Fact Checking with Web Scraping #1 - Are Most Rust Jobs In Crypto?

Rust is a relatively new programming language without established and highly developed job market yet. Being developer's the most loved language though, many people would like to have a full-time job using it. There's a prevalent feeling among Rustaceans that most of the Rust jobs out there involve blockchain tech. Indeed, anyone who was ever seeking for the job in Rust surely stumbled upon a cryptocurrency job offer. Is it really true that most offers are in crypto? We have scraped job ads to find the answer!

Methodology

The notebook with the code used for data gathering as well as a csv file containing the data is available in the Github repository.

To get a fair data sample we scraped offers from 5 job boards: indeed.com, justjoin.it, no fluff jobs, rustjobs.dev and startup.jobs. For each board, we searched with term "rust" which resulted in almost 40,000 job offers.

Many offers include word "rust" in the description while not being specifically Rust offers but rather informing that "having an experience with C#/Java/Rust is a plus" etc. Therefore, to be sure we only include actual Rust job positions, we filtered out offers without "rust" in the title.

We also manually excluded job offers mentioning the word "rust" but not Rust programming language, e.g. "Presbyterian Rust Medical Center". After applying these filters we ended up with 197 job offers which are very likely actual offers for jobs in Rust.

The scraped websites might have changed the design so we can't guarantee that the code works when you try it. Also, we have used our product for data gathering. If you want to reproduce this, you'll have to get the API key.

The answer

To assess whether an offer is for a job in blockchain we used a simple rule: if title or description contains "blockchain", "crypto" or "web3" then it is a job in blockchain. Here's the final result:

With the assumption that our data sample is representative - it is indeed true that most Rust job offers are in crypto!

As a bonus, let's add a remote distinction on top of crypto/non-crypto:

Crypto jobs seem to have a slight advantage in terms of remoteness compared to other types of Rust jobs.