Year over year it’s interesting to study the evolution of in-demand skills in the software industry and this year for sure makes for an interesting time frame to study.
According to an article published by www.developer-tech.com, which cites a study made by career website Hired, the most notable surge in 2020 – where demand for software engineers in the US is concerned – is for AR/VR talent – with a whopping 1400% increase in comparison to 2019.
The explanation is very simple: as per IDC predictions, the AR/VR market and subsequent need for skilled software engineers was enjoying about 60% of the total spending on software solutions in 2018. Within a 3 year margin, by the end of 2021, it is expected to hit 85%, with retail, transportation, manufacturing and public sectors needing services from these software engineers on the top of the chart.
AR/VR and why it’s so in demand in the United States
On a geographical basis, North America is found to be the region that invested heavily in the AR/VR market in the past 12 months and is forecast to witness the fastest growth in the next 5 years. Moreover, salaries for AR/VR software engineers jobs range from $135k – $150k in major US tech hubs. Monetary incentives aside, developers are also looking to get started toying with the emerging technology, with 46% of software engineers ranking AR/VR as one of the top 3 technologies they’d like to learn in 2020.
Gaming and computer vision engineers come in 2nd and 3rd
After VR/AR, the second biggest growth of in-demand talent was seen for ‘gaming engineers’ and ‘computer vision engineer’ roles – both witnessing 146% growths over 2019.
Demand for ‘search engineers’ increased 137%, whereas for ‘machine learning engineers’ increased 89%. Blockchain talent is still in demand, shy off 2019, with a 9% increase.
Most in demand programming languages
As per the study, some of the most in-demand programming languages are Go, Scala, Ruby, TypeScript, Kotlin, Objective C, JavaScript, Swift, PHP, Java, HTML, and then Python.
Some of the less in-demand languages are, unsurprisingly, some of developers’ favourites. Python, JavaScript, and Java are developers’ favourite languages but are behind several other languages in demand – including three of developers’ least favourites (Ruby, PHP, and Objective-C).