A slightly more serious topic, also noted via Inside Higher Ed: Money magazine has deeemd "College Professor" the second-best job in America. The fact that it trails "software engineer" makes me a little dubious about their methodology, but there you go-- I have the second-best job in the country.
Of course, looking at the detailed results, you really have to wonder what they were basing some of this on. In particular, 30+% job growth over the next ten years? Don't tell me they've bought into the "There's going to be a huge wave of retirements any day now..." myth...
They also appear to be lumping college administators in with the lowly faculty (the "Top job in field" is "Dean of Medicine"), which also helps explain the salary figures-- the 5% who make more than half a million are probably all deans or college presidents.
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Well, there are jobs one loves, then jobs that make decent money.
Software Developers (like myself) are in one of the few jobs that actually fits both.
That half a million figure has got to be a typo. The top 5 percent of financial advisors only make $200,000.
Yeah, and Larry Summers only made $554,098 in the 2004 fiscal year, and he's the 27th best paid president of a private university in the states. I think Munger's right.
It makes the paranoid leftists feel justified. Software is a field where being discarded at 30 is common; it's field threatened by offshoring. The only thing which keeps it going if hordes of fresh-faced naive kids pouring in, paying mucho moola for their short-lived education. But one wouldn't know that from reading Money magazine.
"Here's your rifle, kid; here's your sharp-looking uniform - you'll get plenty of women with that - after a brief tour of something we like to call 'the front'".
Software engineer is a great job (at least for the moment). Advancing technology has made the job incredibly useful, which translates (or at least can) into good pay, flexible hours, and a lot of personal freedom. There's not necessarily job security in the sense that you can't be fired, but the job market is still pretty ridiculous, in that if you're in the right areas, you can get another job pretty damn quickly.
Then there's the job satisfaction from the creative nature of the work... it's a good gig. When I think of ranking jobs, it's right up there with university professor and federal judge.
(Calling out "release engineer" as a desireable subset of software engineer? That is lunacy.)