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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.
Dice ads.
its the actual person in that job that counts. You'll find someone who is talented and driven will end up succeeding regardless of what job they start in when they start their career.
People who don't have talent and drive will end up not succeeding.
"Over at Dice...[...]"
Since when is that "somewhere else"? Any submission of news from Dice lacks any credibility... and puff piece articles like this aren't worth anyone's time at the best of time.
What's the difference between a software developer and a programmer? One develops software by programming, and the other programs computers to develop software.
Where did you get your salaries from? Those starting salaries are absurdly low. I know which job board I won't be using next time. Thanks Dice!!
Even Youtube has a dislike button. X
Business majors use MS Office and end up being CEOs making millions.
Maybe not "shocked," but I'm a little surprised to see such a difference between sysadmins and DBAs. I usually think of them in the same group, with DBAs being a notch higher by dint of specialization.
Over at McDonald's (one of the worlds greatest Scottish Restaurants) you can taste a variety of taste sensations...
All you'd have to do is type www.mcdonalds.com and it could all be yours. Yep Over at Mcdonalds you could figure out the dinner that best suits your needs over at McDonalds. People might think that by saying over at McDonalds I'd like you to you know go over to Mcdonalds but I'm just Say'n it (I can say this because Slashdot isn't owned by McDonalds its owned by Dice)
Nonsense. Job titles in IT are just "guidelines" as for your job duties and job duties are what decide salaries once you've become established at a company. I've seen "sys admins" who wrote C++ code all day long for various system tools and got paid well into 6 figures for it. I've seen DBA's who spend there days building systems and configuring various components of the server who also make 6 figures. I think the bottom line is generally that you need to have multiple strong skill sets and to find ways to apply these various skills at your job. A quick story that probably has no real merit: A linux admin at my current job got saddled with trying to get the microsoft system suite to do a few fancier things in terms of configuration management. This means that he had to write a few dozen modules in C++ to get the right data placed into the microsoft suite. He makes well into 6 figures (we're drinking buds). Talent + effort + correct company == high pay.
So basically, -1 troll/offtopic is really slashdots way of saying "I hate that you thought of something before me."
ROI: I think I owe somebody some money.
Shocking... another article from the lip piece that is Nerval's Lobster about Dice.
Fucking douche.
Good pay, good hours, limited room for advancement.
But it's not like I expect a Dice Slashvertizement to be remotely complete...
Lawrence Person (lawrencepersonh@gmailh.com (remove all "h"s to mail)
http://www.lawrenceperson.com/
These salaries are insanely low.
At the risk of sounding cruel, this reminds me of an unpopular kid who's walking all around school, casually mentioning to everyone that lots of people are going to hang out at his house that night.
"Genders that pay the best in I.T."
Around here, if anything, the DBA job is disappearing: There are a lot less openings, and most are at huge, extremely corporate places that you'd not even want to work for. And even in that world, they are switching to development models that don't need DBAs. So maybe the averages are high because only companies that pay well would even hire DBAs?
They also talk of averages, but not high ends. Around here, a programmer's high end is very high: I make 4x what my employer pays an entry level developer. People realize how much a top developer can get you. DBAs, not so much.
but mostly because I mostly enjoy the job. We don't need another wave of money-chasing mouth-breathers fucking up the industry.
If you were me, you'd be good lookin'. - six string samurai
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.
I didn't graduate from high school. I never went to college. I make a six figure salary running million+ dollar machines from IBM running AIX in a very large hospital system.
And the DBA's don't get anything done without us.
UNIX Administrators (notice I didn't say Linux) are still at the top of the food chain. DBA's make a lot of noise and money too, but we are still their overlords.
Rows and columns, BORING. And they have to deal with users, poor bastards.
For some people a satisfying job is an important part of their overall happiness, so even if they might be making less, still might be more fulfilled by their lives.
Of course for other people the job is just 8 hours a day they can easily partition from the rest of their lives, and don't have any such concerns.
There is no good or bad about one or the other, it's just how some people's natures are different. It is though, too important of a metric to be left out of an article like this. Graphic designers might be a good example of this. Some may be making less, but for them it might be more valuable on the balance for their mental state then the money.
Software QA Tester
Entry-level salary: $51,322
Average salary: $51,322
At times I make near double that.
Money seems a bad metric to choose a job. Once it pays enough, having an interesting job is quite important, since you are going to spend at least 8 hours a day at it. Job security can also be another important point: who cares a high wage if you are going to be fired within 2 years and remain unemployed after that (hint: another technological bubble exploded)
As a digital forensic analyst, I began at 45K after graduating from Champlain College. Now I make 87K
These reviews always seem to only include the IT jobs everyone's heard of. Where do SAN Admins fit in this? Or enterprise backup? As a storage area network admin, I do pretty well and have a degree in Theater, with no certs at all. And I recently saw a job posting for Avamar/Data Domain for $105k, in a medium-sized market.
core team. They be a lot slower Tra8sfer, Netscape
Depends on what you call an investment....
I dropped out of high school, completely skipped college, and work in the in NYC making 250K/yr as a software developer.
The smartest ones always have skipped the larger investments yet are yielding the same results. Boy does that piss off a hardworking type A though....
I think there is a term for the rare working-class intellectual not born of the Bourgeois......
I have to admit that I haven't even looked at the job listings on Dice for years (largely because I've been happily employed and didn't feel the need). But as someone with a background in network/systems administration, PC support, etc. -- I distinctly recall finding FEW interesting listings on Dice. The web site seemed slanted towards those looking for software coding or web development jobs, DBAs, or specialists in rolling out and supporting large ERP packages.
So when a survey from Dice tells me that there's more growth, opportunity and money in all of those areas -- I have to take that with a grain of salt.
I mean, look.... I think we should all know by now that help desk jobs are a dead end, unless you're with one of the few remaining companies who hires from within and essentially demands you do your time on their help desk to earn the right to one of the better positions in I.T. they offer. We don't need a survey to tell us that. There's a whole group of jobs out there that tend to have titles like "systems specialist", "support specialist", "support analyst" or even "network manager" where you're likely to wear multiple hats. Often, these turn out to be jobs where you're really the only full-time I.T. person for a small business who finally decided to get serious about I.T. and quit hiring consultants at hourly rates whenever they screwed things up. Other times, you're part of a team who does everything from help desk type support to ensuring backups run to making recommendations for upgrading the whole infrastructure.
I find these positions to be right up my alley, in the sense they aren't as likely to get boring and I get to "call the shots" more and more often, as I get established in such a role and prove to management that I know what I'm doing. (You probably won't make big $'s in these positions, but you'll get your hands on all sorts of different things and get a decent shot at working for a business where you're not just a number or line-item in a spreadsheet.)
So sure.... Dice can hawk the software development side of I.T. as "where the money's at!" -- but I'm good doing what I do, thanks.
SQA jobs hence why I got laid off over a couple months ago. :(
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
Electrical/Computer Engineers > Computer Science >>> IT
A developer has a sell by date, it seems, not really or course although he/she will be slower when older. I think that's a major risk of being in IT
I noticed there's no ROI mention here. Interesting.
Rate of income? Return on investment? Republic of Ireland?
For the love of god please stop with the obscure acronyms just for the sake of saving a few keystrokes?
Seriously, do you honestly think that the world doesn't see Slashdot as a Dice advertising mouthpiece now?
Graphic designer was an art job, not a tech job. Just because graphic designers are now being used to develop user interface components doesn't make graphic design a tech job. Dice is full of idiots.
"Nerval's Lobster writes: "
If you go to Nerval's Lobster's profile http://slashdot.org/~Nerval%27s+Lobster most of the contributions seem to be links to Dice stories.
As a slashdot reader I would like to filter stories by submitter so that I can save myself the pain of seeing articles from Dice shills and other self promoters.
'The tyrant will always find pretext for his tyranny.' - Aesop's Fables
They don't factor in geolocation; "associate software engineer" churned up mostly in west coast states. I'd hope you got paid better in CA than in IA because well, the cost of living is staggering.
Since as a software engineer I completely admit you know way more about databases than I do.(You're worth every dollar you get paid.) The problem is so many managers think "Oh we don't need DBA's, you SE's can do it. It'll be just as good. Oh and we don't need release engineers either since we'll save money by having the SE's do that as well." (Yeah, right.)
Did you know 80 to 90% of the moderators on slashdot wouldn't recognize a troll even if one dragged them under a bridge.
The original material talked about salaries and job titles; it didn't say how much investment it took to develop the skills to get those titles. Some of those skills are things you can add quickly; others take a long time or access to appropriate work environments. (For instance, learning PHP is quick, and Ruby on Rails isn't that hard either. But while you can learn SQL and MySQL pretty quickly, becoming a DBA really needs access to real-world databases and workloads that you're involved in administering.)
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks