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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.
Tell that to the HR drones or the managers who see people as interchangeable biological units.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.