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Software Developer, Six-Figure Salary

If you’re certain you want a top-notch career, and you have your eyes set on a six-figure salary, but you aren’t sure which career is right for you, what’s the best way to move forward? Is it folly to shoot for salary when you don’t know what you want to be when you grow up? Not necessarily. The key is to pursue skills, not roles.

Tech Skills vs. “In Tech”

We talk often on this blog about the difference between tech skills, and being “in tech.” Our point is generally that learning tech skills doesn’t necessarily mean a job “in tech.” In this day and age, virtually every successful company out there needs talent with tech skills, and learning these skills can lead you to a job in many different fields—healthcare, finance, transportation, politics, education, security, marketing, entertainment, and agriculture, to name just a few.

For example, our most recent edition of This Week in Machine Learning featured a story about researchers at Princeton using Machine Learning to study autism gene correlation, alongside another story about a lab in New Mexico using Machine Learning on satellite imagery to predict crop yields with greater efficiency! Here’s another example: our iOS team recently sat down with some iOS developers and engineers for a series of “fireside chats.” Among those they interviewed were Mike Lee, who helped develop the app for Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign (politics), and Jonah Neugass, who manages a team of developers at Credit Karma (finance).

The point again is that tech skills can take you anywhere. So the real question is, which skills?

Six-Figure Skills

Relying on data from our partners at Paysa, I went through all our Nanodegree programs and identified five roles for which the average market salary is above $100,000. Then, digging deeper into Paysa’s data, I pulled out the top skills associated with each position. I then gathered together the skills that appeared most often across all these roles.

The five Nanodegree programs I looked at in particular were: Machine Learning Engineer, Android Developer, iOS Developer, Self-Driving Car Engineer (launching soon!), and Senior Web Developer. The five roles I focused on were: Machine Learning Engineer, Android Engineer, iOS Engineer, Self-Driving Car Engineer, and Senior Web Developer.

Here are the six skills I identified, and how often they appeared:

  • Software development: all 5 roles
  • Java: all 5 roles
  • Python: 4 out of 5 roles
  • C++: 4 out of 5 roles
  • C: 4 out of 5 roles
  • Javascript: 3 out of 5 roles

If we now jump over to LinkedIn, we can observe the number of jobs requiring:

  • Software Development skills – 239,209
  • Java skills – 157,963
  • Python skills – 135,176
  • C++ skills – 105,013
  • C skills – 62, 856
  • Javascript skills – 142,938

Now, back to Paysa, to look at some of the fields these skills might prepare one for. To ideally prove our point, let’s look at the skill that produced the fewest available jobs on LinkedIn. That would be the computer programming language C. Paysa’s narrower filters still show over 6,000 jobs requiring this skill, and these roles include positions at Uber (transportation), Salesforce (sales/customer service/marketing), Facebook (social media), and Netflix (entertainment), to name just a few!

Conclusion

If you see a six-figure salary in your future, but aren’t sure which career is right for you, rest assured you have a lot of options. By mastering any or all of the skills we highlight above, you’ll prepare yourself for a wide array of roles in a wide array of fields. So don’t worry just yet about what you want to be when you grow up. Just start learning those skills!

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Ready to master the skills you need to succeed?

 

Christopher Watkins
Christopher Watkins
Christopher Watkins is Senior Writer and Chief Words Officer at Udacity. He types on a MacBook or iPad by day, and either an Underwood, Remington, or Royal by night. He carries a Moleskine everywhere.