What kind of programming jobs are common these days?

[rcgldr]

I'm wondering what kind of work is out there these days. My recent work has been with computer peripherals, mostly C, and some assembly, in an event driven, multi-tasking environments, but lately, there's not a lot of new development in this area.

Going back to 1973, most of my work was with multi-tasking, sometimes multi-system, (custom networking in the old days) applications or environments. I got hired to do device drivers for OS and backup apps at a peripheral company, but eventually migrated into working on the firmware itself, initially helping with the multi-tasking OS implementation, later specialzing in compression and ECC, becoming somewhat niche oriented.

I'm looking to get back into more "mainstream" jobs before I retire, and I'm wondering what's out there. I can scan postings at monster.com, but I'm curious as to what programmers that post here are doing these days.

 

[Jonne]

I don't think you'll tend to see may companies starting new project in C or C++ unless they are embeded these days. Everything seems to be moving towards .NET mostly using C#. There is still quite a demand for script languages like PHP and Ruby but they don't tend to pay as much.

 

[davee123]

At our company (a financial data company), we mostly have:

- C/C++: not much that I'm aware of. No new development that I know of, but there are a few applications that still need to be supported. These are (surprisingly!) web pages and cross-system tools. Most C/C++ stuff is enough of a hassle to maintain that it's been getting phased out in favor of Java, mostly.

- Java: in theory, all our new non-web development is supposed to be in Java. This is mostly for data processing, aggregation, retrieval, and delivery. Java is probably one of the more widely used languages in the company, and is still going pretty strong from the looks of things.

- PHP: This is supposed to be the "other" language we're moving into (but not in a hurry). All our web development is supposed to be moving to PHP. Primarily because PHP is very simple to understand, and everyone and their brother knows how to write PHP, so it's cheaper to find developers (although you'll find a wide diversity of skilled and unskilled PHP developers).

- Perl: We've got a lot of older code in Perl. A chunk of our web development, as well as data processing (and so forth) is written in Perl, although we're being encouraged to migrate going forward.

All told, our company has a few hundred developers worldwide, just to give you an idea of our size. Are we "mainstream"? I guess so? Hard to say, really...

DaveE

 

[Borg]

I did a quick search of my company's job listings. Of course, many list multiple languages but, it gives you a rough idea.

Java: 194 job listings
C++: 136
Perl: 80
.NET: 77
C#: 70
PHP: 2

 

[silverfrost]

- C/C++: not much that I'm aware of.

What about the iPhone or Apple Macs? They use Objective-C: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Objective-C

 

[rcgldr]

Thanks for the responses. What about pay scale versus language? In my area, the embedded application companies mostly use C, and they tend to pay more than generic windows type programming jobs.

 

[davee123]

What about the iPhone or Apple Macs? They use Objective-C:

I was just referring to my company in particular-- I can't really speak to how C/C++ is being used industry-wide compared to other languages, so I figured I'd just cover what we do in our little corner.

DaveE

 

[rootX]

There are good companies like Accenture: http://www.accenture.com/. I believe they are mainstream. My company hired them for some massive projects.