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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.
Yeah it makes no sense. They have separate categories for Software Engineer, Programmer, and Software Developer. They are the same job, although often they have slightly different connotations in that in some organizations the word engineer has more prestige than programmer but it varies.
Pretty much useless... a distinction that makes no different at best. Even if some pedant comes along and says "a software engineer has XX degree and a programmer has YY degree" it is still meaningless because these types of distinctions are not generally agreed upon.
Software developer is someone who is capable of dealing with more of the software development lifecycle than the programming part. Architecture, design, requirements analysis, etc.
programmer = code producer (aka code monkey)
Dev ops, I have gone from 40k 6 years ago to 120K+bennies now.
That's not mentioning side work or the 6 emails A week I get about new jobs.
A programmer can take a specification and implement it. For example he can be told: "Create a module with function that takes two arguments from the databse and stores their product back into the database.* He may even be able to take a set of specs and write all the code for the project.
A Software Developer on the other hand knows how to do requirements gathering and analysis, create time lines and cost projections, recommend and implement solid Source Code Control mechanisms (In other words they use git in 2015)
Above that level of competence is the Software Engineer. They understand various development models (e.g. Waterfall, Iterative/Spiral, etc.) and paradigms (e.g. Structured, Object Oriented, Event Driven) , and patterns such as Idempotence, singletons, etc.).
* One other difference between a programmer and the Software Dev or Engineer is that the programmer thinks this is easy, and the latter two know that there can be a lot more involved than you might imagine
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
In England we call them, much more accurately, train drivers.
Interestingly, in France we call them chauffeurs, as in heaters. Because they used to have to shovel coal under the steam engine long before they could start them. And taxi and truck drivers are still called this way. Etymology...
Non-Linux Penguins ?
You actually kind of proved the point because you are not an engineer/admin anymore, you are now a manager. It's a pretty sad cultural quirk that the target of every so called "career path" always tend to be some kind of management, removing the best engineers from what they do best if they want to have a good salary.
My other account has a 3-digit UID.