I shoulda learned Java

Alas, my bank account has little more than tumbleweeds in it, so my year or so of un-/self-employment is coming to an end. I must job search in earnest and stop turning up my liberal elite nose at corporations looking for automated pollutant emitters and chicken torturers.

The question now is what programming skills such corporations want me to use to design their new improved Humvee fan sites, and since I've sent out my quota of three resumes today, I get to blog those skills.

As I've opened various job postings, hoping the single handful of programming languages I'm truly comfortable with are just what they're looking for (FORTRAN anyone? Anyone?), I've been keeping track of what they are, in fact, looking for. This is completely non-scientific, of course. One glaring flaw, for example: every third company wants a straight-up Java programmer. I want to know Java (that's how the awesome, awesome, awesome Legend of Zelda for your phone! was written), but I don't honestly know Java, so I don't open those ones.

Here are the programming languages/skills companies are looking for in order of popularity in my unscientific survey:

Javascript - 8 companies
Green Ventures, Inc.
Mystery Company
Auction company
Smarsh
Mystery Company
Dealerpeak
Inspiration
ConceroTechnology

HTML - 6 companies
Sharepoint
Smarsh
Intersoft
Mystery Company
Auction company
ConceroTechnology

Java - 6 companies
Amazon
Sharepoint
Axiom
Mystery Company
Dealerpeak
DB Professionals

Linux - 4 companies
Amazon
Mystery Company
Intersoft
VxWorks

PHP - 3 companies
Green Ventures, Inc.
Mystery Company
Intersoft

MySQL - 3 companies
Green Ventures, Inc.
Mystery Company
Auction company

Visual Basic - 3 companies
Smarsh
Axiom
Selectron

Visual Basic.NET - 3 companies
Lifeport
Sharepoint
ConceroTechnology

XML - 2 companies
Intersoft
Dealerpeak

Perl - 2 companies
Amazon
Intersoft

C++ - 2 companies
Amazon
Axiom

C# - 2 companies
Selectron
ConceroTechnology

C - 2 companies
VxWorks
Mystery Company

Coldfusion - 2 companies
Mystery Company
Dealerpeak

.NET - 2 companies
Sharepoint
Intersoft

CGI - 1 company
Intersoft

CSS - 2 companies
Smarsh
Mystery Company

ASP - 2 companies
Sharepoint
Smarsh

Flash - 2 companies
Auction company
Inspiration

SQL - 1 company
Dealerpeak

AJAX - 1 company
Green Ventures, Inc.

Joomla - 1 company
Green Ventures, Inc.

Drupal - 1 company
Inspiration

SQL Server - 1 company
Smarsh

ActiveX - 1 company
Smarsh