Salaries for the 20 hottest tech jobs

Unemployment rates in the IT industry remain low. That's good news for you because it means to compete for top tech talent, companies are offering higher salaries.

Quality Assurance Engineer
What it pays: $100,000 to $120,000

Quality control testing is crucial to ensure speed-to-market and security of software solutions and applications. Cirri says Mondo's clients are most interested in candidates with experience in Selenium, QuickTest Pro (QTP) or Cucumber solutions, but that any candidate with QA experience is in great demand.

Systems Engineer
What it pays: $100,000 to $125,000

Systems engineers used to be restricted to administration and management of systems and server operating systems, but Cirri says Mondo's clients are increasingly looking for programming and scripting experience, as well.

"It used to be that systems engineers would only administer an OS and maybe have some role in disaster recovery," Cirri says. "But now, individuals with stronger coding and/or scripting experience are commanding salaries toward the higher end of this range," he says. In addition to standard administration skills, Cirri says a knowledge of Linux, UNIX, virtualization tools like VMware and Citrix as well as scripting languages are mandatory.

C# / .Net Developer
What it pays: $90,000 to $125,000

There's still a huge demand for developers with C# and .Net experience, Cirri says. "Our clients are still looking for folks with this kind of experience, but those candidates that also have Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) or Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) experience can go even higher; to the tune of between $130,000 and $150,000," Cirri says.

User Experience/User Interface Developer
What it pays: $110,000 to $130,000

User experience and user interface design are hot areas for both software companies and those in marketing and retail, says Cirri. While any experience with UX or UI is valuable, he says mobile device experiences can push candidates to the higher end of this salary range.

Drupal Developer
What it pays: $100,000 to $130,000

Drupal developers were all the rage in 2013, says Cirri, and while demand has slowed somewhat in 2014, Mondo's government clients are increasingly demanding developers with Drupal skills.

"Our clients are asking for developers with both PHP language experience and specific APIs within the Drupal platform," Cirri says. "The federal government is one of the clients that's increasing its demand for Drupal, and that's where a lot of the demand is coming from," Cirri says.

PHP Developer
What it pays: $90,000 to $125,000

PHP developers are still needed, Cirri says, especially as the IT industry focuses on open source solutions as well as scripting of applications and sites. PHP developers can command salaries in the range of $90,000 to $125,000 in the New York region, Cirri says.

Big Data Engineer
What it pays: $125,000 to $145,000

Another big data role that's gaining traction is big data engineer, says Cirri. These roles build on candidates' experience with data warehousing, and Cirri says the most common platforms clients want are Hadoop, Netezza and Cloudera. "This is a great role for current data warehousing pros who are building their skills to incorporate big data," Cirri says. "This is a case where the skills needed are not necessarily new, but the ways those skills are applied certainly is."

DevOps
What it pays: $135,000 to $170,000

Walking the fine line between IT and business is what DevOps is all about, says Cirri, and developing open and productive communication between technical and line-of-business departments is a critical skill. DevOps professionals can have a variety of skills, both technical -- programming, networking, software development -- and soft -- communication, marketing, sales, negation -- and the more experience these pros have in either or both areas, the higher salary they can expect.

Project Manager
What it pays: $110,000 to $150,000

There's no shortage of demand for project managers, and the number of skilled PMs in the market just isn't sufficient, says Cirri. "Project managers are in short supply and high demand, and they always will be," he says. "With the need to understand and implement the latest and greatest technology like Salesforce, new security platforms, mobile applications – we don't think PMs will ever lack for high-paying positions."

Related: The 9 most difficult-to-fill IT roles

---

Best comptia A+ Training, Comptia A+ Certification at Certkingdom.com

Enterprise wanted there own IT cloud fears, HP says

Hewlett-Packard wish its center on private clouds -- and it's asset of power and capital in the skill -- can convince enterprise IT executives that it can provide a safe way to come into the fray.

3 years after it vowed to turn into a chief cloud seller, HP Wednesday unveiled Helion, a set of products and services designed to help companies set up private clouds, and disclosed that it's using OpenStack, a NASA-derived open source cloud operating system.

HP executives yesterday also dedicated to investing more than $1 billion over the next 2 years in study and development to extend the Helion portfolio, and build fresh cloud new data centers and team them up.

"We are living in a period of enormous change," HP President and CEO Meg Whitman told reporters yesterday. "Open source is enabling an entire industry to build solutions that solve problems. The result is something that is more flexible and secure than any company could deliver alone."

HP is aim Amazon, Google, IBM and Microsoft - corporations that are already strongc cloud company. The company says its spotlight on personal clouds, and thus on security for big companies that wish for to take benefit of the cloud's scalability and additional features, and be able to handle and look after their own data, will provide a competitive edge.

At this point, there are plenty of vendors that can assist companies construct their own cloud system, but most are small, new businesses. HP believes it has an benefit as has a tech developed huge. But now it's a large player in a still relatively little pool.

"Server huggers will be involved in this," said Gartner analyst Lydia Leong, referring to "those organizations that desire to construct and run things themselves. IT administrators may include objections to the civic cloud. They don't trust what they don't control. There are reasons to build it yourself."

By costs $1 billion on its cloud effort, HP absolutely is gearing up to be a chief player, though already accepted cloud vendors, like Google and Amazon have been investing that kind of money -- more, actually -- for some time now.

Jeff Kagan, an independent industry analyst, said HP's $1 billion investing is probably only 20% to 25% of what Google and Amazon are investing every year on their cloud businesses. Nonetheless he said the HP cloud plan could be a threat to those organizations.

"It's a threat to everybody," said Kagan. "Every move that every competitor makes at this point is a risk because you don't know who will be top a year from now or 5 years from now. There are a lot of organizations getting in the cloud."

"This is a matter of what do organizations want? Do they want to set it up on their own? Do they want to just rent space and have someone else take care of it? There's no right or wrong. It's just a different approach," he added

A lot of companies will base their decisions on which solution can significantly cut their anxiety about cloud computing performance, security and other issues.

A fresh study by IHS showed that 73% of IT executives think cloud providers are beating performance issues.

"The enterprise IT folks are being very, very cautious about their migration to the cloud," Jagdish Rebello, an analyst with HIS, recently told Computerworld. "They see the cost benefits but when they look at reliability and security, there is essentially a fear of going there wholeheartedly."

HP hopes those IT executives will show a big interest in going to a cloud they can control.

"I think the big companies, mainly the Fortune 500s, will be looking at this architecture," Rebello said today. "It's a play for them to go into the personal cloud. They're worried about the security of their data being on somebody else's servers, so they are going to be more paying attention in the private cloud."

This is a unlike play into this bazaar, as opposed to what Amazon or Google quoted. If you seem at this market you see HP trying to reinvent itself," Rebello added.

For any organization IT store, the personal cloud can offer advantages. The business controls its own safety with a private system, and IT knows exactly where it's data is sitting. The IT company has complete manage of the systems.

A private cloud, however, will also need regular savings, noted Rebello. The owners will have to appoint people to run it and will be in charge for system upgrades, virus protection and other security issues -- and any other major problems when they happen.

"It's a question of control versus cost," said Rebello.

He did note that HP's use of OpenStack should make the offering more attractive to IT administrators.

"I think the fact that HP is embracing OpenStack makes the IT guys think that what they create for this system can be migrated to other systems because it's open source," said Rebello.

"It's not proprietary for HP any longer so they can transfer it to other architectures. They see the reimbursement of open source and the payback of having security of a personal cloud and the safety of having a large player like HP serving them with their organizations,"

---

Best HP Certification Training and HP Exams Training  and more HP exams log in to Certkingdom.com