Which has more job openings for programmers - Rails or Django?

Question

Based on this trend chart from indeed.com,

Rails vs Django job openings

my impression is that Rails currently has more openings but that Django is gaining popularity.

Does anyone have personal experience in the job market or additional data to support this idea?

Answer 1

Google Trends suggests that Django is eclipsing RoR.

I don't see either one very often in the marketplace, though. But that's because Dice.com job postings usually come from larger, more conservative companies and their adjuncts.

Answer 2

Learn them both, and you'll gain far more hire-ability than picking just one.

To put it another way:
Knowing how to write software in general is far more useful than any specific language/framework.

Learn good programming principles first, and you will be a better developer with whichever syntax(es) you choose to use.

Answer 3

Here is what job trends from indeed.com looks like http://www.indeed.com/jobtrends?q=%22ruby+on+rails%22%2C+Django&l=

Answer 4

How many jobs can you hold at once anyway? You only need one.

Realistically, if you're deciding on what technology to learn based on jobs, you might want there to be a few openings. If the first job doesn't work out then you have to jump ship. Beyond that, it doesn't matter if there are a 100 openings or 100,000.

Take for example erlang right now. There are not many openings, look at the graph above with erlang added. Erlang's a whole language not just one framework in a language.

job trends for django, ruby on rails, and erlang

Clearly if you were just looking at numbers, you wouldn't go spend time learning erlang. But that's not the whole picture. Just yesterday one of my coworkers, based in Montevideo, Uruguay got a call from a company in Norway begging him work for them. His total erlang experience was one university class half a decade ago.

You could go the other direction, say, let's look at what's popular, java.

job trends for django, ruby on rails, and java

Throwing java in the picture you can see that both rails and django have almost no listings or growth.

The size of the job market mostly does not matter. What matters is do you enjoy working in the language, is there a job, or a few interesting jobs to choose from. I've worked professionally programming in both ruby and python a times when there were few to no jobs for those languages. At the time there were a few passionate coders who had experience and would happily move half way around the world to work in their favorite language.

Trends matter, but i'd say that job listings are a tailing indicator of technology adoption, not something you can use to predict the future. Find something you enjoy working with, learn a new language every year, and don't worry about getting 100,000 jobs, you only need one.

Answer 5

I'd be very careful about inferring anything from google trends. Django is one word while ruby on rails is three and could be searched for as ruby and rails, Ruby/Rails or as RoR while django is just django.

That's just one of a myriad of possible interpretations/complications.

I'd also be hesitant to place much stock in job ad mentions since these kinds of things are often thrown in as part of the ridiculous alphabet soup that recruiters are looking for (not to mention that multiple recruiters are probably listing for the same job in many cases - particular for rare hard to find specialties like rails or django). It may just reflect the recruiters awareness of a technology rather than the existence of an actual job requirement.

My guess for the best measure would be what the going rate is for either category but even that is hard to interpret - both supply and demand are a factor.

Plus geography is a big issue. Rails is popular in some large cities but less so in other areas (In the UK Rails is big in the London but much less so outside of the congestion charge zone).

I also wouldn't trust an answer from anyone because people only have very limited experience of the job market - the job they have and the hiring they do at the very best unless they are recruiters and if they are recruiters ... well, trust recruiters at your own risk...

Answer 6

There are definitely more Rails jobs than Django jobs at the moment. No reason not to learn both though - if you know both you can get a job using either :)

Answer 7

Definitely Rails, but I don't really think that is important, if you're deciding which one to learn don't do it based on which one has more jobs openings. Try both you'll have fun :)

Answer 8

rails jobs:11886 http://www.indeed.com/jobs?q=rails&l=

django jobs: 717 http://www.indeed.com/q-Django-jobs.html