The world's largest digital jobs survey, using data extracted from more than 230,000 jobs posted to The Freelancer.co.uk site, reveals some interesting hiring trends in the developer sector.
According to the latest Freelancer Fast 50 survey, if you are a mobile apps developer than it's pretty good news overall with job offers in both Android and iOS marketplaces on the up. However, Android developers should have the broadest smiles on their faces after the survey showed that job offers for them were up by 16% on the previous quarter. Meanwhile, although I would hardly have used the word 'stagnate' to describe the slower rise in iOS developer job positions as the Freelancer press release chose to, iOS jobs are slowing somewhat: up by a more modest 8%. Still, as I say, it does suggest that app development is a good place to be right now.
What is, perhaps, slightly worrying from the Apple developer perspective is that the momentum of the 30% jump seen in the previous quarter could not be maintained. Some are saying that this is down to a combination of the usual 'waiting game' for the iOS point release in September, the lukewarm reviews of the iPhone 5 and the reputational car crash that was iOS 6 maps. The clever money says we should wait and see what happens during the next quarter before jumping to conclusions, or jumping ship and boarding the Android development party boat.
If the iOS development job numbers continue to drop, however, then it could well signal the potential for a Microsoft revival in the developer workplace. Certainly Q4 will be critical for Microsoft what with the rollout of the Windows Phone 8 SDK.
Other trends revealed by the report include the growth in HTML5 jobs which were up 44% this quarter, and the 32% rise in jQuery jobs. PHP is also doing well, up by 19% along with CSS with the same growth and MySQL jobs up 18%.
"This report truly reflects Mary Meeker’s thesis that through software and the Internet we’re experiencing the reimagination of everything" says Matt Barrie, Freelancer.co.uk CEO, continuing "every industry we can think of is turning into a software business, and every job function is increasingly being performed using software tools in the cloud".
