[The post bag is full of single unit count postcards, okay one, with comments from my last post].
Anon from Northern Ireland writes:
As it’s a bank holiday it’s double time mate but I’ll look all the same.
No Pondering Required
No pondering required as we’ve done all the majority of the pondering we need to do and we have some scripts that will help us get the numbers. So a small ponder is required….
A Wee Bit of Prep
IT Sales and Business Development Manager are essentially sales roles so I’ll base my searches there. The category number is 24, compared to 3 which is for IT.
A quick switch of the keywords and we can release the script to an unsuspecting world.
for i in it+sales business+development+manager; do echo -n $i >> jobsoutput.txt ; curl http://www.nijobs.com/ShowResults.aspx?Keywords=$i\&Location=\&Category=24\&Recruiter=Company | grep "Total Jobs Found:" >> jobsoutput.txt ; done
And this time no messing around with awk, there’s only two numbers I’m after.
it+sales <label style="margin-right:30px;">Total Jobs Found: 31</label> business+development+manager <label style="margin-right:30px;">Total Jobs Found: 19</label>
There we are, 31 and 19. Fifty jobs in grey, so to speak.
Back to the Hypothesis
Let’s have a look at the “anonymous” comment again.
So the question is are those numbers matching. For 50 sales jobs there should be 300 developers. A quick look at a basic search of all the IT positions shows 118 jobs. So that’s a factor of 2.36, a bit off the mark.
That does beg the question that given every sales position does an organisation already have the required number of developers and just a lack of sales? The conclusion here is that there’s a factor of 2.36 available IT jobs against the number of sales/bizdev positions.
For Further Discussion?
Is Northern Ireland a “normally functioning market”? Does the number of employed sales people match up with the required number of IT related people (a factor of six)?
Can I have my tea now????
It's All A Bet - MLOps, DevOps, AI and Synthetic Data Design 
2 responses to “#DataScience for the confused. Ni Software Jobs – Part 2”
Not sure I agree with Anon’s premise; *why* should there be a geographically restricted sales/dev factor at all? Esp when one of the biggest ‘selling point’ of NI is “Yer an hour from London/Dublin/Liverpool/Manchester/Glasgow/Edinburgh”.
Obv this is all back-of-the-envelope stuff and it’s be a massive job to try and normalise this process against the thousands of job sites across the UK, but TLDR I don’t think we can derive and conclusions from this factor.
Well that question does open up a world of possibilities. I don’t think there are any real conclusions either, not without an awful lot more data from around the country. One jobs website is hardly a concrete sample of data. NI has been used as the technical deployment of things while sales could be run from the UK with the old adage, “that’s where they customers are”.