IT Jobs With the Best (and Worst) ROI 139
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" (Score:5, Insightful)
"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.
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Does Dice still do the job listings thing? I ask because its been a few years since I heard anyone talk about looking there, either for jobs or for candidates.
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Hey guess what. When you're spending thousands of dollars a month on running /. then you can link to all your own relevant content you like.
If I were running /. I'd have the editorial integrity not to.
software dev vs programmer (Score:2)
Re:software dev vs programmer (Score:5, Funny)
Developers are more in demand than mere programmers.
Notice how Ballmer never says,
Programmers
programmers programmers
programmers, programmers, programmers, programmers, programmers, programmers, PROGRAMMERS!
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Well, now he is saying:
Basketball players
Basketball players basketball players, etc . . .
I am no fan of the NBA, but if it lured Ballmer out of the IT industry, and keeps him out . . . I will love the NBA . . .
Re:software dev vs programmer (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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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 d
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No they don't. At least not in the US. Do you think the guy who drives a train has a state certification? And they're the originals.
Re:software dev vs programmer (Score:4, Informative)
In the US, railroad engineers are required to be state certified and re-certified every two to three years [wikipedia.org]. How about civil engineers? Oh yeah, them too [wikipedia.org]. Mechanical engineers? To become a Professional Engineer [wikipedia.org] in the US, state certification is required [wikipedia.org]. 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.
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I work on avionics systems and do not have a professional certification other than college degrees. No one whom I work with does either (and I know many people in the industry). I even know people without college degrees doing the same work for decades...since the 70's even.
Re:software dev vs programmer (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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Re:software dev vs programmer (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:software dev vs programmer (Score:5, Informative)
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."
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These days, we are more likely to call your train "engineers" developers, designers, or inventors. Or at the very least design engineers.
We use the general term "engineer" for a persons who runs an engine, whether it be a railroad engine or a Warp Drive.
Similarly, a "computer" used to be a person. Now it's hardware.
The English language isn't as regular as some would like it to be.
Re:software dev vs programmer (Score:5, Interesting)
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...
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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...
That is interesting -- because chauffer in English means the person who drives your limousine.
The man responsible for the fire on a steam locomotive is called a fireman. (It's actually moderately skilled -- the fire is large, and needs to be balanced, and provide the right level of heat, and not waste coal. I had a go when I was about 13, unofficially on a tourist steam railway.)
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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 engin
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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.
But that's why all three are listed. Companies that post may have different names for pretty much the same job, but the posters have to find a matching title. I don't see what the problem is.
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You wouldn't say that if you were a software developer or a software engineer.
Re:software dev vs programmer (Score:5, Interesting)
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)
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If you read the fucking article you would know.
Also, Dice is about job postings, so they search for keywords and crunch the numbers.
It's all about statistics and averages, and every programmer or developer or engineer I know thinks they are above average, so they are not going to agree. They are going to read 3 words and think they know the end of the paragraph.
Idiot.
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Only the 20-sided one.
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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 w
Re:software dev vs programmer (Score:5, Interesting)
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
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A little surprised (Score:2)
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Maybe on old school systems, but modern day they are quite different. And that's a beef I have with this "article", DBA entry level might be $59,000, but I haven't met many 22 year old DBAs pulling in a nice salary like 60k. My experience has been they are all 30+ with other experience prior, like sys admin or programmer. Average age has been 40+. YMMV.
Over at McDonald's (Score:5, Funny)
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)
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'say it once.
say it twice.
three time's the charm.'
(the B guy)
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I tried ordering haggis once at the drive-thru, and they asked me if I wanted fries with it. WTF, do they think I'm a brit?
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Nae neeps and tatties?
Nonsense (Score:4, Insightful)
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I'd argue this has more to do with the size of the company than anything.
In large enterprise systems, you usually stick pretty close to your job description. In smaller companies, they need people with a more wide range of skills.
My Job: /. commenter (Score:4, Funny)
ROI: I think I owe somebody some money.
ROI depends on investment as well as return (Score:2)
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 administerin
Missing: Technical Writers (Score:2)
Good pay, good hours, limited room for advancement.
But it's not like I expect a Dice Slashvertizement to be remotely complete...
"Over at dice..." (Score:4, Funny)
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.
Waiting for SUPER-Dice story plant. (Score:3)
"Genders that pay the best in I.T."
DBAs first? Strange (Score:2)
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
Re:DBAs first? Strange (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:DBAs first? Strange (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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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.
Re:DBAs first? Strange (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
But us SE's want DBAs (Score:2)
I do a lot of what I do for money (Score:2)
but mostly because I mostly enjoy the job. We don't need another wave of money-chasing mouth-breathers fucking up the industry.
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Dev ops seems to be missing (Score:2, Interesting)
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.
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That is why sys admins look a little low on the scale. The ones making the money have re-branded themselves as "DevOps Engineers".
Which is sort of funny, because DevOps isn't supposed to be a title, it is literally supposed to be collaboration between Operations and Development, where the jobs are still distinct but inter-operate better by using certain tools and methods.
Most security standards tend to still insist on some sort of separation of duties, so you basically end up with DevOps being Ops with mor
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Shouldn't that be the job of the manager or supervisor to talk to operations and be the so called quarterback instructing everyone else what to do?
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I suppose it depends on your structure. In reality, the managers have to deal more with the business aspects of what their team is doing, in addition to coordination and planning. You could have the managers also do the technical coordination, but I find it better to just let the sys admins and developers talk to each other directly.
I manage the conflicts with their manager if they happen. That discussion is usually based on business criteria, not technical criteria. Which is not to say that it is not t
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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 :-)
Satisfaction (Score:2)
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 migh
Oh Really. A Sample of One (Score:1)
Software QA Tester
Entry-level salary: $51,322
Average salary: $51,322
At times I make near double that.
Money (Score:5, Insightful)
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)
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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)
Pay me ten times a minimally acceptable wage for two years and I can retire the next eighteen doing what I want.
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Pay me ten times a minimally acceptable wage for two years and I can retire the next eighteen doing what I want.
Not necessarily because by then you'll have a loan on an expensive house, a bunch of kids on the way and a greedy mistress.
Digital Forensic Analyst (Score:2)
Familiar jobs ... (Score:1)
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.
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The Dice are loaded ..... (Score:3)
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.
Ouch. (Score:2)
SQA jobs hence why I got laid off over a couple months ago. :(
Network Architects and Engineers (Score:1)
I noticed there's no ROI mention here. Interesting.
Feature Request User Story (Score:2)
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I'm the best there is at what I do, but what I do isn't very dice!
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Cowbell.
Re:The Job Title doesn't matter.... (Score:5, Insightful)
Tell that to the HR drones or the managers who see people as interchangeable biological units.
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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 h
Re:The Job Title doesn't matter.... (Score:5, Interesting)
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Those who can, do.
Those who can't, teach.
Those who can't teach, manage.
Those who can't manage, administrate.
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This is a reason/excuse for pay reduction.
"Those who can't teach, manage. Those who can't manage, administrate."
And these two jobs have sudden pay raises over those who "can do"
Re:The Job Title doesn't matter.... (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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I CHOSE that route based on the options presented. I spoke with my fellow engineers at the time and got their backing. I only got the supervisor position because of their support. I could have stayed as an engineer, held out or pitched for an architect position. I could have left and went somewhere else for an arcitech position. The point is you cannot blame others or "them" for your lack of moving up no matter what track or disipline you are doing. In my specific case supervisory and management is no
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There's a degree for "Help Desk" support! Am I the only person that sees that as, obviously a waste of time and money?
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Pretty sure it means 'return on investment' in this context, but as they don't supply the cost of the investment, the location these salaries are drawn from, the number of years after the degree, etc, etc, etc, it's just another bit of Dice-tastic link bait.