September 17th, 2007
Rich Internet application job trends and salaries
Indeed.com has a pretty cool job trends feature as well salary lookup which Mike Potter uses a lot to track Flex. Mike got me thinking about the trends in the overall RIA space. After throwing the various rich internet application technologies together I came up with a decent picture of the job and overall market for RIAs.
For the first exercise I trended “Adobe Flex”, Silverlight, JavaFX and OpenLaszlo:
The graph is pretty much what you’d expect. Flex has a big head start and as a result has more traction. The growth rate for Silverlight is pretty impressive and OpenLaszlo has been up and down. JavaFX (as you’d imagine for an unreleased product) doesn’t make much of a blip. After this I decided to throw in WPF:
This was really interesting, especially the blip back in July of 05. WPF follows a pretty steady pattern to Flex but this year it’s rocketed up. Now what happen when we throw Ajax in the mix?
The other lines get really small. Ajax has ben growing pretty steadily for a while but it doesn’t have the huge surge that WPF, Silverlght and Flex had. Now just for giggles I wanted to see what happens when we add Flash. Flash is kind of a generic word, but in looking at the job list, I think it’s dominated by actual Flash jobs.
It’s a pretty steady line with a small, gradual growth recently which is what I’d expect. Now these are jobs on technology, but I thought it would be good to take a look at the core languages underneath each. For this I searched ActionScript, C#, and JavaScript:
There has been a huge surge in C# lately as well as JavaScript. It seems like JavaScript and C# follow a pattern which I don’t know the reason for. ActionScript looks kind of small in comparison but there has been increased traffic in the past 6-9 months.
Finally what I wanted to also look at were salary numbers for the RIA technologies. According to Indeed, here are the average salaries:
I’d take these numbers with a grain of salt, but it’s very interesting. The Flex numbers mostly match up with my experience but I thought the Silverlght/WPF salary discrepancy was odd. Ajax has a much higher salary than I would have thought while Flash was lower than I was expecting. The JavaFX and OpenLaszlo jobs are both pretty closely tied to Java so the salaries show that.
All in all kind of a fun experiment if not 100% correct. Indeed has a fun service and it will be cool to watch these numbers change.
Ryan Stewart, a Rich Internet Application developer and industry analyst, recently joined Adobe's Platform Team as a Rich Internet Application Evangelist. full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
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