For all the money spent on technology by financial institutions, Silicon Valley still holds the trump cards when it comes to innovation. Silicon Valley goes first and banks traditionally play catch-up. – Skills that are well-established within pure IT players only emerge later at financial institutions.
So it is that some of the top paying technology jobs in the last 12 months have yet to manifest themselves in investment banks. The 2015 Dice Tech Salary survey suggests that most of the best paying jobs in tech now centre around big data. The skills which get the highest salaries in the US technology sector rarely feature on banks’ job descriptions currently.
Below we’ve outlined the top ten highest paid skills in the US tech industry, together with where you may find such jobs in banking – if possible.
1. Platform as a Service (PaaS): $130.1k.
Annual change: N/A
What is it?: A cloud computing service that allows companies to roll out applications without needing the infrastructure usually required to support it.
Investment banks hiring?: Yes, actually, but not many. J.P. Morgan is hiring for web technicians, project leads and UNIX SAs for its new PaaS build related to its infrastructure and platform deployment (IPD) team in Singapore.
2. Cassandra: $128.6k
Annual change: 14.5%
What is it?: An open source database management system that’s part of the Big Data revolution. It’s designed to handle huge amounts of data across multiple platforms.
Investment banks hiring?: It’s cropping up in job descriptions, but usually as part of a broader role. It features as a nice to have in everything from Java developer positions to Data Scientists and the occasional UI/UX specialists roles.
3. MapReduce: $127.3k
Annual change: 11.3%
What is it?: A programming model that allows for the processing and generation of large sets of data.
Investment banks hiring?: A little – Big data specialists, data architects and data analytics managers are expected to understand it.
4. Cloudera: $126.8k
Annual change: 20%
What is it?: A software firm that provides an open source distribution service for Apache Hadoop – the Big Data storage and distribution software framework – as firms look to deploy that technology, along with support and training.
Investment banks hiring?: Not at all.
5. HBase: $126.3k
Annual change: 20%
What is it?: A Java-based open source software targeted at creating ‘Big Table’ solutions for (again) large datasets. Essentially a compression tool that allows for user-friendly presentation of huge amounts of data.
Investment banks hiring?: Any sort of analytics, enterprise data or Big Data related position is requesting an understanding or experience of this. Unfortunately, these jobs are not overly plentiful currently.
6. Pig: $124.5k
Annual change: 13.7%
What is it?: Another platform for analysing large datasets within the Hadoop stack.
Investment banks hiring?: Not currently.
7. ABAP (Application Business Application Programming): $124.2k
Annual change: 24.2%
What is it?: The programming language develop by SAP to develop its application server. Introduced before Java, which also performs the same function.
Investment banks hiring?: What, with Java jobs so numerous? Absolutely not…
8. Chef: $123.4k
Annual change: N/A
What is it?: A ‘configuration management’ tool written in Ruby and Erlang – both of which have some traction in financial services – that allows companies to streamline their server and potentially hook up to cloud-based platforms.
Investment banks hiring: Some software engineer positions ask for an understanding of either Chef or its competitor Puppet, but it’s not a central requirement.
9. Flume: $123.1k
Annual change: N/A
What is it?: Another tool for collecting and aggregating large amounts of data.
Investment banks hiring?: No.
10. Hadoop: $121.3k
Annual change: 11.6%
What is it?: Built in Java, this is the primary tool for Big Data specialists designed to store and process huge datasets.
Investment banks hiring?: Yes. An understanding of Hadoop is creeping into the job specs of multiple roles. Obviously data analytics roles and anything related to Big Data is requesting Hadoop, but banks are also requesting it from their developers, business analysts and project managers.