The 8 fastest growing tech skills worth over $110,000

Business Insider ^ | 04/25/2016 | Julie Bort

[SeekAndFind]

In the tech industry, one day a skill is hot, the next it's not. IT professionals spend a lot of their career learning, training, and trying to keep up.

Job hunting site Dice prides itself on helping IT pros navigate which skills to pursue. It just concluded an analysis of its database of 80,000+ tech jobs from April 2015 through April 2016 to determine the fastest-growing skills based on job openings.

We then cross-checked those skills against Dice's annual salary survey, published in February, which offered the average salary for jobs using those particular skills in 2015.

The good news? All of them are part of jobs that command average salaries of over $110,000.

No. 8: Cassandra, job openings up 32%, worth $147,811

Cassandra is a special kind of database called a noSQL database, which is part of the big data trend. NoSQL databases can handle massive amounts of data, spread across cheaper, low-end servers.

Cassandra was born at Facebook, but Facebook released it as a free and open source project and today it is used at companies including Apple, Comcast, Instagram, Spotify, eBay, Rackspace, and Netflix.

No. 7: Hive, up 32%, worth $129,400

Hive is another skill in high demand as part of the big data phenom, particularly a big data tech called Hadoop.

Hadoop is software 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).

No. 6: Cloud computing, up 33%, worth $112,972

Enterprises are increasingly using shared, rented computer servers, software, and storage accessed over the internet from companies like Amazon, Microsoft and Google.

[mouse1]

I’m sure our wonderful politicians will find a way to bring in IT workers on H1B’s to do this work for less.

[bkopto]

“Hive” is a tech skill? Can I take a college course called Hive 101?

[Resolute Conservative]

I have been in tech since the mid 80’s and I cannot wait to leave it, just a couple more years unless I just throw in the towel. It is not about science anymore and has not been since about 2000 give or take. It has been bastardized to instant gratification, useless social media, spyware, and useless/convoluted business apps. IMO about 30% of the software out there provides a useful service.

I won’t even get into the demographics.

Call it burn out or whatever, it sucks.

[I want the USA back]

Lots of luck trying to get one of those jobs, if you’re American, White, male and over 55.

[Nifster]

Programming languages and applications have strange monikers. Somewhere in Silicon Valley you can take that course

[SpinnerWebb]

agreed

[Nifster]

Most programming was NEVER about science

[CitizenBob]

Local manufacturing companies (multi-billion in annual sales) in my small “hick town” have been using Indian IT workers either H1B or on contract for well over a decade.

They also use Asian employees either H1B workers or on contract for design and development activity.

The same local companies each also established manufacturing facilities in China over a decade ago.

[bigbob]

and if you want to use Visual Basic you have to pay them

[fruser1]

Half of these are “big data” oriented.

What will skew the salaries up in those is the fact that many of those jobs are intelligence oriented. The high clearance involved demands the higher salary, as much as the technology.

Not much of a point, but I figured I’d throw it out there.

[snarkpup]

I have been in tech since the mid 80’s and I cannot wait to leave it, just a couple more years unless I just throw in the towel. It is not about science anymore and has not been since about 2000 give or take. It has been bastardized to instant gratification, useless social media, spyware, and useless/convoluted business apps. IMO about 30% of the software out there provides a useful service.

The web site upon which the article resides is a classic example of this kind of crapware. Most of the content of the page is being blocked by my security plugins. I'm not desperate enough to read it to whitelist all the domains it's trying to bring in.

[SaveFerris]

You are very wise and smarter than about 95% of Americans.

Or, at least have a clue about what is going on that the MSM and the White House are hiding.

[SaveFerris]

Oh, the tales I could tell. But I won’t, not in the open forum.

[wally_bert]

Soon even white males of any age will be in the same boat.

[ronnietherocket3]

I wish someone would come along with a bug tracking tool to get rid of JIRA; that thing is so bloated.

[sjm_888]

Amen on that. JIRA sucks.

[dr_lew]

Most programming was NEVER about science

Well, I dunno. In the 1960's programming WAS science, whether it was about science or not. And furthermore, scientific programming was a more or less equal rival of business programming, as epitomized by FORTRAN programmers vs. COBOL programmers.

I once heard this division invoked by a speaker describing the hopelessness of advocating PL1, as the angry FORTRAN programmers on one side, and the angry COBOL programmers on the other side, wanted none of it.

[Nifster]

Programming like any good tool made science possible. I will give you that but computers were never more than that

[dr_lew]

Programming like any good tool made science possible. I will give you that but computers were never more than that

We read daily about AI taking over humanity, and it's nothing but a tool?

At any rate, it was Science to us when I took Applied Math 101-102 from Andries Van Dam back in the 60's ( He's still there! according to Wikipedia. )