Agile Developers Needed

by Shane Hastie on Feb 19, 2013 |

A study conducted by Yoh indicates that US companies advertised a total of 558,918 agile jobs from 2010 to 2012. During the same time period, there were merely 121,876 active candidates, just 17 candidates for every 100 jobs. Of the available job seekers, more than 50 percent have 10 years of experience or more, while less than two percent have one to two years of experience.

Summarising the study results Don Kim wrote on ProjectManagement.com :

The agile gap exists across the U.S., varying only in its degree of severity:

Demand outstrips supply by nearly 4x

Companies have to pay a premium for Agile expertise

The agile talent gap is most significant in the Pacific Northwest

Labor pressure for agile talent goes from bad to worse

Competition for agile talent is fierce

The top 10 roles in demand over the period of the study are:

Java Developer
Software Engineer
Project Manager
.Net Developer
Senior Software Engineer
Software Developer
Business Analyst
Web Developer
Senior Java Developer
QA Engineer

Yoh prepared an infographic which shows the highlights of the results. The infographic and the full study results can be downloaded from the Yoh website.

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Community comments

I wish by Markus W. Posted

Oh, please ... by Dean Schulze Posted

Re: Oh, please ... by Konstantin Ignatyev Posted

Weird by Gonzalo Herreros Posted

I wish by Markus W.

I wish those companies who advertise themselves as being agile would actually act accordingly.
Granted that there are true agile shops, in my experience the standard case is that those who pretend to do agile just do a "Scrum for the Project Manager" and that's it.
So the open question is, do the "open positions" from that study include all or just truly agile companies?
I know there is a side topic in my question, "what's true agile?", but that's not the point here. I just feel like agile has become a buzzword in every job description. Also, I get shivers when I see "Business Analyst" in the list.

Oh, please ... by Dean Schulze

If demand outstrips supply by 4 times then salaries for "agile developers" would be going through the roof, but they're not.

There are so many things wrong with this "study" (as described in this article) that it's hard to know where to start.

Simply counting job postings without verifying that a real opening exists is one problem. How many of these postings are duplicates? Also, many job postings are for phantom jobs -- jobs where the hiring manager has already identified who he or she wants to hire but the position still must be posted.

How did they count available candidates? It doesn't say. And what makes someone a candidate for an agile position instead of a non-agile position.

Re: Oh, please ... by Konstantin Ignatyev

Why would salary go up if productivity of typical new hire is 1/8th or less than productivity of a seasoned developer?

Weird by Gonzalo Herreros

I think what they mean is that demand for IT engineers outstrips supply. The Agile part has become just a buzzword.
When you hire somebody you look for skills and experience, the agile part is a nice have since anybody can learn that in no time when joining to a team.