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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.
"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.
Developers are more in demand than mere programmers.
Notice how Ballmer never says,
Programmers
programmers programmers
programmers, programmers, programmers, programmers, programmers, programmers, PROGRAMMERS!
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)
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.
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."
Tell that to the HR drones or the managers who see people as interchangeable biological units.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
I tend to use "programmer" or "computer programmer" for myself, because I think it's the most accurate description.
Most professions with "engineer" in the title require state certification and licensing to practice their trade. I figure that's a reasonable benchmark for whether someone should put "engineer" in their title. Some engineers get in a snit about this, and I can sort of see their point.
I generally view "developer" as anyone who works on the software product in any capacity, although "software developer" still would likely refer to a programmer. For many products, there may be little distinction between "programmers" and "developers" simply because all the developers happen to be programmers. I happen to work in video games, where there are typically many more non-programmers than programmers working on a given project. As such, the distinction becomes more important. It's fairly common in the video game industry (and the public at large) to refer to everyone involved as developers, or "devs".
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
People who do have talent and drive also sometimes end up not succeeding. The people who are willing to step on anyone will definitely end up succeeding though.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
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.
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
The DBA probably gets paid a lot because the company is desperate for someone to come in and fix the database after the developers thought they could do the job themselves.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
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)
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.
Ditto. Where I work we've gone through cycles of having devs design DB changes and implement procs only to go back to stricter guidelines once the DBAs have to get engaged in performance issues. In cases where a high performing application is a must, a DBA is essential.
Unfortunately, the cost of hiring one is often spending six months to re-engineer the nightmare created by semi-sophisticated developers, the nightmare which simply cannot support the next level of service or next round of customers on the original architecture. This sort of problem pays for the DBA members of my group, others of us work with other aspects of such projects.
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
If you did not make it up the IT ladder, some of it may be your manager(s) fault but I'd say even without knowing you, it was more than likely yours. I started at my current company as a Tier 2 tech in one of our regional offices making roughly 50K/yr. I was a desktop admin, a network admin, a systems engineer, I expanded into VM and then storage, and eventually voice and networking, now eleven years later I am the infrastructure manager sitting over 7 engineers in our world wide operation and my salary has tripled. I am still physically in the same regional office and 6 of my 7 guys are are not even in my physical office, they are spread across two different offices, most at our headquarters. My situation is not unique. Many of us have worked our way up but also.. a person that started 2 months after me in the same regional office is still here and still a regional Tier 2 tech.
If anyone in your company doing IT is getting promoted and it is not you, don't blame the other guy. If the situation is "bad" and people have it out for you, then go somewhere else and try again. Don't blame others for you not getting promoted. Those engineers and managers at your current company did not start at 20 as senior engineers and managers. They did it somehow. Take responsibility for your career or be happy and comfortable where you are, that is your choice. Just don't complain about a choice YOU made.
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
Sure, of course. It's why I used the qualifier "most" and "typically". And that's also why I mentioned that if the professions themselves aren't certified, then it may be the products themselves. I have no idea about the specifics of your industry, but I'd bet your company's products have to get certified by the FAA.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
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.
I did notice that, actually. I also noticed that you are either too lazy, too stupid, or too ashamed to log in as you say it :-)
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.
The DBA probably gets paid a lot because the company is desperate for someone to come in and fix the database after the developers thought they could do the job themselves.
This.
Sincerely, a DBA.
My other account has a 3-digit UID.
Though you are typically expected to understand DO-178b, or at your company should have people who do in order to certify the software. Then the FAA DER audits that software based on DO-178b. At least if the software is considered critical to safety of flight.
Certification is all very well and good when most people in the profession are doing the same thing and the state of the art is advancing relatively slowiy.
One the other hand, one of the IT professional organizations of the 1970s attempted to create the concept of a "Certified Data Processor" (CDP).
I have a copy of a CDP exam prep guide. Not many things in it are even possible any more. Reading punch cards by eye, knowledge of COBOL program organization, mainframe JCL - the stuff that isn't flat-out obsolete is really niche these days. Few RoR programmers know JCL. People who Java well aren't usually also top-tier .Net experts. Some people work intensively with Struts, but more don't. And that's not counting system expertise like how to endure the Windows Registry or run dtrace on Linux.
Sure we have dozens of domain-specific certs in IT. Most of them carry little or no weight. There's no general cert that defines your overall competence or lack thereof.
The only hope for professional certification would be if someone could devise an exam sufficiently abstract to work in all major variants of an IT discipline, regardless of OS, language or platform. So far, no one has done that.
There is a problem with the IT or technical ladder itself in many companies where IT is not core business (and even in some where it is). The ladder can be rather short: Junior / Medior / Senior tech (and senior can be someone with as little as 5 years experience), then you basically leave tech and be project manager, line manager or the manager of a division or competence center or some such. A few rock stars may stay in tech as Principal Consultants, but those are rare (and often not promoted from within).
In many companies, there will be a few clever techies who are recognized as being very knowledgable in their own area of expertise as well as having a wider and forward looking view, and who are consulted on where to head the company's strategic direction. Such a techie may be promoted to management (and possibly do a crap job at the people and process aspects of that), or the existing manager may continue to draw upon his best techies to help him strategize, but why not turn it into a role? Some companies do, but I don't see it very often and it's a shame, because it can be a very nice role for a senior tech to be promoted into, increasing his value to the company as well.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
Most professions with "engineer" in the title require state certification and licensing to practice their trade. I figure that's a reasonable benchmark for whether someone should put "engineer" in their title. Some engineers get in a snit about this, and I can sort of see their point.
IMHO, the mere usage of the term engineering in the software industry is a good thing. The more developers who think of themselves as engineers, and try to elevate their professional practices to a level worthy of the term, the better the industry will be. It may take some time for software engineering practices to become as mature as civil engineering, but I believe the developers who consider themselves software engineers are the ones who will do it.
I personally am fine considering myself a software engineer. I find the connotations the term carries apply well to how I try to separate my capabilities from less structured programmers.
And as for engineers being rubbed the wrong way, I have yet to meet a "true" engineer who I admire who felt there was anything profound about being called an engineer. To paraphrase one college friend / mechanical engineer: "There are a lot of incompetent certified engineers out there."
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
Those who can, do.
Those who can't, teach.
Those who can't teach, manage.
Those who can't manage, administrate.
What a load of unsubstantiated ideological crock.