Dice.com just released the results of their salary survey of nearly 20,000 IT professionals taken last fall. You can see a summary of the results on eWeek. This survey is self-selecting, but I think you can still draw some conclusions from the results, one of the main conclusions being that you need to know Java.

Application Development

Java that's what's up

Oracle's acquisition of Sun and the rather lackluster subsequent JavaOne conference seem to have had little effect on demand for Java talent. JDBC, the standard Java programming interface for database connectivity, is the highest paid programming language skill. UNIX/Linux junkies take note: Korn Shell scripting is right behind JDBC. Apex, the Java-like language used for Salesforce apps is the only young language to demand higher salaries than the now-ancient C language. Java-related skills took three of the top six salary slots.

COBOL Alive and Well-paid

I know a guy who doesn't want anyone to know he can write COBOL. He's afraid  of being identified with a "dead" language. I'm like, "huh?" I know several languages in addition to Java, but if I had the spare time to add COBOL to my list I'd do it in a New York second!  COBOL pays better than any .NET language. My personal opinion is that we are only just beginning the great mainframe guru retirement era. Anyone who thinks we can respond to the aging of our mainframe talent by migrating off the mainframe is simply out of touch with the real challenges and costs associated with replacing one mainframe with several thousand distributed servers. No, look for salaries around mainframe technologies like COBOL to continue rising for at least the next decade.

System Administration

Solaris / AIX / HP-UX --> Linux

Make no mistake; among system administrators, the best paid are currently managing proprietary UNIX systems like Solaris, AIX and HP-UX. However, the salaries associated with managing those operating systems dropped nearly 10% last year. If this demand erosion continues proprietary UNIX administrators will be paid less than Linux administrators next year, dropping below the salary of Windows server administrators two years later.

Actually, just forget system administration

OK, I gotta do a reality check here. The majority of U.S.-based system administration jobs are going away. Think about it; the goal is for system administrators to have nothing to do during normal business hours. All their work is supposed to occur while end-users are home asleep. Why make American's work through the night when that same time period falls within a normal workday in Korea, India, Ireland, or Kenya?

As more companies gain international customers we may see the idea of a night-time maintenance window begin to fade. The fact that many companies are now setting their server time zones to GMT is a tacit acknowledgement that the definition of "day" vs. "night" is increasingly arbitrary in the new "always on" world. So we may see a partial restoration of system administration jobs to the U.S., but I wouldn't bet my mortgage payment on that. My advice to any current system administrator is to either (a) be good enough to move up to an engineering, architecture or management role by the middle of this decade or (b) find a new line of work.

Sybase better paid than Oracle? For real?

Never in the last decade has anyone I know migrated onto Sybase. I think what we see hear is Sybase salaries artificially inflated by talent (wisely) abandoning that dead platform -- but the talent is leaving faster than vertical application vendors (mostly in the financial services industry) are migrating off. Microsoft SQL Server and Sybase share a common ancestry, so former Sybase administrators might be temporarily depressing MS SQL Server salaries. That might be why SQL Server salaries are only a little higher than MySQL.

ETL!

If you don't know what ETL stands for (extract, transform, and load) you're missing out on what may be the hottest technologies of 2011.  Yes, I'm saying this is hotter than cloud -- one of only two six-figure skills on the list. The funny thing is, like nearly everything else in computing, we've been doing ETL on the mainframe for decades. The difference is that high speed networks and cheap, reliable SAN (storage area networks) has made ETL a viable proposition on Intel hardware. The recent proliferation of FOSS (Free and Open Source Software) ETL frameworks like Spring-Batch brings a fair amount of the structure we're used to in mainframe ETL flows to the distributed world. 

The Best Mash-up

Learn a Java-based ETL framework and develop at least a moderate ability to read and understand COBOL.