2013 Data Science Salary Survey: Open source tools correlate with higher salary

“In our report, 2013 Data Science Salary Survey, we make our own data-driven contribution to the conversation. We collected a survey from attendees of the Strata Conference in New York and Santa Clara, California, about tool usage and salary…

What did we find?

In a sentence: those who use data tools make more.

More specifically, the tools that correlate with higher salary are scalable and generally open source; they are often script-based or built for machine learning.  Those attendees who tend to use one such tool tend to use others––that is, these tools form a ‘cluster’ in terms of usage among our sample.  Perhaps just as interesting is that some of the traditional, popular tools such as Excel and SAS were not used as widely as R and Python. This might be food for thought for those data analysts who have thus far resisted learning how to code or moving beyond query-based data tools.”

Source: 2013 Data Science Salary Survey