Being a tech professional is a good career with plenty of high-paying jobs.
But it's an ever-changing job market. One day a skill is hot and the next it's not.
Job site Dice.com recently published its 2015 Salary Survey, which named the highest-paying tech skills.
Dice, a tech-job-hunting site, surveyed 23,470 IT professionals in the fall of 2014 to come up with this list.
Of course, skills alone won't always lead to a high salary. Work experience counts, too.
No. 29: JDBC is worth $114,234
JDBC is a Java-based technology from Oracle. It helps a database connect to an app written in the Java programming language.
Java is a super popular language for writing apps, so lots of skills associated with it pay well and this is one of those skills.
Pay for JDBC-associated jobs has climbed 11% over last year, Dice says. It has over 880 job listings for it.
No. 27: UML is worth $114,372
Software today is really complicated.
Enter the Unified Modeling Language (UML). This is a visual language for turning complex software designs into an easier-to-understand diagram.
Pay for UML-associated jobs has climbed 6.5% over last year, Dice says, and there are currently over over 1,300 job listings on Dice for it.
No 26: Documentum is worth $114,494
EMC Documentum is an "enterprise content management" system, meaning it lets enterprises store and search for all kinds of documents.
While big-data options like Hadoop are the new-age way of dealing with data, Documentum remains a popular tool in industries that still use a lot of paper or electronic forms, like legal, medical, insurance, and so on.
No. 24: OmniGraffle is worth $114,667
OmniGraffle is a diagramming tool just for Macs – like the Mac version of Microsoft Visio.
It may seem odd that knowing this tool could be something wanted in a $110,000 job. But it's also a popular tool for complex diagramming tasks like website wireframes and graphic design.
Pay for OmniGraffle-associated jobs has climbed 3.3% over last year, Dice says, and there are currently over 120 job listings on Dice for it.
No. 23: CloudStack is worth $115,043
Cloud computing is a big trend and there's a battle over the different "cloud operating systems."
Several of them are free and open source, but they're mostly built by vendors who want to sell a commercial version along with cloud computing software or equipment.
One such example is CloudStack, run by the Apache Software Foundation (keeper of many open source projects) and backed by Citrix, who sells a commercial version of it.
Pay for CloudStack-associated jobs has climbed 24% over last year, Dice says. It has over 70 job listings for it.
No. 22: R is worth $115,121
At the center of the massive new tech field called "big data" is something called "analytics," the ability to sift through the data to answer questions and create graphs or charts.
R is the language of choice for that sort of thing, for statistical analysis and graphics/visualization. As such it is seeing a huge surge in popularity.
Although pay for R-associated jobs didn't climb over what R programmers earned last year, Dice has over 1,180 job listings for it.
The Mandelbrot image, above, was written in R.
No. 21: CMMI is worth $115,467
CMMI is a sophisticated method for performance management. It helps companies predict costs, create schedules, and ensure quality.
Pay for CMMI-associated jobs has climbed 8.4% over last year, Dice says, and there are currently over 740 job listings on Dice for it.
No. 20: OpenStack is worth $116,047
Another free and open source cloud computing operating system is OpenStack and by most accounts, it's the one that's winning.
Many vendors are supporting it and selling their own commercial versions of it, such as IBM, HP, Red Hat, Ubuntu, lots of others.
Pay for OpenStack-associated jobs has climbed 8.5% over last year, Dice says. It has over 520 job listings for it.
No. 19: Big data is worth $116,414
CEOs of big data startups
Big data is the buzzy term for a new kind of software that analyzes large volumes of data.
It can handle massive amounts of information in all sorts of formats -- tweets, posts, e-mails, documents, audio, video, whatever.
There are a growing number of technologies that make up the "big data world" including all sorts of analytics, in-memory databases, NoSQL databases, Hadoop and so on. Startups, big tech vendors, companies big and small are all jumping on the big data craze.
Pay for big data-associated jobs has climbed 9.3% over last year, Dice says. It has nearly 35,000 job listings for it.
No. 17: Solr is worth $117,394
Solr is a free and open-source enterprise search platform that is extremely popular with large websites.
Some of its users include eHarmony, StubHub, and BestBuy, plus many others.
No. 15: SOA is worth $118,518
SOA is actually an old term for a software concept that's grown more popular thanks to cloud computing.
It stands for "service-oriented architecture" and pracitioners of it write their code in small bites, making little "services" that can be shared among multiple apps. Instead of every cloud app needing its own way of dealing with passwords, for instance, a "password service" can be shared by many.
Pay for SOA-associated jobs has climbed 8.7% over last year, Dice says. It has over 3,600 job listings for it.
No. 14: Zookeeper is worth $118,567
Zookeeper is a free and open-source project that also came from the big data craze, particularly the uber popular tech called Hadoop.
Hadoop is a way to store all kinds of data across many low-cost computer servers. Zookeeper is like a file system, a way to name, locate, and sync files used in Hadoop. But now it's being used with other big-data technologies beyond Hadoop.
Pay for Zookeeper-associated jobs has climbed 21% over last year, Dice says. It has nearly 200 job listings for it.
No. 10: Hadoop is worth $121,313
Hadoop is a super important technology at the center of the whole "big data" craze.
Hadoop is open source software used to gather and store vast amounts of data and analyze it on low-cost commodity hardware. For instance, banks may use Hadoop for fraud detection, and online shopping services could use it to analyze customers' buying patterns.
Pay for Hadoop-associated jobs has climbed 11.6% over last year, Dice says, and there are currently over 2,220 job listings on Dice for it.
No. 9: Flume is worth $123,186
Flume is yet another skill spawned from the "big data" craze and the popularity of Hadoop.
Hadoop is a way to store all kinds of data across many low-cost computer servers. Flume is a method to move massive amounts of data from the place it was created into a Hadoop system.
No. 3: MapReduce is worth $127,315
MapReduce has been called "the heart of Hadoop."
MapReduce is the method that allows Hadoop to store all kinds of data across many low-cost computer servers. To get meaningful data of Hadoop, a programmer writes software programs (often in the popular language, Java) for MapReduce.
Pay for MapReduce-associated jobs has climbed 11% over last year, Dice says. It has over 500 job listings for it.
No. 2: Cassandra is worth $128,646
Prashant Malik, creator of Cassandra
Cassandra is a free and open source "noSQL" database.
That's a kind of database that can handle and store data of different types and sizes of data and it's increasingly the go-to database for mobile and cloud applications. Apple uses Cassandra in a big way to store over 10 petabytes of data. Netflix uses it, too, among many others.
Pay for Cassandra-associated jobs has climbed 14.5% over last year, Dice says. It has over 780 job listings for it.
