coming market. (That’s just my opinion, though.) I know that when I worked at a NASA subcontractor, we hired contractors either because (a) they were much better than other people we could hire, or (b) because they knew an up-and-coming technology we didn’t know.