In the ever-evolving tech industry, staying updated with high-paying skills can significantly impact your career trajectory. While web development is popular, there are several other tech skills that offer higher salaries. This article highlights five such high-paying tech skills.
1. Web Developer vs. DevOps Engineer
Who do you think gets paid more? According to a report by Dice, web developers get paid around $87,000 per year, whereas a DevOps engineer makes around $136,000. This disparity underscores the importance of exploring various tech skills.
2. The Go Programming Language
At number five, we have the Go programming language. Imagine a language that is as easy to learn as Python but as powerful as C++. That’s Go. Also known as Golang , it is a relatively new programming language created by Google in 2009. It has quickly gained popularity among developers due to its simplicity, efficiency, and versatility.
Go is a general-purpose programming language, which means that it can be used for a variety of tasks, from building web services to cloud-native applications. Go has built-in support for concurrency, which is the ability to run multiple tasks simultaneously. This makes it an ideal choice for developing high throughput and low latency systems. Go can help you get jobs like cloud engineer and backend engineer. According to the Dice report, programmers who know Go can make around $145,000 per year. Go also ranks sixth among the skills with the fastest-growing salary.
3. Rust Programming Language
To truly match the performance of C++, we have Rust at number four. In the world of low-level programming, Rust stands out as a rising star when the speed of execution beats all other requirements, for example, in operating system kernels or game development.
Rust ensures memory safety through an ownership and borrowing system. This means that code is immune to memory leaks and other common programming pitfalls. Rust is constantly ranked among the most loved programming languages in recent times. If you have Rust in your skill set, you can expect to make around $137,000 per year.
4. Docker and Kubernetes
Moving on, at number three, we have Docker and Kubernetes. If you’re a DevOps engineer, you would already know what Docker and Kubernetes are. Docker is like a portable kitchen that lets you package up your entire cooking process—the ingredients, the utensils, the oven temperature, and everything.
In the software world, Docker does the same thing for applications. It lets developers package up their code, libraries, and dependencies into containers, which can then be run on any computer without worrying about compatibility issues. Kubernetes is the catering company that acts as the central coordinator, ensuring that all the kitchens are working together seamlessly.
It automates the deployment and management of containerized applications and would restart failed containers, scale the application up or down, and roll out new versions of the application. With DevOps skills like Docker and Kubernetes, you can expect to earn somewhere around $139,000.
5. Cloud Skills (AWS, GCP, Azure)
At number two, we have cloud skills. AWS, GCP, and Azure are some of the most popular cloud providers. They provide services like Google Kubernetes Engine or Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service that can help you manage your Kubernetes cluster. But these are not the only services they provide.
For example, Amazon EC2 lets you rent virtual servers on the cloud. AWS Lambda lets you run your code on the cloud without worrying about maintaining and scaling your servers. When I say learn cloud, what I actually mean is to read about different services available on the cloud and their use case. To learn all these things, you can do a cloud certification. All cloud providers, including AWS, GCP, and Azure, offer these certifications. With cloud skills, you can expect to get paid around $145,000.
6. MapReduce and Hadoop
At the top, we have MapReduce. Imagine that you have a massive pile of books and you need to count how many times a specific word appears across all of them. If the number of books is very large, the task would be very difficult, and that’s where we need MapReduce. Think of MapReduce as a two-stage process: mapping and reducing.
In the mapping stage, you divide the work among many servers, also called helpers. Each helper takes a book, reads it, and creates a list of all the words and their counts. They then hand over these lists to the reducing stage.
In the reducing stage, another set of helpers combines the lists from the mapping stage. They add up the count for each word across all the lists, giving you the final tally of how many times that word appears in the entire pile of books.
The MapReduce operation is done with the help of Hadoop. Hadoop is an open-source framework that stores and processes a large amount of data, and MapReduce is Hadoop’s processing engine. If you plan to become a data engineer, you can expect to earn somewhere around $146,000.
Conclusion
If you’re not convinced about these five technologies and want to stick to safer, time-tested options like Python, Java, and JavaScript, that is completely fine. Explore your interests and choose a path that aligns with your career goals and interests.
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