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Beware of Marketeers Bearing Strange and Smelly Fruit
posted Wednesday, 29 March 2006
At first glance and if you don't think - JDeveloper, NetBeans and IntelliJ developers might be alarmed. The blog entry purposely leaves out a gigantic number and the number is 13,801 (as of today):
So if you add up his IDE-specific postings you get a very small number and percentage :
Now we know that a very small number of postings target specific popular IDEs. Ask yourself why ? You know the answer. If you are building real Java code (as opposed to non-standard SWT software) then you don't need to tell developers what to use. In fact, most developers are downright resentful. You can build standard Java code with any number of IDEs - so why would a recruiter put an impediment in the way? Unless they are not using standard Java APIs and are building an Eclipse plugin with SWT or a SWT-based RCP or perhaps using a particular plug-in it makes no sense. Mostly it makes sense to advertise Eclipse if you are doing SWT or SWT RCP, afterall standard Java APIs you can easily do using all the other Java IDEs. The number of Java IDE-specific job posts increased by a tiny number if at all. Here is what Shay Shmeltzer posted on JavaLobby on 3/13/2006 for Dice.com. Note that Shay provides a more complete picture by also including Borland's JBuilder. My response to him was that - the number of specific postings was only 7.6%. So you would think that this is the end of the story. The number of Java jobs postings dwarf the number of Java IDE specific postings and the above numbers are probably irrelevant because we don't know how many of the Java- non-specific job postings use the various IDEs. Well no, almost. Because of the simplistic way that the above numbers are collected - there are actually duplicate postings. Here is what I mean - if you go to Dice.com and search for "JBuilder Eclipse JDeveloper" - you get 11 hits (like this) - if you type in "NetBeans JDeveloper" you get 3 hits (hits like this) and that means that the total number of Java IDE-specific postings actually is even smaller than 1075. I don't have the energy (and I'm too far behind on my email) to track down the real number - but I suspect it is closer to 7.6%. The bottom line is that very few Java shops care to tell developers what tools they have to use and the small percentage that do often provide more than one option. The percentage of Java-IDE specific postings looks pretty anemic in terms of growth - not to mention that often postings are lumping together a number of IDEs in the same job posting - not exactly showing significant preference. Now, development shops that are in the business of not writing standard Java APIs and are using SWT may very well need to specify Eclipse. However, for the overwhelmingly large number of regular Java posts, which in this case is 12,726 job posts, they don't mention Eclipse or NetBeans or JBuilder or IntelliJ - they mention Swing, JavaBeans, Servlets, JSP, JSF and other standard Java APIs and for all we know they may be using one or more IDEs. A very small number of posts mention Java specific-IDEs, often more than one. I will leave you with a bit more food for thought (from Dice.com) :
By Don's own measurement tool it is pretty clear that the Swing Ecosystem is thriving. |
