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

Ryan Daws is a senior editor at TechForge Media, with a seasoned background spanning over a decade in tech journalism. His expertise lies in identifying the latest technological trends, dissecting complex topics, and weaving compelling narratives around the most cutting-edge developments. His articles and interviews with leading industry figures have gained him recognition as a key influencer by organisations such as Onalytica. Publications under his stewardship have since gained recognition from leading analyst houses like Forrester for their performance. Find him on X (@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.

Interested in hearing industry leaders discuss subjects like this and sharing their use-cases? Attend the co-located 5G ExpoIoT Tech Expo, Blockchain Expo, AI & Big Data Expo, and Cyber Security & Cloud Expo World Series with upcoming events in Silicon Valley, London, and Amsterdam.

View Comments
Leave a comment

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

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *