@FIRST_LIGHT

While updating the Drupal Economic Indicators page tonight, I found an interesting event in the Indeed.com job trends chart.

It looks like PHP mentions in job postings has overtaken JSP for the first time ever. If valid, it's an interesting turn of events, particularly for communities like Drupal, Joomla, and Wordpress that depend to some degree on the health of the PHP economy.

NOTE: I should caution that these results may not be accurate. Simplyhired.com, an Indeed.com competitor in the job metasearch market, tells a different story. Both sites show strong relative health for PHP, but the fact that Simplyhired finds so many fewer ASP jobs and shows PHP as flat suggests we should be cautious here.

If it turns out that the Indeed.com numbers are accurate - what does it all mean? While JSP work seems to pays better (see Indeed.com salary data below), PHP jobs seem to be more plentiful.

It's unclear whether PHP is actually replacing JSP for some projects or whether this just represents different rates of growth in two segments of the overall web development market. My personal experience (validated by lots of expensive primary market research) suggests that JSP is used more often by larger teams working within larger companies working on relatively more complicated projects with longer life spans that integrate with more internal systems than the typical PHP project. So it could be that we're seeing a slow down in that kind of work relative to the relatively smaller, shorter, simpler, and more short-lived projects completed by smaller teams of PHP developers. Or it could be something else entirely :-).

What do you think?