As far as skills are concerned, knowing what's hot and what's not is part of my job. I teach Enterprise Software class for Computer Engineering Dept. Graduate course at San Jose State University and it's my responsibilities to give my students a preview of everything happening in the valley and beyond. Take a look at the trend below:
- Apple Mac OS / iOS developers are in demand. Programming skills with Objective C / OpenGL(high performance graphics), XCode/ Cocoa framework, prior development experience with iOS apps. These skills can really get you to a developer position that will pay above 100k. Take a look at this company who is hiring and paying big How do you acquire the Objective C skills? Well, I suggest going through this tutorial first. After that you will know where you need to go next.
- SaaS, Cloud computing and Service Management skills - This is a open wide area with systems, virtualization and networking skills coupled with service management skills. I introduced Cloud computing and Service management in my class where I covered introduction to cloud architecture and design considerations for SaaS based application development. I can point to this starter guide to get started on the subject. This article gives you overview of multi-tenant data model, scalability design, and various services that interwind with SaaS application architecture. Service management is one of the skills that are going to be very rewarding in future. Take a look at the company like ServiceSource who is developing such solution and offering as SaaS.
- BigData, Hadoop, MapReduce skills - Java Programming experience with Hadoop / MR skills is HOT. A lot of companies are developing analytic platform around open source technologies like HDFS, MapReduce framework, Pig(platform to analyze large data), Hive, Zookeeper, Statistical Analysis tool like R. You must know the advance Java technology stack to be successful with these startups. Yahoo developer network is the best starting point for learning HDFS
- Web technology skills like PHP, Node.js strong java Scripting are in demand too.
- QA/Testing has bigger focus than ever before. Testers are in high demand. How do you become a good tester? Well, becoming a good test engineer requires strong scripting skills (perl/Python/*nix shell) along with the tester mindset. I will talk about the tester mindset in detail in my next post. For now, think about modernizing your existing skills and let me know your thoughts and suggestions.
