Developer, data science jobs: US tech is taking a worse hit than other sectors Posted on : Jul 30 - 2020

And data-science jobs are being hit harder than other technology areas like tech support.

Remote working under the COVID-19 pandemic has put an extra load on tech workers, but new data from US job-search platform Indeed now indicates tech jobs could be facing a slump that's worse than that seen in other sectors.

Indeed reports that tech job postings over the past few weeks are down about 36% compared with last year and that they're now trending lower than other sectors after initially showing resilience to the lockdowns that began in March.

New US tech job postings started to fall behind other sectors in mid-May and have slowed down even more since then, according to Indeed. Overall job postings, as expected are down too, but only by 21% year on year versus 36% for the tech sector.

While developer interest in the statistical programming language R and Python, a popular language for data scientists, has seen a boost in recent months, Indeed reports that new data-science job postings have fared worse than the overall tech sector.

New postings for data-scientist roles are down 43%, while IT management posting trends are down 45%. Both categories are markedly lower compared with IT operations and helpdesk jobs, which are down by 32% and 31%, respectively, compared with a year ago.

Tiobe, a company that ranks the popularity of programming languages based on search-engine results, speculated that more searches for topics about programming languages R and Python could be because universities and the healthcare industry are using them more to research vaccines for the coronavirus.   

Meanwhile software development jobs are down by 35%, and within that group, artificial intelligence and machine learning job openings are 29% below the 2019 trend.

Until the COVID-19 pandemic hit, these job categories on the cutting-edge of technology were at the top end of the jobs market.

"Tech's failure to recover is probably due to the high cost of hiring and firing. While a restaurant may take on workers based on demand experienced over the past two weeks, sectors like tech have much longer planning horizons," explains Indeed. View More