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Software Engineers Ranked Best Job in America
fistfullast33l writes "CNNMoney and Salary.com have ranked the title of Software Engineer the best job in America. Computer IT Analyst also ranks 7th on the list, placing both technology positions in the top 10. From the article: "Designing, developing and testing computer programs requires some pretty advanced math skills and creative problem-solving ability. If you've got them, though, you can work and live where you want: Telecommuting is quickly becoming widespread.""
Especially with larger companies, I see it more and more that telecommuting is a frowned upon idea. In fact, most of the articles on telecommuting today are instructions on how to argue with your boss because your boss is going to be the last person that wants you telecommuting.
And that's just for jobs in general. With software engineering jobs, the need to work together on a team is obviously a mandatory requirement. Very few solid and marketable software applications are written by one person. Telecommuting just raises another possible barrier and could compound dynamics and differences among team members. There are also security issues regarding the connection between work and home as well as the problem of productivity being a hard thing to measure when developing software.
Then of course there are home distractions that all managers would worry about.
This is old news to the Slashdot crowd.
In the Fortune 500 company I work for, I don't know anyone who telecommutes. We are encouraged to work with different teams accross the country but they are at company facilities in sub-teams that get together everyday.
If by "widespread" they mean one person does it in New York and one person does it in California then I would agree. If they mean "widespread" by increased frequency and occurance then I would not only disagree with them but adamently argue that it's not accepted as a viable method for getting the job done in the software engineering world.
Now that, I can see. I've only been working in the field for a couple years but I can already see that the room for growth in software development is unparalelled. What I mean is that people who start out as grunt developers often have a chance to become a team manager--it depends on how well they can estimate mentally and breakdown a project into tasks (something programmers are required to do in code anyways). More and more I see the manager world developing into two different kinds of managers--engineering managers and business managers. In fact, I have two managers (Office Space is more accurate than you think) with those two titles. One I can talk tech with and the other doesn't know jack about what I'm doing.
My work here is dung.
I have a degree in math and CS and I hardly ever use anything I learned in math for software development. Maybe simple sums and if things are getting really advanced I'll divide by the number of elements for an average. For that matter, I rarely use anything I learned in CS either, past the sophomore year anyway.
The vast majority of software, at least that I've come across, is just moving data around. Certainly, more complex software development exists, such as in the financial services sector. And we rarely have to get into the details of how complex data structures work because we always rely on libraries. Again, I'm sure there are exceptions, but from what I've seen of the work I've come across and that has been done by other developers I know, little is used of school knowledge.
That said, development isn't easy either. You have to be able to pick up new and weird APIs fairly quickly and find creative ways around asinine constraints. I'm just not seeing much in the way of school knowledge used though.
Most computer software requires nothing more than simple arithmetic.
There are exceptions such as in finance and 3d graphics, but come on.
This mentality is really annoying. The math office in my high school wouldn't let me take the C++ class because I had not taken the requisite Calculus class first. Even though I was writing C++ code in my part time job! (Out of spite, I'll mention that I took the state C++ AP test and went on to score the highest in New York. Take THAT Mrs. Lechner!)
Pfft.
Most of the actual advanced math in programming is so intuitive, you probably don't realize you're using it: discrete structures, set theory, topology logic, etc. If you can design an efficient, optimized well abstracted OO framework then your using math "skillz" whether you know it or not.
But it seems odd: If you compare software engineer to college professor, it is clear, based on their data, that the 10-year growth parameter is fairly heavily weighted in their ranking since professor is equal or higher in all other areas.
Software Engineer:
average salary: $80.5k
10-year growth: 46%
Average annual job openings: 44.8k
Stress: B
Flexibility: B
Creativity: A
Ease of Entry: C
College Professor:
average salary: $81.5k
10-year growth: 31%
Average annual job openings: 95.3k
Stress: B
Flexibility: A
Creativity: A
Ease of Entry: C
It seems like *if you had the job*, the quality of that job *right now* would be somewhat independent of the 10-year growth parameter. In that same spirit, if they folded in some "job security" parameter, it seems the tenture (or tenture-track) options of a professor would trump all others.
i\hbar\dot{\psi}=\hat{H}\psi
But they have it ranked as C, which I assume is average entry difficulty. According to their numbers, there are about 95,000 professor positions open every year. But that's not the whole picture: only a small fraction of that 95,000 are positions open to a particular person. In order to be a professor, you need to have a relatively narrow expertise. There will be few professor positions open in the country that want your particular expertise.
I also think they underestimate the stress level of getting tenure. Getting tenure is a cutthroat process.
For the record, I am a Computer Science graduate student.
Do you bring your kids to the office with you? Then why are you expecting to watch them at home while you are working? Telecommuting is about working from home, not doing a few work-related tasks while you enjoy the rest of your day. It's about saving time and money on the commute and on office space. If you're getting distracted at home, then your home office is not set up properly or you're not working in that home office.
Don't think of it as "cleaning up the mess the last guy got fired for". Think of it as "making a mess, that is compatible with your prejudices, for your successor to clean-up."
Censorship is telling a man he can't have a steak just because a baby can't chew it. --Mark Twain
No kidding. The "I married a good provider" thing annoys me.
I've seen too many couples where that sentiment became more like "I married a guy who makes lots of money and is never home, so I can have both the cash and bed the people I *really* want to without his knowing" after a little while.
I've seen too many friends get hurt because of things like that, and they never even realized that it was happening until it was too late. It's sad and depressing, and probably yet another reason I tend to be cynical.
Everything I need to know I learned by killing smart people and eating their brains.