In an analysis of its job postings, Dice.com looked at the most common skills employers seek along with Hadoop. Not surprisingly, that’s Java, since Hadoop is a Java-based framework for managing Big Data.
That’s followed closely by NoSQL, technology that my colleague Lorraine Lawson has been all over.
Salaries for those with both Hadoop and NoSQL experience topped $100,000, according to the Dice Salary Survey. Employers also were seeking skills in Map Reduce (No. 4 on the list), Pig (No. 6) and Hive (No. 8), part of the growing list of Apache projects sometimes called the “Hadoop stack,” or “Hadoop ecosystem,” as Loraine explains. She outlines the various technologies for collecting data, analysis, integrating with existing systems and management.
Integration tool Hive has been called a potential way to deal with the dearth of Big Data talent because it’s similar to SQL. As Stefan Groschupf, CEO of Datameer, put it at ZDNet:
“A lot more people know SQL than can write Hadoop’s native MapReduce code, which makes use of Hive an attractive/cheaper alternative to hiring new talent, or making developers learn Java and MapReduce programming patterns.”
Gwen Shapira, senior database administrator at data infrastructure management company Pythian, recently told me that she sees Big Data as a big opportunity for database administrators to advance their careers. She said:
“In the age of Big Data, data professionals are more visible to the organization than ever, and they are seen as the critical resource they always were.”
“…Talk to business unit managers to find their pain points. Which information do they need? …Managers are happier to talk to technical people now than they’ve ever been. Show them how your skills can help them get more value out of data, because this is what Big Data means to them.”
