Demand for AR/VR talent is up by 1400 percent , mirroring blockchain's 517 percent demand growth last year.

In large US tech hubs AR/VR engineer salaries range from $135k - $150k. More than 46 percent of software engineers rank AR/VR as one of the top three technologies they'd like to learn in 2020.

If you work in AR/VR, you may want to move to San Francisco, where they pay $150k/year on average, although that should rent you a small shoe box at the bottom of someone’s garden.

The next-highest growth in demand came for "gaming engineers" and "computer vision engineers" -- with both positions seeing a 146 percent increase in demand over 2018. The next-highest demand growth was for "search engineers" (increasing 137 percent ) and for "machine learning engineers" (increasing 89 percent ). Demand for "blockchain engineers" increased by just nine percent .

Demand for frontend and backend engineers "grew steadily by 17 percent , which shows that all companies -- not just Silicon Valley tech giants -- are evolving into being tech companies".

And the #1 most-desired coding skill was Go  - for the second year in a row - "garnering an average of 9.2 interview requests for every Go-skilled candidate..." But there may be a larger trend.

According to Robert Half, 67 percent of IT managers plan to expand their teams in areas such as security, cloud computing and business intelligence, but 89 percent reported challenges in recruiting that talent. Those challenges in hiring are even greater for roles related to machine learning, artificial intelligence, and blockchain.

Their analysis concludes the most in-demand programming languages are Go, Scala, Ruby, TypeScript, Kotlin, Objective C, JavaScript, Swift, PHP, Java, HTML, and then Python -- though Python, JavaScript, and Java are engineers' favorite coding languages, "largely because of their useful and well-maintained libraries and packages."

"Ruby, PHP and Objective C are ranked the least popular (and least fun) languages for software engineers."