2013 Data Science Salary Survey

Executive Summary

O’Reilly Media conducted an anonymous salary and tools survey in 2012 and 2013 with attendees of the Strata Conference: Making Data Work in Santa Clara, California and Strata + Hadoop World in New York. Respondents from 37 US states and 33 countries, representing a variety of industries in the public and private sector, completed the survey.

We ran the survey to better understand which tools data analysts and data scientists use and how those tools correlate with salary. Not all respondents describe their primary role as data scientist/data analyst, but almost all respondents are exposed to data analytics. Similarly, while just over half the respondents described themselves as technical leads, almost all reported that some part of their role included technical duties (i.e., 10–20% of their responsibilities included data analysis or software development).

We looked at which tools correlate with others (if respondents use one, are they more likely to use another?) and created a network graph of the positive correlations. Tools could then be compared with salary, either individually or collectively, based on where they clustered on the graph.

We found:

• By a significant margin, more respondents used SQL than any other tool (71% of respondents, compared to 43% for the next highest ranked tool, R).

• The open source tools R and Python, used by 43% and 40% of respondents, respectively, proved more widely used than Excel (used by 36% ...