Become a Software Engineer
Last year, Money Magazine rated software engineer the best job in America. When I read that, I was incredulous. I’m a software engineer, I thought, and my job cannot be the best job in America. My first question was, where do they come up with this crap? Luckily the information architects predicted that it would be my first question and left a link dangling right there in front of me.
It seems one of the most important factors for them is job growth. This is why chief executive is further down the list than physician assistant. They also don’t include very rare jobs, regardless of how sweet. Superhero and rock-god are nowhere on the list. Compensation is important, but the human factor also plays prominently in their analysis. They judged factors such as "stress levels, flexibility in hours and working environment, creativity, and how easy it is to enter and advance in the field."
When viewing the career of software engineering through this lens, it really does make sense. I was happy to see that the number of software engineering jobs in America is predicted to increase almost 45% over the next 10 years. Just 5 years ago, outsourcing was predicted to destroy my career. I guess that was wrong, but those predictions came during a bit of a dark time. Software engineers and just about everyone else in the industry were suffering from disillusionment after the dot-com crash. Luckily, the industry and the career has matured since then. A real understanding in the value of creativity is coming from engineers and their employers. That brings us to the human factor. We’re beyond the days of thinking that it’s all about lines of code. Because of that, the work has gotten better and so has the job.
At the time I read the Money article, I was working for a company that didn’t understand the human factor. I started working for them because they did travel and I love travelling (This is another point the Money article brings up, that as software engineers we can conflate other interests with out careers–travel, music, you name it, they need software). But they viewed programming as lines of code that you could farm off to foreign lands for a fraction of the price. For much of what they do, they can. But because they treat all of their engineers as hot-swappable resources, they’re never going to get much more out of what they are, and what they are is dying.
Of course, if you’re in a situation that you think could be better, you should try to find the better, which is what I soon did. Now I can talk about job growth and compensation in my estimation, but more importantly for me, there’s the human factor. My job has to be creative and interesting and the environment I am in has to facilitate that. On a good team working on an exciting project for a company that’s not trying to institutionalize the creative process, I start to think that Money magazine might just be right.
