Barely a day goes by in the IT industry where the skills gap is not highlighted as a major problem facing businesses.
Whether the problem is associated with cyber security and leaving businesses vulnerable, or impacting how quickly an organisation can grow and expand, the problem is ever present.
What this means is that programmers and developers are in high-demand, some more than others.
Packt, a publishing house that offers technology and coding e-books for IT professionals, recently created a Skill Up 2016 report which surveyed over 11,500 developers and IT professionals to look at emerging trends in IT and tech across the world.
The report looked at areas such as what are the most in-demand skills in the industry? What are the leading salaries in IT? And what developers say will be the next ‘big thing’.
The largest number of respondents came from the United States(2,272), the U.K. (509), and Germany (366), and included people working at IBM, Oracle, Microsoft, Google, and Amazon with an average salary of $66,553.
The most popular tools being used are:
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- JavaScript
- Python
- Java
- C
- SQL
JavaScript is the most popular language, just edging out Python, but it is Python that is really gaining all the buzz. Widely used by data analysts and data scientists it has also become an appealing language to software engineers, software developers, development leads, managers, engineers, system analysts and web developers.
It is becoming increasingly common for developers to need to know the Python language.
While it is the most popular language, JavaScript is far from the best paying.
The median stated salary by programming language is:
- Bash – $100,000
- Perl – $95,000
- Scala – $90,000
- SQL – $70,000
- Go – $60,000
Golang is a new addition to programming languages with it really establishing itself in early 2016. The language has become favoured by software engineers, and software developers, while it is also in use, to a lesser extent, among web developers, system administrators, managers, devops engineers, and development leads. As it is a newer language the median salary is around $30,000.
The findings show that the languages which are favoured by more experienced developers are the ones that tend to have the highest salaries.
On the web framework front it is Angular.JS which is the most popular ahead of Node.js, and jQuery for current tool use and it is streaks ahead of React.js and the rest of the tools when it comes to a tool that is going to be used in the next six months.
In terms of the new frameworks that are making waves there are no prizes for guessing that Docker is the one gaining most interest while Apache Spark, Amazon Web Services, Hadoop, and Azure trail behind.
Why is Docker so popular? Well according to the respondents it is mainly for speed purposes as it is much quicker at getting the job done. AWS meanwhile is being learnt mainly because it is described as ‘the best tool for the job’ and its usage is being driven by operational and organisational strategies as much as developer innovation.
Of the new programming languages it is Swift which is the most popular, followed by Go, Rust, Elixir, and Haskell.
Swift has taken off as a language and is quickly becoming the de facto language for anyone that is developing for iOS.
Programming languages and frameworks are really only one piece of the puzzle and it is the new ideas in the industry which really help to drive increased demand for certain skills.
The most popular idea which is getting people is machine learning, followed by big data, cloud computing, the Internet of Things, and mobile development.
Both machine learning and big data gained top billing in 2015, while new ideas such as deep learning and NoSQL highlight the ever changing nature of data and the rise of thinking about artificial intelligence, the report said.
Around 300 respondents said that machine learning would revolutionise their field and there is particular interest among data analysts, software engineers, and developers. According to the report this shows that machine learning and big data analytics are nearing maturity.
Overall the results are not that surprising. Docker and container technology is talked about frequently at nearly all major tech conferences, while interest in learning AWS is understandable as it is the dominant force in cloud computing.
Python’s ease of use combined with capabilities and near ubiquitous nature mean that it is one of the ‘go-to’ languages for many developers.
