Will it really “look great” on your resume? Introducing ResumeRank
TL;DR — check out my new economic ranking of technology, ResumeRank!
Hey, developer. Pretend you’re in a room full of fellow engineers, and you are asked to give your top 3 motivations for being a software developer. Write them down if you like. Done?
Now, let’s review. You probably put things like: “it’s fun/challenging,” “great community,” “making the world better,” right? Was money anywhere on the list?
Probably not. However, let’s be real. Software may be the hottest industry in the whole United States. There’s no question that money is a factor.
At the very least, it motivates us by way of our employers and clients. You had better believe that lowering costs was a major factor in the open-source revolution. And when you load up Netflix or Amazon, every pixel of what you’re seeing was optimized for revenue via A/B testing.
It’s not just because of them, though; it’s really us, too! How many times have you adopted a new tech because it would “look great on your resume?” Do you mean look great for your significant other? No — to hiring managers, obviously.
Have you ever stopped to ask yourself which techs are really the greatest-looking on your resume? We have many long-running rankings for technology by popularity and performance. Finding the right tech for your problem domain is also important, and there’s no shortage of information out there. It seems that what we’re lacking is an objective ranking of economic benefit for job seekers.
I first sat down to examine this 3 years ago, when I came up with “job-dollars” as a relative measure of job market strength. Over the years, I have refined my scraping and data-crunching techniques, and now have a toolkit that I call ResumeRank.
Take two factors — expected earnings in dollars and total number of job openings — and multiply them together. Twenty job openings at $50,000 a year would be equal in strength to ten job openings at $100,000 a year. There’s more to ResumeRank than that, but that’s the basic idea.
There are a sea of variables I could have chosen from, but I believe these two stand as proxies for many others. The higher your salary, the more likely you are to have great benefits and flexibility on the job. The more jobs there are in total, the more likely you are to find a job near you, or in a domain you are passionate about.
The power of ResumeRank lies in its lack of sophistication. The only non-linear function is the one used compute the chance of getting hired (explained fully here). Future development will mostly be around the data collection and scraping. I also plan to embed rank deltas in the annual report, similar to the TIOBE index.
The National Developer Report is free and always will be, and you can find the 2020 edition on my personal website here. I’ll summarize the data in a few points below:
There are six techs with extremely strong markets (five programming languages and one cloud solution): AWS, C#, Java, Javascript, Python, and SQL.
Web development technologies other than these 6 that enjoy favorable markets include PHP, Ruby, Node.js, AngularJS, Go, and Perl.
Cloud and database technologies tend to produce favorable-to-strong markets across all skill levels.
The junior developer job markets for Objective C, Redis, Go, and Swift get substantial boosts due to low amounts of competition.
Now, what if we switch to the perspective of employers? Trust me, things look quite different. I have another, all-new technique for estimating the personnel costs of hiring a development team, again, broken down by technology, and I’ll follow up on that in a later post.
Finally, a message to developers-in-training: ResumeRank is not intended to be the sole factor in deciding on a technology to learn, but one data point of many. And the markets for all technologies are, in general, good.
Please direct all questions or feedback to my Twitter account. Enjoy!