Who, What and Where of IOT Jobs

IoT devices offer huge potential for electronic component manufacturers, but this is clearly not where the value will stop. Most of the added value in IoT solutions will come from the processing of the generated data. In fact, the ratio between electronic components and data processing can reach 1:50 in certain long-term cases!

Technologies & Sensors for the Internet of Things mentions three types of companies that will benefit from IOT initially.

The IoT is a multi-billion dollar market emerging from several different markets (i.e. industrial sensors, wearable electronics and home automation) which will see strong convergence in the next five years. Three industrial and service sectors will be integral to the valorization of this new market:

• The electronics industry, which will manufacture the sensing devices
• The communication and cloud data storage industry, which will handle data transmission, storage and processing
• Service companies, which will valorize the data either through processing or by selling to a third party

This got me interested in finding jobs in the IOT space. Wanted to find out who is hiring, what kinds of jobs are being offered and where are they hiring. I did a simple Data Journalism style  experiment.

1. Tried a job search in Indeed and SimplyHired for IOT jobs (Indeed and SimplyHired are job aggregators)
2. Got the list of jobs (wrote a small Python script to extract the job list).
3. Wrote another program to take the list of jobs  and extract entities using Open Calais API. Open Calais is a tool for extracting entities from text. They have a free API (with certain rate limits) that you can use to automate the entity extraction.
4. A final tiny Python program took the entity file (generated from the previous step) and extracted the cities, job positions and companies.
5. Here is the output of the first run from steps 1-4 and some minor edits to the output.

Companies

Amazon
CA Software
Cypress Semiconductor Corporation
First Data
Honeywell
Honeywell International
IOT INFOTECH INC
Intel
InterDigital
Juniper Networks
LogMeIn Inc.
Product Development Company
Quirky Incorporated
SanDisk
Sasken Communication Technologies
Symantec
Wink Inc.
iOT Company

Job Positions

Software Engineer
Product Manager
Senior Application Engineer
Manager – PTC
Host Protection Architect
Cloud Architect
IOT Solution Architect
Engineer
Director of Evangelism
Princ Research Engineer
UX Designer
Manager – Internet
Test Engineer
iOS WiFi IOT Engineer
Legal Counsel
TESTING ENGINEER
Home Research Scientist

Cities

San Jose
Mountain View
New York
Boston
Seattle
Santa Clara
Denver
San Diego
Chicago
Sunnyvale
Dallas
Austin
Atlanta
Bellevue

This is a small sample and just a tiny peek into the industry.

The cool thing about languages like Python is that you can write about 10-20 lines of code to extract, clean and generate useful data. In this specific instance, I reused some code and wrote a couple of simple scripts. I need to clean up the code and turn it into a more usable tool.

Meta: Writing a data blog is fun. It took me a couple of hours of exploration  and writing and testing scripts, but I feel it is worth the time I spent. I also learned a bunch of things I did not know before.