I decided to a little spring cleaning recently. I got onto LinkedIn, Monster.com, and Careers.StackOverflow.com to update my resume. After some refreshing I decided to punch some info into the various job searches just to see what would show up. You know, not even testing the waters, but looking to see what people are looking to fill.
Mobile development, native and web, seems to be a hot place to be. Having experience in “open” languages like Java, Ruby, PHP, etc also seem to be highly sought for in a developer.
I decided to look for the stuff that I work on or would like to work on, Windows Presentation Foundation, WPF, applications. Doing a search on this drops the results from the thousands to not even a few hundreds. Type “Java” into StackOverflow’s Careers page. You’ll get close to a thousand good listings. Looking on Monster.com? Over 1000 listings. Go back and type in “WPF”…
It makes me wonder if I should keep focusing on this technology. Mobile and web is where most of the focus will be to hit most consumers now, I understand that. However, I still believe that there is some segment of the market that will still utilize a desktop application.
If not in the desktop world, then I suppose that WPF is the underpinnings for how Windows mobile development works. How much stock can one place in that last place horse?
Microsoft makes a great development stack. I hands down prefer using their tools and servers, but in this world of low cost, reach everyone development it doesn’t seem like they’re making a fit.
I guess I should make the leap to mobile dev sooner rather than later.