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Study Says Software Engineers Have the Best US Jobs
D H NG writes "According to a new study by CareerCast.com, software engineers have the best jobs of 2011 in the United States, based on factors such as income, working environment, stress, physical demands and job outlook, using Labor Department and Census data. Mid-level software engineers make between $87,000 and $132,000 a year, putting them in the top 25% of the 200 professions studied by income. Software engineers beat out last year's number one job, actuary, which came in third, behind mathematician."
Software engineer: $87,000; Computer programmer: $71,000. It is weird that they break those two up.
Best Slashdot comment ever
This study covers competent software engineers which might explain why your outcomes are so different.
I'm astonished that would be the top job last year. Personally, I'd rather shoot myself than be an actuary. But of course, a good actuary would already know that...
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
Assuming you can actually find a Software Engineering job that will stay in the U.S., yeah, they're the "best."
Where else can you get paid $100k+ a year to gripe all day on Slashdot about how crappy your job is?
The 132k figure is not for mid-level engineers (although maybe it is in a big city). The actual quote from the article is "Most earn a typical mid-level income of about $87,000 and top out at $132,000". Makes me feel a little better and it's maybe the first time I RTFA in over a decade of visiting here.
I'm 10 years out of college and make at the low end of that range, though I live somewhere that's relatively cheap compared to most hotbeds of software development. I work 40 hours a week (sometimes a few less) and probably spend 25% of that not doing anything productive in a work-related sense. So from a "money per unit effort" sense I'm pretty well off. From a "doing something that is intrinsically rewarding and gives me a sense of pride and accomplishment"...not so much.
Nah, you really don't.
... that so much of the perception of how good a job is would be derived from how much money one makes doing it.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
You'll notice that the criteria don't include "intellectual fulfillment." Actuaries rate pretty highly in all the criteria the study considers, but perhaps their job is not as interesting as some others.
I know some actuaries, and they find their jobs very intellectually stimulating and fulfilling. For people who really like math and statistics, doing it professionally is enjoyable and challenging. It's not like actuaries spend their days adding up big columns of numbers -- we have computers for that. Actuaries figure out how to use sophisticated statistics to tease out subtle patterns from large masses of information. It's challenging and the results are often surprising.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
What's the difference between a mathematician and a large pizza?
A large pizza can feed a family of four.
I have carried the title "Software Engineer" for 13 years. I'm of mixed opinion about how great the job is. It pays pretty well, but much of that is relative to what you're comparing to.
There are worse jobs out there, no doubt, but we're not just coders at least in my experience and many people I know in Silicon Valley. You have to read a lot of boring documents. You have to know how to write. There are meetings. There are customers to talk with. For me what makes it "not the greatest job in the world" is that it's stressful in a way that people don't understand.
Deadlines always loom, and they are always too short. A good SE has to constantly decide where to unit test, design, explain to management, or just hack to get it done. There's no worse feeling when management decides that a project is taking too long and asks "who can we add to the project?" like we and our code is just plug-n-play factory work.
That is stressful and few people understand the kind of stress created on the job. I'm not asking for pity. It's a good gig overall, but sometimes I wish I would have stuck with my original, lower paying pursuit of teaching junior college mathematics.
$132K as an upper bound sounds about right for mid-level engineers but is a bit low as an upper bound for senior software engineers at large corporations. Principal software engineers at Microsoft are paid at around $160K with fairly huge bonuses that push their yearly pay to nearly $200K. Staff software engineers at Google and others are in the neighbourhood. Note that these are cream-of-the-crop engineers who have chosen to stay as ICs rather than go into management. Source: personal knowledge and glassdoor.com.
Automotive engineer (the guy who designs the engine) and mechanic?
Well in that case I'm sure Grand Island, NE. would love to have you.
European here. After a few years in London and then some time in Australia where things didn't pan out so great, I decided to head back to the old country, south of France.
Turns out I only lost about 10% on the salary, when really, I expected the cut to be more something like 30-40%. Turns out that if you find the right employer, they will go the extra mile if they've estimated your worth correctly.
I seem to remember a guy named Steve saying that there's better money selling magazines door-to-door.
If you don't find that you are getting a good deal with insurance, then why buy it? Except in cases where you are required to (minimal car insurance, or full coverage if you have a loan). For example, I never buy extended warranties on electronics (I consider that a form of insurance), because in my experience it would cost more than it pays back in the long run. Another example, if you are a teenager driving a $8000 car, it doesn't make sense to pay $4000 a year for comprehensive collision insurance.
My last job had a lot of those traits: great pay for local COL, no physical labor, not terribly difficult work. I almost never had to talk on the phone either. However, the work environment was horrible: I had to sit in a bull-pen environment, with all kinds of noise and distractions around me. I finally quit because of that. I simply couldn't concentrate with people interrupting me and having to listen to conversations around me. I also was fed up with never knowing what was going on, as the company had a policy against having meetings to disseminate information. The last straw was when I was told that I was expected to learn about the company direction, what's going on with the project, etc. by overhearing it.
As someone who spends $1,400 a month on private health insurance, I spend it because the risk of someone in the family needing a 6 figure treatment is worse. Since the risk is actually low, I don't consider it a good deal. A child's health has a different weight than that $8000 car.
www.joking.net
Where are these high paying jobs they speak of? And how much do they really make after you take into account all the high paying jobs are in places with a high cost of living to go with it, and the lower paying ones.. well you get the idea. Everyone in California makes ridiculous amounts of money even though their job is usually perfectly transplantable elsewhere. With so many tech jobs in that state it really skews the numbers. How much does a "software engineer" make in a humble small town in a red state? Usually not so much...
You obviously know nothing about the industry. Many insurance lines (especially liability) are in a "soft market", and effective rates have been decreasing for several years, often by 5%+ a year.
If you don't buy liability insurance you may not get that example. But you probably know something about car insurance. On a loss ratio basis, companies like Progressive and Geico attacked the auto market and won market share from companies like State Farm and Allstate. Their secret? More sophisticated and efficient pricing algorithms, which enabled lower prices for many drivers.
Your whole post doesn't make any sense anyway—insurance is a competitive market; if they were really screwing their customers, new companies could just enter and take their profits. It only takes a few guys to start an insurance company and there are about 1000 registered in the US.