Job Trends Report: The Job Market for JavaScript Developers
Are you thinking about attending a frontend dev bootcamp that teaches JavaScript or the MEAN Stack? This report brings together JavaScript developer job market trends from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, Dice.com, Code.org, PayScale, O’Reilly Radar, and more.
1 Million More Jobs Than Candidates
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, in 2010 there were over 900,000 software developer jobs posted, with an expected increase of 30% by 2020. There’s also the often-cited analysis from Code.org that underscored the widening gap between supply and demand (the yellow wedge below).
According to Robert Half International, starting salaries for professional occupations in the US are projected to increase an average of 3.8% in 2015. Professional occupations includes accounting and finance, technology, marketing, legal, and administrative. But when the study broke the data out further, they found that salaries will rise 50% faster for IT professionals — a whopping 5.7%.
What Should I Focus on Learning?
Irvine, Calif.-based IT recruiting firm CyberCoders conducted a study of 10,000 tech companies and their hiring requirements. Their findings revealed that out of all their recruits, those who had development skills — especially mobile, front-end, and open source development skills — were most in demand in today’s job market.
Should I Learn Ruby or JavaScript?
According to data from Indeed, here’s how Ruby and JavaScript stack up:
$93,000 for a JavaScript Developer
$87,000 for a Ruby Developer
$98,000 for a Ruby on Rails Developer
So what’s the difference? Rails Web Development — where you can build both the backend as well as the frontend of a complex web application, has always been an in-demand skill. Whereas the Ruby on Rails framework for web development has been prevalent for many years, JavaScript has up until recently been primarily used on the Frontend. As Express and NodeJS (tools for building JavaScript backends) gain in popularity, demand forJavaScript developers will increase and may potentially surpass demand for Ruby on Rails devs.
The JavaScript Developer Job Market Is Growing
When You’re a beginner, it’s hard to see the difference between HTML, CSS, and JavaScript — they may just seem like buzz words swirling around. However to an experienced developer, it’s clear that the language that gives developers control and power to build complex frontend web applications is JavaScript. According to Glassdoor, the national average for Frontend Developers in 2014 is $74,426, with the average in San Francisco and New York at $90,205 and $78,393 respectively.
According to data from Indeed.com, there has been a marked increase in salaries for JavaScript developers since Oct 2013, with the average JavaScript developer in the United States makes an average of $93,000 today.
As you can see from this analysis compiled by gooroo, JavaScript is ubiquitous, appearing in the greatest percentage of job postings. That said, Ruby was a stand-out language as well, appearing in 3% of all job postings, but commanding the fourth-highest salary of all the languages compared.
What Are the Hottest Topics in JavaScript Development?
Modern JavaScript Frameworks That Allow You to Create Heavy Clients
JavaScript frameworks like Ember, Backbone, React and Angular are increasingly becoming the biggest part of modern Single Page Applications. Programming logic that was once restricted to the server side is increasingly getting moved to the frontend to make applications quicker and more responsive. All of these frameworks are used frequently in modern web applications.
A Focus on Angular
At Bloc, we teach AngularJS for our JavaScript applications. Angular gained huge popularity when it was co-opted by Google in 2011. Since then, companies like Amazon, Google, YouTube, Salesforce, Nike and Virgin America have used Angular in major projects facing millions of users. Angular allows you to make custom HTML elements, attributes and classes packed with JavaScript functionality to make applications more interactive on the frontend. Angular’s functionality allows for high performance, animations, data modeling and communication with the server-side.
What You Need to Know: MVVM architecture
Angular is built with a Model View ViewModel architecture. Similar to MVC, Angular separates the structure of the views from the logic of its models. The difference lies in the “ViewModel”, which exposes the data layer to the interface components but keeps the major JavaScript logic separate creating cleaner, understandable codebases. This design pattern allows for Angular to update information on the frontend instantly in response to events triggered by the user.
Keeping the data on the frontend also makes Angular highly testable. Angular developers advocate heavily for Test Driven Development (TDD), a practice that prioritizes testing before writing the code that will directly power your application. TDD makes it easier for programmers to minimize bugs and ensure application quality as the size of the codebase scales. At Bloc, we expose you to the value of JavaScript testing while teaching you how to leverage MVVM to create maintainable, modern web applications.
What’s the Job Market Like Near Me?
According to a recent survey by Dice.com, here were the top cities by average developer salary:
