I've referenced many of the salary survey sites, but they all tend to categorize salaries based on generic job titles. Obviously, things like job title, years of professional experience, location, and the many important non-tech skills are closely associated with how much a position pays. What are currently some of the hot programming-specific skills that tend to hike up the programmer's price?
Thanks in advance!
It's not strictly programming - but computer forensics, as I understand it, is good job security (the government and police departments are always backlogged) and lucrative (large firms pay 6 figures standard).
If anyone has more details about this, please post - I'm curious.
This is going to generate some wildly-differing opinions.
However, for web development I'd put Ruby, Python, and PHP at the top of the list.
Desktop development for Windows seems to be heavily using C#.
Mac development is still Xcode's suite.
Linux and server development is going on in Python, Java, and C/C++, from what I've observed.
Sharepoint development is big $$ right now and is in high demand in the government sector. Also any specialized skills that you possess that are difficult to find will pay top $$. Items like...
I'd say anything that has to do with understanding and implementing automated RISK controls within financial institutions will be very lucrative.
I think the most lucrative job skill for you is the one you enjoy doing the most. That will also bring in the most money most of the time.
One of the skills that I frequently see as increasingly popular is ETL (Extract, Transform and Load). Basically it's the art of of taking a file full of 'x' and making it conform to 'y'. It's a good skillset to pickup for whatever development platform you are working with because people always need to get data INTO a system at some point. In the past I've written applications that take output from an AS400 printer and imported them to a PC. We currently process alot of bank files for customers, each one of the formats for the file is different but we read it, parse it and stick the data into fields our systems and use and understand. If you are going to do anything serious with databases, this one WILL come up.
As a good rule of thumb, the more you are managing others at your programming job, the more pay you will earn.
Higher specialization gains you more money, but also makes the market smaller for jobs you can take.
Classic languages like C/C++ seem to earn more money, possibly because of the type of project they are used on.
Use common sense and estimate the job market potential competitors: while there are plenty of web-development jobs, there are also plenty of web-developers. Embedded, hardware near programmers are much more seldom.
If you know your geographical area of interest, look at other industries. They WILL need programmers. Programmers that are knowledgeable of their field of enterprise.
I put ActionScript 3/ Flex on my CareerBuilder resume about a year ago, and immediately started getting cold calls for job opportunities almost every day. Flash, Flex, and AIR are really hot right now. I've since taken my phone number off the site because people were calling so much. I think that's an indicator of a very high demand for Flex developers, and not many people who have skills with it.
I'm going to avoid the norm and choose an actual skill rather than a language,
That skill is concurrency. In the days where the common desktop machine has multiple-cores, learning how to properly handle concurrency and multi-threading is a must,
I can speak only in terms of webdev;
Rails and AJAX are getting pretty hot. So is "Social Media" and "Web 2.0/3.0" - whatever the hell those actually mean these days.
Old staples are going to be sought after for a long time. XHTML, CSS, Javascript are always going to be useful and in demand. Writing well-formed, semantic XHTML is going to always be a huge asset. It'll let you easily transition into browser compliance, SEO, mobile development, disabled user support, even XML. And those all look great on a resume.
In Spain, if we consider only programming languages :
I think certifications (SCJP...) are not very useful here. What about other countries ?
From what I have heard, the current demand for Ruby on Rails developers is outpacing the supply of developers with even 3 months of good experience. However, the overall number of available Ruby on Rails jobs is very small compared to Java/C#.
You need to make a distinction between hot and high-priced. What drives a high salary is not how much demand there is for something, but how much demand there is compared to the number of people with that skill. Python, PHP and Java are poor choices in this respect, because while there is high demand, there are also a lot of people with those skills. Web development in general doesn't get the high salaries.
If I had to pick a skill that was highly likely to net a high salary, I'd go with COM programming in C++. For years nobody has been learning COM, and as a result the only people still in the field are senior people. It's still very much in demand, and that demand isn't about hype, its about necessity. Knowing how to program Extended MAPI doesn't hurt either.
What you need to be looking for are unsexy technologies that are in reasonably high demand. Others have mentioned SAP, but there's also Cobol (pretty much anything on IBM iSeries), business intelligence, and Delphi (in some regions, and only for more than form design). Inside each platform there are also niches that net you salary bonus points. For example, knowing the ins and outs of writing PHP applications and setting up PHP environments that perform well when scaled to thousands of concurrent users is a valuable trait.
Another perspective is more at a systems level. That is the notion of Identity Management. There are a number of products in the space and they are all quite different.
The interesting part is that you need to learn a fair bit about each connected system. (I.e. Active directory, eDirectory, Lotus Notes, SAP, PeopleSoft, etc). Thus it is rarely boring.
With the various audit rules coming online for companies in the US, they need to manage identities much better than currently done, and they may not have a lot of choice due to audit constraints.