Study: Demand for AR/VR devs surges, Go is the most in-demand language

Study: Demand for AR/VR devs surges, Go is the most in-demand language Ryan is a senior editor at TechForge Media with over a decade of experience covering the latest technology and interviewing leading industry figures. He can often be sighted at tech conferences with a strong coffee in one hand and a laptop in the other. If it's geeky, he’s probably into it. Find him on Twitter (@Gadget_Ry) or Mastodon (@gadgetry@techhub.social)


Careers website Hired has posted its latest annual “State of Software Engineers” report which highlights some fascinating industry trends.

The most notable statistic in this year’s report is an 1400 percent surge in demand for AR/VR talent. Given the release of acclaimed headsets like the Oculus Quest, and the anticipated release of a PSVR 2 later this year, it’s perhaps unsurprising to see demand growing so rapidly.

Salaries for AR/VR jobs range from $135k – $150k in major US tech hubs. Many developers are looking to get started toying with the emerging technology with 46 percent of software engineers ranking AR/VR as one of the top 3 technologies they’d like to learn in 2020.

The growth in demand for VR talent dwarfs a surge of 517 percent in last year’s report for blockchain talent. This year, the demand for “blockchain engineers” increased just nine percent.

After VR/AR, the second biggest growth of in-demand talent was seen for “gaming engineer” and “computer vision engineer” roles – both witnessing 146 percent growth over the past year.

Demand for “search engineers” increased 137 percent while for “machine learning engineers” increased 89 percent. Given the hype around AI and machine learning, that final one may be a bit of a surprise to some – myself included – that it didn’t rank higher.

In terms of most-desired skills, the Go language tops the rankings for the second year in a row. Hired says the average candidate with Go skills receives 9.2 interview requests.

The other in-demand programming languages are Scala, Ruby, TypeScript, Kotlin, Objective C, JavaScript, Swift, PHP, Java, HTML, and then Python.

Some of the less in-demand languages are, unsurprisingly, some of developers’ favourites. Python, JavaScript, and Java are developers’ favourite languages but are behind several other languages in demand – including three of developers’ least favourites (Ruby, PHP, and Objective-C).

You can find Hired’s full report here.

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