SW-developer tops list of U.S. News and World Report's annual best jobs rankings | Hacker News Reader

SW-developer tops list of U.S. News and World Report's annual best jobs rankings

eu.usatoday.com

17 pointspunnerud12 comments

> This job pays six figures and has low levels of stress

Unfortunately, I don't know many developers that have low levels of stress. The fate of a project or a company is often in their hands.

Compared to most other options? Software Developer has been the least stressful title I've ever held, even with the occasional long nights involved.

It helps that our relationship with employers tend to be in the Software Developer's favor.

- It's unlikely for someone to be fired suddenly (outside of outlier companies like Netflix)

- The high salaries give people an opportunity to build up a decent emergency fund (which everyone should 100% absolutely have)

- Finally, with the high demand for experience in the U.S., there's a high likelihood for any experienced dev to find a new job within three months

With these factors in mind, devs should always be able to walk into work with piece of mind, no matter the situation.

You should experience jobs where the fate of nothing is in your hands yet provide pressure cooker environments. There are plenty.

I think it's about stress relative to other jobs. Most of the other jobs on the list are in healthcare, which is arguably more stressful than software development.

Architects seem better paid with less stress.

Yes but this is generally true for all non-executive senior roles.

An experienced anything is going to be better paid and have more security (and less stress) than a junior. And an architect is just a fancy term for an experienced individual contributor swe.

Does anyone know where to find the median Software Developer salaries by State or region?

It would be interesting to see a median salary vs cost of living comparison for the top cities in each region.

Stack Overflow has a Salary Calculator[1] that allows for searching by role and region. The raw data used for that calculator and for past years can be found here[2].

[1]: https://stackoverflow.com/jobs/salary

[2]: https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey

Really awesome and they include CSVs. I only wish it was more than 100k, with only ~28% residing in the US.

Is it not obvious that certain industrial interests want to make software development easy and common, simply to reduce the cost of labor? and cynically, to encourage that, inflate the perception of riches therein?

Not sure why people disagree with this. This is why there is a push to teach kids programming in school and the entire reason why large companies are pro-mass immigration. Lowering costs is a priority.

The "teaching kids to code" is more subtle however, in that it is an OBVIOUS good. Am I opposing learning for my selfish interests?

The question is poorly phrased intentionally, it ought not be "should kids learn to code?" But rather "is code what kids ought to be learning instead or X?". Personally, I believe that kids should learn personal finance or cooking instead, for example.

Your point being? Are you suggesting we make software development harder just for the sake of it? (Isn't that what Hacker News constantly bitches about, anyway, with regards to Javascript?)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com