oDesk and the market trends

oDesk and the market trends

Tags: Perl, PHP, Python, Ruby, Java, .NET, business, outsourcing

As a response to my previous post (Looking for a Perl related job?) one of the comments pointed at oDesk. I have seen this website already but now I took a slightly closer look.

Basically it is a market maker mostly for programmers and sysadmins on one hand and companies looking to outsource relatively small projects. The average payment is around $10 / hour with "Data Entry" jobs averaging at $4 / hour and "Developer" jobs averaging at $16 / hour. Clearly this is not a market where I could compete but I think it is a good service for many people. For example for people who are in countries where such fees can provide a relatiely good living or for people who cannot provide on-site development to their customers.

Anyway, I looked at some of the data they provide for each programming language. They provide several data points, one of them is the "New Jobs Perl Month" in each language. I see these data Perl (45), Python (63), Ruby (85) and separately Rails (80) and I can see a trend. But then I also see PHP (2,038) which makes the differenece between the other 3 languages almost insignificant. So let's look at the corporate languages and one can see .NET (150), Java (291) and J2EE (33) which changes the whole picture.

So I don't think this is an indication for anything beyond the users of oDesk though others too might find it interesting.