Prologue

Recently, I had a reason to revisit freelance exchange. About 5 years ago I did it for the first time because I was so tired of enterprise and Java and I was trying to make a decision about whether to stick with my boring, but well-paying technologies, or move to more interesting but less payed fields.

Dataset

For those readers who aren't interested in the technical process, you can skip to the Conclusion section

I explored the IT category and found that it contains approximately 5000 offers. There were about 100 pages with 50 items per page, I went through the hundred pages and saved a .har file in chrome, split it by page request and saved them into separate files. Here comes the data for analysis.

You can find the most trending tags based on these offers in the picture:

As we can see, DevOps is the trending topic at the moment. Pretty funny, considering that just a few years ago, when I partly joined a DevOps team at one of the largest banks in Europe, my manager could not define what "DevOps" meant. But now, it is a top trend.

Rates per hour seemed noticeably lower than I expected. After a little investigation, I found a lot of offers with significantly lower rates than usual. I can still remember certain regions offering lower rates in the past. Typically, you want to target regions where rates are equal to or higher than those in your local region. Therefore, I decided to filter out those offers from regions with reduced rates, based on my location.

The final rating is as follows:

It is just top of the table. Here’s some explanation:

Min and Max represent the are averages (to smooth it a bit and to avoid spikes) of minimum and maximum rates respectively (where the rate is specified), Avg is an average of the Min and Max. Project price is an average of fixed project prices, which is rather insignificant due to it’s unrelatedness to work duration.

Relations

I thought it would be interesting to find correlation what exactly what some tags mean, so I did a simple thing: I linked tags from the same offer, where the central force of a node is the number of its links. The greater challenge was finding a good online tool for graph visualization.

One of them was cosmograph.app, which suggested our IT industry is alive and rotates around SQL

So I generated the graph in graphviz. Too many minor links resulted in a somewhat cluttered distribution, so I decided to limit each node to those with 75 or more links

To explore it in better detail, you can find it here https://t.ly/1Y3ur

From the graph, it appears that these days, the term DevOps mostly means AWS, then Docker and CI/CD. Python also seems to be the main language for DevOps also

There are two clusters here, the second one is about Security, I am not sure I know the major diff between information/network and other security issues. Also, it is necessary to note that Upwork contains a lot of “security” stuff like “hack my ex’s instagram”

I wanted to detect more clusters, but, as I mentioned earlier, I struggled to find good tools that could do it quickly. Also, it was pretty clear that it is possible to merge some nodes like “AWS” and “Amazon EC2”, but did not want to spend too much time on it

Conclusion

Finally, I created a table focused on the topics which are most interesting to me, specifically programming languages:

From the table and the graph it is quite clear that DevOps goes hand to hand with AWS, sometimes it goes with Azure and it tends to pay a bit better. Knowledge of Docker is must-have If you want to work in DevOps. After that, K8s and TerraForm could also extend your feeding ground. “DevOps” contains “Dev” — typically involves Python, knowing Ansible would also be benefit.

The topic of programming languages is of particular interest to me:

Python is language for everyone, for tooling and not only. JavaScript also ranks high, but I am surprised with the rate I see. Next surprise for me is unreasonable (sorry) PHP with reasonable price for it. Java experienced some stagnation about 10 years ago from my perspective, but it remains popular. C# is half as popular as Java. C++ is still performing well as an older technology. Typescript, I believe, should be merged with JS. Flutter does not look very popular, but the number of offers involving it is quite low, which might have resulted in it's low rate. The same applies to C, but I had expected C to rank higher.

When I decided to quit Java I bet on Golang - mature enough for prod work and was increasing in popularity, but I have a feeling that it is ~ on the same level it was before. Maybe, if I were brave enough, I would invest into AWS when I made the decision. At least that seems like a reasonable move based on the current market.

Rust is mostly supported by crypto, but its presence on the market is a good result. Kotlin ranks slightly higher than Rust, and surprisingly, I found that it is more often used in backend development than in Android development, as it was originally positioned.

Databases. MySQL tops the list, which is expected — the number one choice for those who prefer not to deliberate over their database selection. Postgres is the next one, followed by Mongo and Redis. Unfortunately, ClickHouse is nearly invisible, but I continue to follow interesting projects that involve it.

Epilogue

This analysis is based on freelance exchange, but the results can still be applicable to permanent employment as well, with some deviation for expensive regions. Of course, there are some banks which are still using rare and aged technologies like APL (❤️) or Fortran, and it's quite common to stay in one department for many years. Such scenarios could be interesting and even profitable, but they may not always offer good job security perspective. If you're in the process of making a career decision, this article might help you to make a decision based on different criteria: to find the most profitable tech or tech which you could improve your skills. It also allows you to compare your income against the minimum to maximum rate scale based on your proficiency level, and find out if you're being paid reasonably or not. Moreover, this analysis could also provide insights into the idea of freelance, which can be profitable, but could be more risky too.

PS

Some data that is not only about IT: