Ruby, PHP, ASP.NET Job Comparison

Frank C
#1. August 26th, 2007, at 4:44 AM.

I think your numbers on PHP reflect the strong anti-MS sentiment found in the Silicon Valley area. Oddly enough, some of your Adsense ads were for Ruby jobs in that area.

I did a search (on indeed.com) of my area (Atlanta, GA) and found 25 RR jobs, 238 PHP jobs, and 683 ASP.NET Jobs within 100 miles. It would probably be more if you expanded it out to include all .NET jobs.

One problem though. If you go into an interview for an ASP.NET position and they use VB.NET rather than C# or vice versa, you may not get the job where PHP or Ruby you won’t have this kind of divide.

Anyway, good article.

Andre P
#2. August 27th, 2007, at 12:43 PM.

Very good article. It would also be interesting to see where web jobs based on Java technologies rate.

Chris Pietschmann
#5. August 27th, 2007, at 4:49 PM.

I’ve actually had my eye on RoR for awhile now, I’m still trying to find the time to dig in (which hopefully I’ll find soon). But I’m not detered from going down that path because there aren’t alot of jobs. You’ll still benefit from learning how things are done with RoR (or any technology for that matter) and it’ll make you a better programmer in what ever technology you develop with. Just look at some of the cool things that are happening out there like SubSonic (http://subsonicproject.com/); they are bringing some of the coolness of RoR over to ASP.NET.

Sidu
#6. August 28th, 2007, at 9:08 AM.

A more sensible strategy would be to figure out which jobs pay more rather than how many there are. Which languages are more fun should also count for something.

Incidentally, a critical distinction you fail to make is between the language and the framework. In the case of ASP and PHP you rarely use anything significant as a framework, which is weird given that both the languages are ugly and difficult to use. Frameworks like ROR can be used effectively only if you understand the language thoroughly, or you are likely to shoot yourself in the foot.

Purely from a language perspective, even Java is a better alternative to PHP. C# 3 on the other hand is actually quite nice. Ruby is easily the nicest language, though it isn’t as fast as Java or C#.

C# is probably a good middle path as long as you use Spring.Net or some such instead ASP.Net (the default framework MS ships) which is a badly messed up web framework. Rails is also pretty sweet when developing - you have the power of Ruby and the elegance imposed by Rails - but Rails has its weaknesses in production. Rails is a memory hog (60MB per instance of Rails) and also has a fair number of leaks. It is also pretty much single threaded so you need to start clustering your app servers very early.

Personally, I wouldn’t touch a PHP or ASP job with a twelve foot barge pole.

Daniel Haran
#7. August 28th, 2007, at 10:24 PM.

Well, maybe a lot of the Rails shops don’t advertise on the same job boards?

Also, keep in mind that the number of Rails jobs keeps growing very fast, and that the salaries are often quite a bit higher. All the people I know in Montreal that have switched to Ruby in the last year have had salary increases of 10k+. Plus, it’s more fun!

Jon
#8. August 28th, 2007, at 10:48 PM.

ASP.NET jobs generally pay much better than PHP or RoR, because the majority of them are for enterprise sized deployments.

However, with the glut of .NET developers from India, the actual value of a developer has dropped significantly.

P.S. This comment box is horribly broken in FireFox.

Derik Whittaker
#9. August 29th, 2007, at 12:19 AM.

This is a great post. I myself am mostly a C# Winforms developer but have also thought about trying out RoR.

Rick
#10. August 29th, 2007, at 6:16 AM.

Some things to consider:
- When I started with PHP, the job numbers where about the same as they are for RoR right now. And right now, I can pick and choose any PHP-job I want because there is a huge shortage of experienced PHP-developers. And I live in an MS dominated country. Behing ahead of the curve has it’s advantages.
- The RoR jobs are often the coolest and most challenging jobs. Not the best paid mind you, because they are often with young start-ups, but it’s something to consider.
- Job postings on the major sites do not represent the actual demand. On those sites, major enterprises and the recruiters they hire dominate the stats (spending more money on recruitment an reposting the same position over and over, especially on Monster), and they usually look for .Net and Java people.

Me, I’m definitely going to dive into RoR soon.

Kelvin
#11. August 30th, 2007, at 1:00 AM.

Here is an interesting trend analysis by Google:
http://www.google.com/trends?q=php%2C+asp.net

Jonathan
#14. August 30th, 2007, at 5:10 PM.

This was interesting but don’t forget that .NET is heavily used in
established business environments so its seems natural that more jobs
are available. For new startups (west coast) that are heavily focused on innovation and new technologies, php is the way to go.

Joshua K
#15. August 30th, 2007, at 8:45 PM.

Any suggestions or tips for a person seeking an entry-level PHP positions in Dallas?

Dolfa
#16. August 31st, 2007, at 8:22 AM.

Nice research.
Maybe this http://blog.assembleron.com/2007/08/31/meetings-and-mentions/a part PHP on the bottom adds another info.

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#18. September 3rd, 2007, at 9:10 AM.

TechToolBlog: Ruby, PHP, ASP.NET Job Comparison… …

Pat Monardo
#19. September 4th, 2007, at 1:55 AM.

Please don’t take the west coast to just SFO/Bay Area. Seattle, WA and Portland, OR has more jobs for ASP.NET compared to PHP or RoR

-Pat
SDE @ http://www.aivea.com

Praveen
#20. September 11th, 2007, at 11:36 AM.

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Robert
#21. September 13th, 2007, at 2:00 AM.

I bet if craigslist was included you’d probably get a lot more hits for PHP.

Most smaller shops are moving towards craigslist rather than monster, hotjobs, etc…

Tom Barr
#22. September 14th, 2007, at 3:58 PM.

For me the choice is whether I want to be productive or be paid well but the salaries for productive languages are catching up with the ones that are prefered by enterprises. I’ve worked in small shops and on my own sites using PHP and ColdFusion. I’ve worked in enterprises that were going toward .NET or J2EE. It took 5 times as many people including teams in India and 5 times the project time to accomplish in Java what we did with the rapid application development languages. I am glad to see PHP and Ruby gaining traction.

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#26. December 9th, 2007, at 4:43 PM.

I want to be productive or be paid well but the salaries for productive languages are catching up with the ones that are prefered by enterprises.

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