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IT Jobs With the Best (and Worst) ROI
Nerval's Lobster writes: Over at Dice, there's a breakdown of which tech jobs have the greatest return on investment, with regard to high starting salaries and growth potential relative to how much you need to spend on degrees and certifications. Which jobs top this particular calculation? No shockers here: DBAs, software engineers, programmers, and Web developers all head up the list, with salaries that tick into six-figure territory. How about those with the worst ROI? Graphic designers, sysadmins, tech support, and software QA testers often present a less-than-great combination of relatively little money and room for advancement, even if you possess a four-year degree or higher, unless you're one of the lucky few.
Where I work, the software engineers work with the system and sub system engineers (mechanical electrical and chemical), write specs, develop the overall software 'architecture', frameworks and do some coding while the programmers implement the specs as provided by the engineers.
Eg, developing the control software for a large food processing plant, the engineer would be familiar with the valves, levers, relays, transformers, host of sensors and types including electrical characteristics, etc. They would also understand the failure modes of each of said devices and how a failure at any one point affects the plant as whole so they would understand how a stuck valve at position 244 could be detected by a temperature drop followed by a rapid rise at mixing valve 11 on the other side of the plant. They understand what signals need to be debounced and how to debounce them, how to filter the different signals, detect system inconsistent states, etc.
The programmers do some of this also, but it's not their primary responsibility which is to implement the specs in software
In the US, railroad engineers are required to be state certified and re-certified every two to three years. How about civil engineers? Oh yeah, them too. Mechanical engineers? To become a Professional Engineer in the US, state certification is required. As for electrical engineers, I don't think they have any state licensing requirements, but for all practical purposes, a four-year degree (a state-certified document as well) is typically required for employment.
This shouldn't be surprising to you. Any profession that could adversely affect the safety or lives of the public if mistakes are made often requires state certification. For the most part, this doesn't affect EE or CS. No one dies if MS Word crashes or your microwave stops working. And in those exceptions when that's NOT the case, certification is typically required of the products themselves (cars, airplanes, medical equipment) instead of the people who worked on them.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
First of all, quit being obtuse.
Second, train engineers are not the "original" engineers. The original engineers were people who designed siege engines (hence the name) for warfare -- ballistas, trebuchets, battering rams, etc. -- as well as fortifications. Military engineers predate trains by several thousand years.
Third, the second-oldest type of engineering is "civil engineering," and is named such because "civil" is the opposite of "military." Civil engineering is also several thousand years older than trains.
Oh, and by the way: the word "engine" didn't originally have anything to do with internal or external combustion; the Latin root word translates roughly as "a produced thing," or an object created by ingenuity. So in the truest sense, an engineer is anyone who uses his ingenuity to build something.
The only reason railroad engineers are called such is because presumably the earliest ones built the damn locomotive as well as operated it. Besides, the US and Canada are the only places that call people who drive trains "engineers" anyway -- everywhere else calls them "drivers," "operators" or "pilots."
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz