News

Salary Info Shows Big Data Paid Off Big Time in 2014

• By David Ramel
• January 22, 2015

Further confirming what everybody in the IT biz knows, careers site Dice.com released its latest annual salary report today, indicating that Big Data skills pay better than others, with several niches completely dominating the list of top 10 average salaries reported in 2014.

"Big Data made a big showing last year and we're seeing it this year too," said Dice president Shravan Goli in a statement. "Tech professionals who analyze and mine information in a way that makes an impact on overall business goals have proven to be incredibly valuable to companies. The proof is in the pay."

The pay is good, ranging above $120,000 for several Big Data-related skills, which make up seven of the top 10:

1. Platform as a Service (PaaS): $130,081
2. Cassandra: $128,646
3. MapReduce: $127,315
4. Cloudera: $126,816
5. HBase: $126,369
6. Pig: $124,563
7. Advanced Business Application Programming (ABAP): $124,262
8. Chef: $123,458
9. Flume: $123,186
10. Hadoop: $121,313

That's compared with the reported average IT salary of $89,450.

Overall, Dice said, IT workers received almost a 2 percent salary bump in 2014, but nevertheless employee satisfaction declined slightly, continuing a trend started in 2012.

"As demand for technology professionals rises and highly-skilled talent is harder to find, the pressure is being reflected where it counts: paychecks," Goli said. "Still, tech pros are less happy with their earnings, signaling to companies that in order to recruit and retain the best candidates, offering more will be necessary."

That's already pretty much in the works, according to a recent survey from high-tech careers firm Robert Half Technology, which reported Big Data pros will get salary hikes this year second only to mobile developers.

"As organizations of all types launch or advance Big Data initiatives, many will look to hire experienced engineers who can communicate with business users and data scientists, and translate business objectives into data processing workflows," Robert Half Technology said. "Big Data engineers can anticipate a 9.3 percent boost in starting pay in 2015, with average salaries ranging from $119,250 to $168,250."

Today's Dice.com report came from a survey of 23,470 employed tech pros responding to an invite notification on the Dice.com site between Sept. 29 and Nov. 26, 2014.