Programming skills are becoming ever more important, quickly turning into the core competency for all kinds of 21st Century workers. That inescapable fact is leading individuals to seek out new ways of learning to code, startups and non-profits to find ways to help them and businesses to search for innovative approaches to finding the coders they so desperately need.

When daily deal site Living Social couldn't find the coding help it needed, for example, the company took matters into its own hands and successfully created its own qualified programmers. Through an experiment called Hungry Academy,  Living Social paid 24 people to learn computer programming within five months. All two dozen passed the class and became full-time developers at Living Social following their graduation. 

“We believe that intelligence and passion are far harder to hire for and much more important than a specific technical skill,” Chad Fowler, LivingSocial’s senior vice president of technology, told the Washington Post last year. “We have enough of the kind of DIY sort of mentality here and, maybe it’s a little bit of hubris, we can teach faster than the industry.”

Likely due to Living Social’s larger troubles, the company won’t be repeating the experiment. However the concept it nurtured - teaching untechnical people technical skills - is gaining in popularity in a wide variety of ways. Learn-to-code programs bent on teaching anyone, even children, programming skills are on the upswing, at non-profits, at startups and at companies that need to hire programmers.

See also:

• This Is What The Next Generation Of Programmers Looks Like
• How To Raise The Next Zuckerberg: 6 Coding Apps For Kids

Plenty Of Ways To Learn Programming

Mark Lassoff, founder of Learntoprogram.tv, believes it’s not the place you learn to code that counts. It’s the portfolio you can show potential employers.

“People think you have to go back to school to learn programming and other computer skills, but you don’t,” he said in a statement. “There’s also the myth that you have to be some kind of math or science genius to learn it. Not true. You just need to learn the process, and then practice it. You can build a portfolio by doing volunteer work for a church or charity.”

Ordinarily, newly minted developers would be less desirable than experienced ones for employers. But the current developer drought means there are far more jobs that require programming skills than people who have those skills.  So companies are more accepting of programming newbies.

Lots Of Coding Jobs Going Begging

(See also Don't Look Now, But We Might Be In A Developer Drought.)

The number of coding jobs is only expected to increase over time. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, there were 913,000 computer programmer jobs in 2010. That number is expected to jump 30% from 2010 to 2020. Meanwhile, the average growth of all other U.S. jobs is predicted to be just 14%. 

“There aren’t enough people to fill these jobs because technology and the job market are moving much faster than education in high schools and colleges,” Lassoff said. 

How Coding Can Boost Everyone's Career

Developer and mentor Joe O’Brien believes that computer skills are essential even if you’ve already got a non-technical job. 

“We all interact with computers in such a way that they’re no longer this extra thing you do on the side,” O'Brien told ReadWrite. “Computing is a vital part of what everybody does nowadays.

"Not that we want everyone to go out and create Web programs and write the next Twitter, but I think having a base understanding of what happens behind the curtain can be huge,” he added.

O’Brien never graduated from college, but he did recently sell Edgecase, the software development company he founded and operated himself. He thinks that his programming skills made him a better CEO than he would have been without them. Today, he mentors aspiring programmers in his hometown of Columbus, Ohio. 

“Even if a CEO never codes for her company, just understanding what is happening is going to be huge for her from a risk standpoint, from an understanding standpoint,” he said. “CEOs need to have a lot of knowledge of a lot of different things and programming is a large part of that.”

Teaching Programming Is Big Business

CEOs who think like O’Brien might be the reason that learn-to-code startups have been able to fundraise millions in venture capital. Investors seem to realize that companies like Treehouse and Codecademy don’t just train the next generation of developers, but that the skill they teach are essential for managers, too. 

(See also There's A Boom In Teaching People How To Code.)

Whether to boost your career or just to keep pace with the rest of the world, learning to code has never been more important or more accessible. If you haven’t started yet, what’s stopping you?

Second image courtesy of Team Round of APPlause. Final image courtesy of Girls Who Code.

(Read more: With Pulse, LinkedIn Is Becoming The Newspaper Of The Future)

The company released this video that details how users can best use the new navigation addition: 

HubSpot, a Cambridge-based marketing software-as-a-service venture, has started a new initiative to handsomely compensate anyone who can refer a developer friend. “If you do, and we end up hiring them, we’ll thank you with a big, fat check for $30,000,” its Refer A Dev program promises. 

HubSpot’s solution may seem like an extreme one, but not if you’ve been looking at the numbers. In 2010, there were 913,000 U.S. jobs for software developers, and that number is expected to grow by 30% from 2012 to 2020, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Expected job growth across all U.S. occupations over that time? Just 14%.

Heck, see for yourself:

Even just compared to the rest of the growing tech industry, developers are among the most wanted. According to Wanted Analytics, a data firm that analyzes help-wanted ads:

[a]pplication [d]evelopers were the most in-demand technology occupation in April, reaching a new high in the number of job ads. Demand for this talent has grown 16% from April of 2012 and more than 190% from 4 years ago.

Irvine, Calif.-based IT recruiting firm CyberCoders conducted a study of 10,000 tech companies and their hiring requirements. Their findings revealed that out of all their recruits, those who had development skills — especially mobile, front-end, and open source development skills — were most in demand in today’s job market. 

“Everyday we see the engineers with these skills getting an average of four to five job offers,” the CEO and founder of CyberCoders, Heidi Golledge, wrote in the company blog post.

If the ratio of offer to engineer is indeed five to one, that means a lot of engineers are being paid well, and a lot of companies are going home empty handed. 

With a growing glut of learn-to-code companies eager to teach customers the requisite skills, it’s hard to say how long developers will remain the golden geese of the job market. But if you’re a mobile, front-end, or open-source developer working today, maybe it’s time to reconsider your options.

Just tell me first, so I can make $30,000 when you get hired at HubSpot.

From writing basic HTML to building complex logic into mobile applications, the ability to smartly craft lines of code continues to be one of the most in-demand — and often, well-paying — skill sets one can have. 

(See also: Why This Guy Quit His Sports-Radio Dream Job... To Write Software)

So what skills are the most sought after? That's an ever-fluctuating, somewhat difficult thing to track. Normally, we'd avoid turning to a single source for such data, but its very nature makes Indeed.com an ideal place to look. The job search site aggregates more than 16 million listings from a wide range of sources, so it's fairly comprehensive. 

15. Ruby 

It may be almost 20 years old, but the object-oriented scripting language is still going strong. After existing for years as a general purpose programming language, Ruby got a huge bump from the advent of Ruby on Rails, the hyper-popular Web development framework. Since the rise of Rails, the two have practically become synonymous, but Ruby has plenty of applications as a general scripting language. 

14. ASP.NET

Microsoft's server-side Web development framework is more controversial than many of its peers, in part because it's a Microsoft product. Still, its ability to build dynamic sites and Web applications is favored by many programmers and, more importantly, the organizations who hire them. 

13. AJAX

AJAX is actually multiple technologies bundled into one. Asyncronous JavaScript and XML was first popularized by Web applications like Google Maps and Gmail. The ability of websites to retrieve data in the background without reloading the page is something we now take for granted, but it was groundbreaking stuff a decade ago. Today, using a conglomeration of HTML, CSS, JavaScript (or JSON) and XML to build asynchronous Web apps is still popular, and the job listings prove it. 

12. Objective-C

For a 30-year-old programming language, Objective C is looking pretty good. It's the core of development for both of Apple's operating systems. Its roots in Mac OS X go back to Steve Jobs' days at NeXT and it's at the heart of iOS. Considering the  the platform's enormous popularity, it's no wonder that Objective-C is coveted by employers across industries. 

11. PHP

PHP is huge. The open source, server-side scripting language runs on more than 20 million websites and powers high-profile sites we deal with every day, including Facebook and Wikipedia. Any blog, news site or other website built using Wordpress or Drupal is making use of PHP as well. It's all over the Web, even if you can't see it by clicking "view source." 

10. Python

Python is a general purpose programming language that can be used in a variety of ways. Known for its clean and efficient code, Python is used by players as notable as Google and NASA. It's also what Dropbox is written in. In fact, the technology is so important to Dropbox that the company hired Python author Guido van Rossum away from Google late last year.  

Dropbox isn't the only one hiring Python talent. There are currently 19,455 Python job listings on Indeed.com. 

9. Perl 

Perl was very popular in the 90s for its ability to create CGI scripts that beefed up the functionality of early Web pages. But the dynamic programming language — sometimes called the "Swiss Army chainsaw" of languages — is capable of a wide range of feats. In addition to Web development, it's used for things like system administration, building desktop apps, game development and even bioinformatics. 

8. C

C has been around since the early 1970s and remains one of the most widely-used programming languages. It may lack the sexiness of the latest Web development frameworks, but C is what lots of operating systems, kernel level software and hardware drivers are made of.  

7. C#

Not to be confused with C or C++, C# is an object-oriented programming language developed by Microsoft in 2000 to compete with Java. Programmers will debate the merits of one language versus the other until the end of time, but tyhe fact remains that employers are hiring C# programmers like crazy.

6. XML

XML is everywhere. The markup language is used to define structured information in a wide variety of contexts. On the Web, it forms the basis of RSS and XHTML, it talks to databases and is paired with JavaScript for AJAX interactivity, among much else. It's even extended beyond the Web and has found its way into the heart of desktop applications like Microsoft Word and Adobe InDesign. The list goes on and on. And so do the job listings. 

5. C++

Like its predecessor C, C++ is used widely in operating systems,  desktop apps, developing games, hardware drivers and much else. C++ has a reputation for being more complex and inefficient than some of the alternatives , but it is nonetheless an incredibly widely used and important programming language. 

4. JavaScript

 On the Web, JavaScript is what makes things interactive. This is especially true now that the rise of tablets and smartphones has bumped Flash from its once-prominent perch. Whether it's trendy frameworks like jQuery or the JSON data interchange standard, companies need JavaScript-focused talent like never before. 

3. HTML

It's only natural that the language at the heart every Web page would be in high demand, even as native mobile app development and back-end cloud technologies command bigger ad bigger chunks of IT budgets. In fact, as tablets, smartphones and cloud-hosted services proliferate, the importance of the Web grows along with it. The conglomeration of Web technologies known as HTML5 is all the rage at the moment, but hypertext markup is more than a fad. It is, and will remain, the skeleton of the Web for the foreseeable future. 

2. Java

Java certainly has its critics, not to mention some well-publicized security issues.  But the object-oriented language remains in heavy demand and used for a wide range of purposes. It can't possibly hurt that Google uses Java as the basis for Android application development, a sector that isn't likely to slowdown anytime soon. 

1. SQL 

NoSQL databases might be getting all the attention as of lately, but more traditional, structured databases are still going strong. Thus, SQL, the programming language for querying, manipulating and managing relational databases is in high demand. Considering the sheer volume of data being generated everyday, it's no shock that having the ability to help manage it is such a marketable skill. There are currently more than 98,000 SQL jobs indexed by Indeed.com. 

But where to start? With so many languages, platforms, protocols and other technologies, it's hard to know what's worth spending your limited free time to learn. Based on surveys and data from a variety of sources, ReadWrite has put together a list of seven of the most sought-after tech skills for this year. 

7. All Things "Cloud" 

The cloud computing craze is still going strong, if tech job hiring trends are any indication. Specifically, companies are looking for software developers who specialize in things like virtualization and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) development, with familiarity with Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) technologies. 

According to one survey of IT execs, 25% of companies are planning on hiring people with SaaS and related cloud-computing expertise in 2013.  In general, SaaS and virtualization are both buzzwords often cited as being on-the-rise on job search sites. 

Of course, SaaS and PaaS (not to mention whatever-else-as-a-service) can utilize any number of specific programming languages and technologies (more on those below). Suffice it to say that if a given skill helps companies utilize cloud infrastructure or virtualize any aspect of their computing needs, it's in high demand.

See also: Tech Jobs in 2013: Open Source All The Way Down

6. IT Project Management

One of the most sought-after tech job skills isn't all that technical. Slinging code, maintaining infrastructure and designing software are all really important, but they're kind of useless without somebody to see the project through to completion. That's why certified project managers can pull in six figure incomes and why 40% of IT executives are looking to hire project managers in 2013. 

5. JavaScript (And Related Technologies) 

On the Web, JavaScript is what makes things interactive, especially now that the rise of tablets and smartphones has bumped Flash from prominence. Whether it's the ever-popular jQuery framework or the JSON data interchange standard, companies need JavaScript-focused talent like never before. In fact, JSON is the most in-demand skill on CyberCoders.

It's worth noting that when people say "HTML5," they're often referring in part to JavaScript. That's because what makes Web apps look and feel so app-like is CSS and JavaScript, not just the plain HTML itself. 

If you're looking to learn Web programming, JavaScript is the place you want to end up. If you want to start slow, a framework like jQuery could be the way to go. 

4. Java / J2EE

Java and the J2EE development platform are popping up more and more on job hiring boards. Indeed, Java/J2EE developers are going to be in high demand throughout 2013, according to a survey from Dice. 

Unlike hot new technologies like Android development and HTML5, demand for Java skills has been fairly consistent over time, although it has been on the rise in the last few years. 

3. PHP / MySQL

It may lack the sexiness of mobile development or newer Web programming technologies, but PHP is still very important. The open source scripting language runs on more than 20 million websites and powers high-profile sites we deal with every day, including Facebook and Wikipedia. Any blog, news site or other website built using Wordpress or Drupal is making use of PHP as well. It's all over the Web, even if you can't see it by clicking "view source." 

PHP is currently ranked as the most sought-after skill on Elance, with MySQL and Wordpress also cracking the top ten. There are more than a quarter of a million PHP programming gigs listed on Elance alone. 

2. iOS Development

It comes as no surprise that iOS developers are sought after. Most sources that track job talent demand rank iOS development or related skills like Xcode and Objective-C programming very highly. As Apple's sales in both tablets and smartphones has exploded, so too has the demand for developers who can build apps for the iOS ecosystem. 

iPhone and iPad development have been trendy for a few years now, but it's actually accelerated pretty dramatically in the last two years. After years of slow but steady growth, demand for iOS development skyrocketed over the course of 2011 and 2012, according to data from the job aggregator site Indeed. If you've been meaning to try your hand at building apps for the iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch, now is a good time to get into it. 

1. HTML5 / CSS

Where would the Web be without HTML? Nowhere, really. This simple markup language is literally what the Web is made of, with cascading style sheets (CSS) making everything look nice and JavaScript adding interactive functionality. 

It's only natural that the language at the heart of the Web would be in high demand, even as native mobile app development and back-end cloud technologies command bigger ad bigger chunks of IT budgets. In fact, as tablets, smartphones and cloud-hosted services proliferate, the importance of the Web grows along with it. Consumers still need to access their cloud-hosted SaaS services via their Web browser. And studies show that tablet owners still love the Web. 

After years of relative stagnation, HTML has made big advances in recent years with HTML5, which is now supported by the latest versions of all major Web browsers. Meanwhile, the design options available via CSS3 and the interactivity provided by JavaScript have pushed the Web even further, blurring the line between Web-based and native apps. 

HTML5 makes a 23-year-old markup language cool again - and back in high demand. Elance and Indeed both rank HTML as one of their most sought-after job skills, while other studies routinely point to it being in strong demand.

As a bonus, it's relatively easy to learn compared to the other skills on our list.

PHP photo by Robert Agthe.

That's because the industry's hottest trends are being driven by open-source software.  Big Data, cloud computing and mobile are all intimately connected to open source.  Hence, it's not surprising that of the top-10 tech skills in demand on Indeed.com, listed in order of how fast these keywords are growing in online job postings, six of them are explicitly open source:

  Used with permission from Indeed.com.

PaaS, which isn't uniformly open source, has prominent open-source offerings like VMware's Cloud Foundry and Red Hat's OpenShift helping drive the market.  Hence, as much as 70% of the hottest job trends can be argued as involving open source.

It's Not Just Open Source

Yes, I know.  There are plenty of proprietary technology companies faring quite well.  Apple, for example.  But let's face it: you're not Apple, and even Apple is facing increased pressure from open-source Android, which now dominates smartphones and looks set to dominate tablets and anything else Apple cares to reinvent.  In mobile, then, you need to know Android as well as HTML5 application frameworks like Ember.js, Sencha, Backbone, jQuery Mobile or others.

In Big Data, demand is high for know-how in a range of open-source projects, as Dice and Wikibon note.  In fact, while we've long had Big Data solutions from brand-name vendors like Informatica and IBM, it's the open-source projects like Hadoop that have really made Big Data a big deal by bringing serious data processing and data storage (predominately NoSQL) to low-cost commodity hardware.

Cloud computing, too, is largely an open-source phenomenon, though the 8,000-pound gorilla known as Amazon is hardly a big open-source contributor.  But that doesn't mean Amazon hasn't benefited from open source: it runs a half million Linux servers (mostly customized Red Hat Enterprise Linux), Xen and other open-source technology.  Much of the other cloud providers, however, rely expressly on open source, including Eucalyptus, Citrix's CloudStack, OpenNebula and OpenStack, among others.  

Training Made Easier

Which leaves us with just one problem: how to get trained on all this great open-source software?  According to the Dice survey, one of the big problems hiring managers have is in finding qualified personnel for all these tech jobs they need to fill:

Which isn't really a problem in open source.  The code is there for anyone to download, learn from and improve upon.  This aspect of open source - the lowering of hurdles to access great code - perhaps more than any other, will do more to increase the pace of innovation in the tech industry over the next decade.  In 2013, our problem is not access to training on the tech that will give us better, higher-paying jobs.  Our problem is choosing where to launch our first GitHub fork.

Lead image courtesy of Shutterstock.

It's a nice feather in the caps of Google, SAS, NetApp, Microsoft and the other winners, but beyond bragging rights, is there a point to this or any similar lists? Don't these awards always go to rich companies that can afford to pay and coddle their workers. Isn't that why fast-growing tech companies always seem to dominate them?

To find out, I asked a Director of Human Resources for a federal agency - who asked that ReadWrite not publish his name. He told me I was looking at the lists all wrong.

"I think they're great!" he said. Just not for employees. I was looking at the wrong consumers.

Impractical For Job Seekers

"They aren't very practical job-hunting tools," he explained, "unless you're young and mobile, and willing to go where the work takes you. But for employers – particularly 'boring' employers like us – they can put numbers on qualities we usually can't quantify, and that helps us compete."

His reasoning makes sense. Hip, well-funded companies offer catering, gyms, cocktail hours and a ton of perks that look great on a website. More traditional companies, particularly those (like the government) with budget constraints have to carve out less-sexy intangibles. "We have teams that have been working together for 30 years, and we really do operate as a family. We have solid benefits, a great retirement plan, and if something goes wrong and we have to lay off employees, we do everything in our power to find them work without disrupting their lives or incomes. But that's a horrible pitch, because it's fuzzy and it's tough to prove, without talking to our employees."

The Feds Do It Right!

It turns out the best, most complete report is the Federal Employee Viewpoint Survey, which provides unparalleled transparency and detail. The Federal Employee Viewpoint Survey was a great start, he says, because it provided actionable data he and other managers could use to make things better, and it gave his agency "a bit of an edge with recruiting transfers" from other agencies.

But the Great Places surveys' focus on employee trust was most exciting to him. "It's a measure of employee contentment, and I honestly think we can go toe-to-toe with the private sector on this. We may not be able to match salaries dollar-for-dollar, but if our employees are happier, applicants might take a closer look at why. And then we have a discussion."

Why Do Tech Companies Dominate?

So, why do so many tech companies dominate the list? Was it simply because they have the money to spend, or because their brand recognition makes them desirable?

He didn't think so. "Part of it might be their lack of legacy, sure. But mostly, I think it's because they're used to competing for the best, and they know what that takes. The good ones, like Google, know it takes an actual culture of support, and they've built that, as much as that makes my life hard when I have to recruit tech people in California. They're just ahead of the curve, and most of us have to catch up."

So there you have it, the tech companies that make the top of these lists really are likely to be good places to work - no matter what your salary.

Dos And Don'ts

Finally, if you really must use the Best Places To Work lists as job hunting tools, be sure to follow these Dos and Don'ts:

Don't use Best Places To Work lists as a primary job-hunting tool. Don't worry if your future employer isn't on a list - it might still be the perfect spot for you. Do use these lists to find new leads. Do consider high-ranked employers that you might have otherwise dismissed.

Image courtesy of Shutterstock.

Intuit was not named in the lawsuit because it had already been listed in a suit and settlement from September 2010 over a series of similar agreements with other companies (Apple, Adobe, Google, Intel and Pixar) not to hire each other's employees. The current eBay case grew from the 2010 one, but is being treated as a separate suit. 

Competition Doesn't Hurt, But Limiting Opportunity Does

Tech companies are in constant competition when trying to find qualified people to work for them. Acting Assistant Attorney General Joseph Waylan said in the DOJ's press release that the department believes eBay violated antitrust laws by entering into this agreement because it "eliminated a significant form of competition to the detriment of affected employees who were likely deprived of access to better job opportunities and salaries."

By preventing Intuit, or any competitor, from trying to hire their employees, eBay is trying to limit the options for its employees and thus reduce their leverage. This means employees might not be able to negotiate raises or better benefits because there are fewer places for them to go if their requests aren't met. 

Bad Practice, Good Business?

These agreements are illegal, and clearly hurt employees. But it's easy to understand why companies are tempted. After all, in most states, companies are allowed to develop these kinds of agreements directly with their employees, if not with other companies. They see this as a way of protecting an investment. Employers put a lot of money into training employees, not to mention the access given to confidential information and relationships. Non-compete agreements help prevent that investment from benefiting a competitor. 

In California, non-compete contracts between employers and employees is prohibited, except in limited circumstances. That could be one reason for companies to make anti-competitive deals with others in their industry. California State Attorney General Kamala Harris is filing a State lawsuit - separate from the federal one - based on the State's stronger protection against anti-competitive agreements. 

Image courtesy of Shutterstock.