Wednesday, March 25, 2015

30 tech skills that will get you $110,000-plus salary

30 tech skills that will get you $110,000-plus salary

/ March 25,2015
30 tech skills that will get you $110,000-plus salary
IT seems to be a lucrative career option offering of high-paying jobs. However, it's an ever-changing job market. One day a skill is hot and the next it's not.

Job site Dice.com recently published its 2015 Salary Survey, which named the highest-paying tech skills. Of course, skills alone won't always lead to a high salary. Work experience counts, too.

So, here are 30 high-paying tech skills as per the survey.

1. No. 1: PaaS ($130,081)

March 25,2015
No. 1: PaaS ($130,081)
PaaS or "Platform as a Service" is a type of cloud computing technology. It hosts everything that a developer needs to write an app. These apps once written, would live on PaaS cloud.

PaaS is a huge trend in app development right now, with every big tech vendor, every hosting company, and every maker of app development tools looking for game in the PaaS market.

2. No. 2: Cassandra ($128,646)

March 25,2015
No. 2: Cassandra ($128,646)
Cassandra is a free and open source NoSQL database.

It's a kind of database that can handle and store data of different types and sizes of data and it's increasingly the go-to database for mobile and cloud applications. Several IT companies including Apple and Netflix use Cassandra.

Pay for Cassandra-associated jobs has climbed 14.5% over last year, Dice says.

3. No. 3: MapReduce ($127,315)

March 25,2015
No. 3: MapReduce ($127,315)
MapReduce has been called "the heart of Hadoop."

MapReduce is the method that allows Hadoop to store all kinds of data across many low-cost computer servers. To get meaningful data of Hadoop, a programmer writes software programs (often in the popular language, Java) for MapReduce.

Pay for MapReduce-associated jobs has climbed 11% over last year, Dice says. It has over 500 job listings for it.

4. No. 4: Cloudera ($126,816)

March 25,2015
No. 4: Cloudera ($126,816)
Cloudera is a company that makes a commercial version of Hadoop.

Although Hadoop is a free and open-source-project for storing large amounts of data on inexpensive computer servers, the free version of Hadoop is not easy to use. Several companies have created friendlier versions of Hadoop, and Cloudera is arguably the most popular one.

Pay for Cloudera-associated jobs has climbed 20% over the last year, Dice says.

5. No. 5: Hbase ($126,369)

March 25,2015
No. 5: Hbase ($126,369)
Hbase is yet another project based on the popular Hadoop technology.

Hadoop is a way to store all kinds of data across many low-cost computer servers. Once that data is stored using the Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS), Hbase can sort through that data and group bits of data together, somewhat similar to how a traditional database organizes data.

Pay for Hbase-associated jobs has climbed 20% over last year, Dice says. It has over 660 job listings for it.

6. No. 6: Pig ($124,563)

March 25,2015
No. 6: Pig ($124,563)
Pig is another hot skill, thanks to demand for technologies like Big Data and Hadoop.

Pig is a programming language that helps extract information from Hadoop like find answers to certain questions or otherwise use the data.

Pay for Pig-associated jobs climbed 13% over the last year, as per Dice.

7. No. 7: ABAP ($124,262)

March 25,2015
No. 7: ABAP ($124,262)
Advanced Business Application Programming or ABAP is the software language developed by SAP for building business applications on top of its business application suite.

Businesses often want to write custom apps that make use of the data stored in SAP. Developers also write commercial apps for SAP.

Pay for ABAP-associated jobs jumped by 24% over the last year, reveals Dice survey.

8. No. 8: Chef ($123,458)

March 25,2015
No. 8: Chef ($123,458)
Chef is "IT automation" software from Chef Software, one of a handful of young companies ushering in a huge new tech trend called "DevOps."

DevOps is when the developers building applications ("dev") and IT people deploying them (operations or "ops") work together to use speedy techniques so they can deploy technology as fast as it's released. Chef helps IT professionals automate tasks that keep computer servers running efficiently.

Dice has over 1200 Chef-associated job listings.

9. No. 9: Flume ($123,186)

March 25,2015
No. 9: Flume ($123,186)
Flume is yet another skill spawned from Big data" craze and the popularity of Hadoop.

Hadoop is a way to store all kinds of data across many low-cost computer servers. Flume is a method to move massive amounts of data from the place it was created into a Hadoop system.

Dice has over 150 job listings for Flume-related jobs.

10. No. 10: Hadoop ($121,313)

March 25,2015
No. 10: Hadoop ($121,313)
Hadoop is a crucial technology at the center of the whole Big Data.

It is an open source software used to gather and store vast amounts of data and analyze it on low-cost commodity hardware. For instance, banks may use Hadoop for fraud detection, and online shopping services could use it to analyze customers' buying patterns.

Pay for Hadoop-associated jobs saw an increase of 11.6% over the last year, Dice says.

11. No. 11: Hive ($120,873)

March 25,2015
No. 11: Hive ($120,873)
Hive is yet another hot in-demand skill, courtesy Big Data and the popularity of Hadoop.

Hadoop is a way to store all kinds of data across many low-cost computer servers. Hive provides a way to extract information from Hadoop using the same kind of traditional methods used by regular databases. (In geek speak: it gives Hadoop a database query interface).

As per the survey, salary for Hive-associated jobs witnessed an increased of 17.6% over the last year.

12. No. 12: Puppet ($120,072)

March 25,2015
No. 12: Puppet ($120,072)
Puppet is "IT automation" software from Puppet Labs, one of the handful of young companies ushering in the new tech trend called "DevOps."

DevOps is a software development method where developers creating software ("dev") and the teams responsible for deploying that software ("ops) use speedy techniques to improve deployment time and cut time-to-market. Puppet helps them automate tasks that keep computer servers running efficiently.

Pay for Puppet-associated jobs has climbed 15.5% over last year, as per Dice survey.

13. No. 13: NoSQL ($118,587)

March 25,2015
No. 13: NoSQL ($118,587)
NoSQL is a new kind of database that is part of the big data phenomenon.

NoSQL has sometimes been called the cloud database. Regular databases need data to be organized. Names and account numbers need to be structured and labeled. But noSQL doesn't care about that. It can work with all kinds of documents.

There are a number of popular noSQL databases including Mongo, Couchbase and Cassandra.

Pay for noSQL-associated jobs has climbed 3.3% over last year as per the survey.

14. No. 14: Zookeeper ($118,567)

March 25,2015
No. 14: Zookeeper ($118,567)
Zookeeper is a free and open-source project that also came from the big data craze, particularly the uber popular tech called Hadoop.

Hadoop is a way to store all kinds of data across many low-cost computer servers. Zookeeper is like a file system, a way to name, locate, and sync files used in Hadoop. But now it's being used with other big-data technologies beyond Hadoop.

Pay for Zookeeper-associated jobs has climbed 21% over last year, Dice says. It has nearly 200 job listings for it.

15. No. 15: SOA ($118,518)

March 25,2015
No. 15: SOA ($118,518)
Service-oriented architecture or SOA or is actually an old term for a software concept that's growing increasingly popular, thanks to cloud computing.

Pracitioners of it write their code in small bites, making little "services" that can be shared among multiple apps. Instead of every cloud app needing its own way of dealing with passwords, for instance, a "password service" can be shared by many.

Pay for SOA-associated jobs has climbed 8.7% over the last year, Dice says. It has over 3,600 job listings for it.

16. No. 16: Data Architect ($118,104)

March 25,2015
No. 16: Data Architect ($118,104)
Data architect is another in-demand job, thanks again to the Big Data craze.

It involves designing IT systems that store data, including figuring out which data should a company keep, how long, where, how, what business units get access to it, and so on.

17. No. 17: Solr ($117,394)

March 25,2015
No. 17: Solr ($117,394)
Solr is a free and open source enterprise search platform that is extremely popular with large websites.

Some of its users include eHarmony, StubHub, and BestBuy, and many others.

18. No. 18: Data Scientist ($116,936)

March 25,2015
No. 18: Data Scientist ($116,936)
There are data scientists that work on the tech side, the marketing side, and just about every other area of business these days, and in just about every size company.

The job involves figuring out how to get meaningful numbers and information from large volumes of data.

Dice has thousands of job listings for data scientist profile.

19. No. 19: Big Data ($116,414)

March 25,2015
No. 19: Big Data ($116,414)
Big Data is one of the most in-demand technology. Startups, big tech vendors, companies big and small are all jumping on the big data craze.

It is used to handle massive amounts of information in all sorts of formats -- tweets, posts, e-mails, documents, audio, video and whatever.

There are a growing number of technologies that make up the Big Data world including all sorts of analytics, in-memory databases, NoSQL databases, Hadoop and so on.

Pay for big data-associated jobs has climbed 9.3% over last year, as per Dice.

20. No. 20: OpenStack ($116,047)

March 25,2015
No. 20: OpenStack ($116,047)
Another popular free and open source cloud computing operating system is OpenStack.

Many vendors are supporting it and selling their own commercial versions of it, such as IBM, HP, Red Hat, Ubuntu and others.

Pay for OpenStack-associated jobs has climbed 8.5% over last year, Dice says.

21. No. 21: CMMI ($115,467)

March 25,2015
No. 21: CMMI ($115,467)
CMMI is a sophisticated method for performance management. It helps companies predict costs, create schedules and ensure quality.

There's a whole CMMI culture that can train someone on the CMMI models and how to use them.

Pay for CMMI-associated jobs has climbed 8.4% over the last year, Dice says.

22. No. 22: R ($115,121)

March 25,2015
No. 22: R ($115,121)
At the center of much-in demand technology Big Data is something called "analytics," the ability to sift through the humongous amount of data and gather business intelligence out of it.

R is the language of choice for this. It used for statistical analysis and graphics/visualization.

Though the salary for R-associated jobs has not seen a huge jump over the last year, the skill still is much in demand as the job listings on Dice show.

23. No. 23: CloudStack ($115,043)

March 25,2015
No. 23: CloudStack ($115,043)
Cloud computing is a big trend and there's a battle over different "cloud operating systems."

Several of them are free and open source, but they're mostly built by vendors who want to sell a commercial version along with cloud computing software or equipment.

One such example is CloudStack from Apache Software Foundation and backed by Citrix, who sells a commercial version of it.

Pay for CloudStack-associated jobs has climbed 24% over last year, Dice survey says.

24. No. 24: OmniGraffle ($114,667)

March 25,2015
No. 24: OmniGraffle ($114,667)
OmniGraffle is a diagramming tool just for Macs – like the Mac version of Microsoft Visio.

It may seem odd that knowing this tool could help in getting a $110,000 job. But it's also a popular tool for complex diagramming tasks like website wireframes and graphic design.

Pay for OmniGraffle-associated jobs has climbed 3.3% over last year, reveals Dice survey.

25. No. 25: Arista ($114,657)

March 25,2015
No. 25: Arista ($114,657)
Arista makes a computer network switch used in big data centers.

Its claim to fame is its operating system software which users can programme to add features, write apps or make changes to the network.

26. No 26: Documentum ($114,494)

March 25,2015
No 26: Documentum ($114,494)
EMC Documentum is an "enterprise content management" system. While Big Data options like Hadoop are the new-age way of dealing with data, Documentum remains a popular tool in industries that still use a lot of paper or electronic forms, like legal, medical, insurance, and so on.

Dice receives fair amount of job listings for Documentum-related jobs.

27. No. 27: UML ($114,372)

March 25,2015
No. 27: UML ($114,372)
Software designs are increasingly becoming complex and here's where Unified Modeling Language (UML) has a role to play. UML is a visual language for turning complex software designs into an easier-to-understand diagram.

According to Dice, salaries for UML-associated jobs have climbed 6.5% over the last year.

28. No 28: Sqoop ($114,328)

March 25,2015
No 28: Sqoop ($114,328)
Sqoop is one of those skills that has zoomed into popularity, thanks to Big Data craze.

It's a free and open source tool that lets you transfer data from popular Big Data storage system, Hadoop, into classic relational databases like the ones made by Oracle, IBM and Microsoft.

It's a command-line interface tool, meaning you have to know the commands and type them directly into the system, rather than click on them with a mouse.

Pay for Sqoop-associated jobs has climbed 24.5% over last year, as per Dice.

29. No. 29: JDBC ($114,234)

March 25,2015
No. 29: JDBC ($114,234)
JDBC is a Java-based technology from Oracle. It helps a database connect to an application written in the Java programming language.

Java is a popular language for writing apps, so lots of skills associated with it pay well and this is one of those skills.

Pay for JDBC-associated jobs has climbed 11% over last year, according to Dice.

30. No. 30: RDBMS ($114,100)

March 25,2015
No. 30: RDBMS ($114,100)
Relational Database Management System is the full from of RDBMS, a type of database management system. This is the traditional kind of database that uses the structured query language (SQL) used by databases like Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server, and IBM DB2.

While NoSQL databases are increasingly becoming popular for new applications, many companies still RDBMS-based systems. There are high number of job listings on Dice for RDBMS-related jobs.