Wednesday, July 16, 2008

Statistical Trends in Modeling

Yesterday's posting about BIRT job trends was interesting and naturally it prompted me to do a few searches of my own, not that I'm competitive or anything like that! I thought I'd share the fruit of my labors.


Searching for "EMF" all by itself turns up some bogus matches, so I used "Eclipse EMF" instead.


That's quite the growth spike. If we look at the absolute scale though, the graph has the same shape, but the axis changes to show the percentage of all jobs that match the search term, i.e., around 0.001-0.002.


If we do a more general search for "Eclipse Modeling" the graph doesn't have the same thousands of percent growth spike to it, so that appears far less exciting.


But switching to the absolute scale is interesting because it reveals that while the growth curve is not spectacular, that's because a significant number of matches have existed for quite some time. Even more interesting is the fact that there are 10-20 times as many matches.


Three lessons we've learned:
  1. Take any statistics with a grain of salt because it's easy to to get a distorted perception if you're not careful about exactly what's being measured and what those measurements really mean.
  2. Learn about EMF and modeling. It will help you find a good job.
  3. EMF jobs are breeding like flies.

I'm eagerly anticipating my next trip to see parts of the world I've never seen. There are bound to be some good photo opportunities! I wonder what it will feel like to be unemployed on Saturday?

2 comments:

Karl Matthias said...

Newfoundland is beautiful... I was up there about 10 years ago and loved it. Have fun sailing!

Karl

Anthony Hunter said...

Cool stats Ed. Try Eclipse UML. Eclipse UML tops both Eclipse EMF and Eclipse Modeling in percentage of matching job postings.