Long-time readers of this blog may recall that I occasionally track IT job vacancies at Jobserve. There may be better sites to track; but it carries a lot of vacancies, and I need to be consistent. I started in early 2002 with the goal of seeing how much adoption Microsoft was winning for its .NET technology. In March 2002, there were 153 vacancies which mentioned C#, versus 2092 for Java.
Since then, C# has grown steadily. Today it overtook Java for the first time (in my random and infrequent visits). There are 2206 C# vacancies, 2066 Java.
I also noticed that the absolute number of vacancies has declined substantially since my last visit, but Java by more than C#. The economy, I guess.
Is Microsoft really sweeping all before it? Well, no. Vista has disappointed; Apple sales grow ever higher; Netcraft’s web server survey shows a decline in the percentage of IIS sites on the Internet in September 2008 and observes that 75% of new web sites coming online use Apache. So it is a matter of what statistic you want to pick. Nevertheless, there is clearly still a lot of C# development out there.
Perhaps it has something to do with the kinds of businesses that use these tools? Java = internet business; C# = line-of-business application. An economic downturn is more likely to clobber the former more heavily than the latter.
Yes or perhaps coupled with the fact that web 2.0 ajax frameworks offer developers the ability to create and easily deploy rich UI experiences/apps akin to applets of old so java for some time has been the domain of server based apps running on a black box, kind of negates the ‘write once run anywhere’ mantra (which was never fully realised). Applets even now are still a major pain on wide scale deployments.