The Best Jobs Of 2014: Lots Of Math, Data And Code

http://readwrite.com/2014/04/28/best-jobs-2014-math-big-data-code-programming#awesm=~oCQnxHtmCYf1oN

Hate to break it to you, but if you want one of the best jobs you'll have to learn how to code. Or do complex math. Or decipher data. Or all of the above.

For those that already have these skills, your bank balance probably shows it. According to CareerCast's "Best Jobs of 2014" report, employers are paying big bucks to lure employees that understand data, code and math (which really translates to "data analytics"). In fact, jobs that depend on these geeky skills comprise half of the top 10 jobs of 2014.

Get Data Or Get Fired

Data analysis is so important to the modern enterprise, in fact, that one executive recruiter declared, "In 15 years, if you don't have a solid quant background, you might have a permanent pink slip," simply because "so much of decision-making in corporations is going so quickly toward having a quant foundation."

See also: The Most In-Demand Tech Skills: Why Java And The Classics Ruled 2013

Scary? Yes. But also likely true.

Not everyone can be a "quant jock," of course. And as much as technology companies need engineers and data scientists, they also need English major-types to help craft a compelling narrative around their products. But more often, those that know data or code command the best jobs, which is measured in terms of environment, income, outlook and stress levels. 

Here are the top 10 jobs of 2014, along with the median income for the position:

1. Mathematician / $101,360
2. Tenured University Professor / $68,970
3. Statistician /$75,560
4. Actuary / $93,680
5. Audiologist / $69,720
6. Dental Hygienist / $70,210
7. Software Engineer / $93,350
8. Computer Systems Analyst / $79,680
9. Occupational Therapist /$75,400
10. Speech Pathologist / $69,870

Express Your Data In Code

Among the worst jobs of 2014 were the lumberjack (No. 200) and the newspaper reporter (No. 199). While it's unclear what the lumberjack should do, famed statistician Nate Silver offers clear guidance for journalists: Learn to code.

See also: 15 Programming Skills Most Coveted By Employers

Silver oversees FiveThirtyEight, his news website, which will likely become 50% developers as "news" becomes far more than simple text. Journalism's future, he notes, is data visualization and interaction. This is one reason that software developer topped US News' 100 Best Jobs of 2014 report. The Bureau of Labor Statistics projects 22.8% employment growth for software developers between 2012 and 2022.

The importance of code, specifically code that helps enterprises process and analyze data, also shows up in Indeed.com's hottest job trends. Two of the top 10 technologies involve Big Data infrastructure, including Hadoop.

In a very real sense, developers write the future, app by app.

On The Job Training

If you're an enterprise in search of these high-paid data scientists and developers, you're in luck.

As Gartner analyst Svetlana Sicular posits, it's very likely you already have the right people in-house. You just need to train them:

[C]ompanies should look within. Organizations already have people who know their own data better than mystical data scientists...The internal people already gained experience and ability to model, research and analyze. Learning Hadoop is easier than learning the company’s business. 

And what do you do if you're the employee? Well, you can always learn to position yourself as a data scientist. It's a bit easier on the development side: You just need to download the relevant open source software—most of the essential Big Data technology is open source—and start hacking away.

SUMMARY; Time to get hacking on the right open source code.

Data, Data Everywhere: Mobile APIs Act As A Spur To Innovation

http://readwrite.com/2014/01/21/optimizing-mobile-data-for-enterprises-and-third-party-clients#awesm=~otE7D0uOFen9BJ

If we replace the Coleridge Mariner’s “water” with “data,” you have the lament of today’s mobile apps. Our world may be swimming in data, but little of it is optimized for mobile consumption.

Mobile poses a unique challenge for developers to acquire and activate data. What worked in the era of Web 2.0 will not necessarily work for the new era of ubiquitous mobile computing, especially for enterprise-oriented business. Companies need to learn how to tap into this data and create flexible application programming interfaces (APIs) that ultimately give developers a platform to do something amazing.

Want Mobile Innovation? Unleash Your Data

As touched on earlier in an earlier piece for ReadWrite, the standards for middleware and backend data access that defined the Web era don’t work for mobile. There are a few reasons:

• Mobile has seen an explosion in data sources. Previous generations of middleware were concerned with orchestrating data from a subset of enterprise systems that lived behind the firewall; good mobile apps need access to those systems as well as corporate software-as-a-service data (Salesforce, for example), public data (eFacebook, Twitter), and whatever may come next from the Internet of Things. 
• Mobile apps consume data in a different size and format than Web application predecessors. Where SOAP and XML are the principal API formats of the web, mobile apps lean primarily on JSON. Because mobile apps must operate within smaller confines of screen real estate, bandwidth and battery life, their data sets must be boiled down to an essential payload size. For instance, if a traditional Web API returns 20 fields, the mobile variant might want only five.
• Mobile users expect full data access from almost anywhere—the grocery line, airport terminal, the in-laws’ Thanksgiving table and so on. This changes usage profiles dramatically, in both transaction volumes and time of access, which means the elastically scalable architectures that have been important to Web become mandatory for mobile.
• Mobile devices can’t count on an uninterrupted connection. This requires apps to function offline and a data exchange intelligent enough to synchronize to the backend when the connection is restored.

Given these differences, consider the plight of the mobile developer: they want to focus on building the best possible client experience, but instead find themselves bogged down in server-side “plumbing” to get the data they need in the right size, the right format, with the right resiliency, piped into the app.

Forrester Research argues, credibly, that the scalability and data integration requirements of mobile are different enough from Web that enterprises will need a new tier to their architectures. If so, consider the benefits awaiting the companies to get their first.

Companies that will win the mobile race are those that make it as simple as possible for developers to access the data needed for transformative apps. This is where mobile-optimized APIs come in.

APIs are the lifeblood of mobility. Good mobile APIs act as a spur to innovation. Think of them as Lego blocks: the better and more varied the collection of blocks you make available, the better and more creative the objects people build. An enterprise that makes mobile-optimized APIs widely accessible to developers is positioned to make terrific innovation leaps, at a pace that would never be achievable by top-down planning alone. 

Beyond these, companies would also publish new, mobile-optimized APIs built to interact with corporate data stores—Oracle, SAP, Microsoft, Salesforce etc. Again, “mobile-optimized” is the key word here: these APIs would orchestrate data from multiple sources, convert it to the right mobile format (JSON) where necessary and boil down the payload to its essential size.What are examples of the kinds of APIs developers need? For starters, there are the commonly required capabilities of most mobile apps, such as the ability to manage push notifications and geo-location services, or readily access a NoSQL database for on-demand storage of app data, or seamlessly integrate with social media services. 

Seeding an App Ecosystem

A good mobile API inventory will appeal to more than just internal developers. With it, companies can designate APIs that are appropriate and relevant to third parties, encouraging external developers to create innovative apps around a company’s business.

NPR has been famously successful with their API strategy, but a commitment to mobile APIs isn’t restricted to social or media companies. Walgreens recently published a prescription scanning API to encourage developers of health apps; Alaska Airlines has been pushing APIs for traveler check-in, flight status, seat assignments and the like. Aetna and Kaiser Permanente have entered into the API equivalent of an arms race, to see which company can attract more third party developers.

Developers anticipate even more in the coming year. In a survey conducted jointly with IDC, we at Appcelerator found that nearly 90% of developers felt it was “likely” or “very likely” that in 2014, enterprises would invest in building mobile-optimized APIs for external builders and third parties. These developers are betting that more IT departments will embrace the role as innovation enabler—to the point of opening up new markets for the business

.

Summary; Making sense of your company's data and creating intuitive APIs is one of the next steps in creating smarter,  enterprises.

In A Big Data World, Marketers Know Shockingly Little About Us

http://readwrite.com/2013/09/06/in-a-big-data-world-marketers-know-shockingly-little-about-us#awesm=~oh0iI0yQ8FolLq

Big Data is a big deal for businesses, given the potential for marketing departments to discover our innermost thoughts and buying behaviors, and thereby tailor pitches to us. At least, that's the dream. For now, at least based on the data marketing firms actually have on most of us, the dream is far from being realized.

The Sad Reality Of Big Data Marketing

We've all read about how marketers are now able to make highly tailored product pitches to us based on our web searches, online purchases and more. Our every click, registered and used against us. Our privacy, destroyed forever!

And yet the reality is kind of depressing. For all our talk about Big Data knowing so much, they marketers may actually know very, very little. 

To help consumers understand the data being collected about them, Acxiom just launched a new website called AboutTheData.com. The site allows you to enter some personal information (name, birthdate, etc.) and discover what marketers think about you. Granted, the site is likely also a way for Axciom to build up its reservoir of data, but it's kind of fun to see what the marketing data says about us.

For example, according to AboutTheData.com, I'm a 40-year old, truck-driving Arab that votes Democrat, has a newborn and is into fashion.

Well, one of those is true.

My friend and Businessweek reporter, Ashlee Vance, notes that according to the site, "I'm a single Italian woman with one child. Time to get back to work, algorithms." Now whatever you may think of his first name, Ashlee is very much a man. And I think the closest he gets to being Italian is ordering pizza... at Dominos.

No wonder that my friend and PR executive Lonn Johnston writes, "I'm feeling much safer if this is how the big data rubber hits the patch of road that runs through my life."

Not That It's All Bad

Of course, much of the information on the AboutTheData.com site is pretty accurate. I do donate to charitable causes (How did they get my tithing receipts?). I have lived in my 1930s era home for 10 years. I do make a lot of online purchases and probably do roughly average the dollars spent that Acxiom believes I do. 

What's weird is that despite this data, the ads I still see on the web (mostly obliterated by studious use of AdBlock) are generally irrelevant to my interests. I want to buy a used Subaru Outback as my daughter is now crowding me out of our family driving pool, and have registered that interest by spending far too much time on AutoBuyer, Edmunds, KSL and Craigslist looking at these cars. But I've yet to see a single ad tailored to this obvious buying intent.

Instead I see the same stupid ads you see: how to learn a new language, weight loss miracle cures, etc.

Which is why I can't credit Acxiom's warning that opting out of its marketing data repository will somehow hurt me:

Opting out of Acxiom's online and/or offline marketing data will not prevent you from receiving marketing materials. Instead of receiving ads that are relevant to your interests, you will see more generic ads with no information to tailor content. For example, instead of getting a great offer on a hotel package in your favorite vacation spot, you might see an ad for the latest, greatest weight loss solution.

I've never had a single ad giving me a deal on a Grand Targhee vacation. Or something urging me to get those new Rossignol S7s that I've wanted and demonstrated interest in by madly clicking on the new season's models.

Or, really, anything that I actually want. 

Maybe Acxiom and the other online marketing companies don't send me such offers because they think I'm Arab. And drive a truck. And vote Democrat. But given all that they do know about me, I'd kind of hope to get an ad that actually mattered to me.

At least once.

 Summary; For all the hype about the promise of Big Data, the reality of what marketers know about us is surprisingly scant.