#1 Top 10 Best Jobs - Software Engineer?

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B

Bean7

Member
May 1, 2013
32
0
0
computerengineeringsalarydata.com
F

Farang

Lifer
Jul 7, 2003
10,913
3
0
The best software engineers I've met come across more as artists than engineers (I understand it is highly technical but they seem to enjoy the creativity involved). If that's a good comparison then getting paid $95k upwards of $120k, to be an artist in something you enjoy, not a bad gig.
 
rh71

rh71

No Lifer
Aug 28, 2001
52,844
1,049
126
Fingolfin269 said:
I think every job title should be reengineered to include the word engineer.
Click to expand...

seriously - what a joke. Just like some companies like to give everyone a title with "manager" in it. Or multiple VPs.

I'm an app developer.
 
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purbeast0

purbeast0

No Lifer
Sep 13, 2001
53,653
6,529
126
i'm a software engineer and i love it. i do wish on the nice days that i could be doing stuff outside and what not, but that is just part of the gig.

i personally just love that every day is different. sure you sit at a computer every day, but the actual work you do is never the same. there really is no routine as far as what you do at your job. and there are always new challenges, and solving them is very rewarding. you also get to learn a lot of new technology which is awesome. learning new things has driven me to make my own mobile apps and stuff on the side which brings in a little extra cash too.

would love to someday come up with a huge idea that i could just work by myself on it and make money off of some mobile app store or something. then i could work from wherever as well. that would be awesome.
 
Aikouka

Aikouka

Lifer
Nov 27, 2001
30,383
912
126
purbeast0 said:
i'm a software engineer and i love it. i do wish on the nice days that i could be doing stuff outside and what not, but that is just part of the gig.

i personally just love that every day is different. sure you sit at a computer every day, but the actual work you do is never the same. there really is no routine as far as what you do at your job. and there are always new challenges, and solving them is very rewarding. you also get to learn a lot of new technology which is awesome. learning new things has driven me to make my own mobile apps and stuff on the side which brings in a little extra cash too.

would love to someday come up with a huge idea that i could just work by myself on it and make money off of some mobile app store or something. then i could work from wherever as well. that would be awesome.
Click to expand...

I enjoy it most of the time as well, but unfortunately, I don't get to have those fun "figure it out"/epiphany moments all that often, which makes it kind of boring. I mean... I enjoy parts of it to the extent that I'll sit at home on my own time designing software on my whiteboard. The only bad thing about doing that? Coding software to a design is really boring. :|

Farang said:
The best software engineers I've met come across more as artists than engineers (I understand it is highly technical but they seem to enjoy the creativity involved). If that's a good comparison then getting paid $95k upwards of $120k, to be an artist in something you enjoy, not a bad gig.
Click to expand...

I've joked before that there's a bit of "art" to software design and somewhat implementation, but there's a bit of truth to it. Just as a painter might become elated at his latest idea, a software engineer would enjoy designing an easy solution to a problem.

Hell, I've done silly things like write regular expressions that take a few lines of code and turn it into many, many lines of somewhat similar lines of code. I've done even crazier things like use Excel to write lines of code by using its math functions combined with concatenating multiple columns together to form the full statement. It saved me quite a bit of time writing everything out manually.

That kind of stuff is a lot of fun.

Fingolfin269 said:
I think every job title should be reengineered to include the word engineer.
Click to expand...

You call them software engineers to differentiate them from computer programmers. Those are the plebes.
 
kalrith

kalrith

Diamond Member
Aug 22, 2005
6,628
7
81
I'm a software engineer, and I love it. I agree with a lot of things purbeast said, such as learning new technologies, doing new things each day, etc. My company pays for a lot of additional training, which I really enjoy.

I used to be an IT manager, and I really didn't like dealing with all the various PC-related problems and user errors. Now I get to sit at my desk and do my job without being bothered much by users.

Another nice perk is getting to set my own hours since I don't have to be here for support at a certain time of the day. I work M-F, 7-3 with a 30-minute lunch break. I don't have to put in much (if any) overtime.

I have heard that some companies have stressful deadlines to meet and require a lot of (unpaid) overtime from their software engineers. It's not like that here at all, but YMMV.
 
Hacp

Hacp

Lifer
Jun 8, 2005
13,923
2
81
Why the sudden shift to label software developers software engineers?
 
Jeffg010

Jeffg010

Diamond Member
Feb 22, 2008
3,435
1
0
I went to school for a CIS degree in 1999. The degree was all programing but I hated sitting at the computer all day long looking at code, it was not for me. Either you are cut out for it or you are not. The worst part of it for me was compiling the code then it spitting out an error and nothing the error said help you find where the code was messing up. I'd comb like couple 1000 lines of code looking for where I might have bad code and find nothing jumping out at me. Most of the time it was as simple as mistype letter or number. This was mainly on Cobol and I learned real fast to use a couple of different compilers which help when the first compiler told me jack. Cobol was hot back then with Y2k going on. I have done C, Visual Basic, Microsoft Access, and IBM DB2

I now do desktop support and fix PCs all day long. It is much more fun because I get hands on with the equipment and always a different learning experience.
 
Aikouka

Aikouka

Lifer
Nov 27, 2001
30,383
912
126
Hacp said:
Why the sudden shift to label software developers software engineers?
Click to expand...

I explained it above. Being a software developer means that you're pretty much just a programmer. Being a software engineer means that you should be able to work in any part of a software's life cycle (requirements, design, development, or test). Albeit, most places that I've seen separate requirements as to being a System Engineer's task.

That's why it annoys me when someone isn't capable of doing that but gets labeled a software engineer. For example, at my first job, I worked test with a fellow software engineer that flat out told me, "I can't program." She was an English major that worked her way into software verification.

kalrith said:
I have heard that some companies have stressful deadlines to meet and require a lot of (unpaid) overtime from their software engineers. It's not like that here at all, but YMMV.
Click to expand...

I think a lot of the horror stories that you hear tend to come from the gaming industry. Those guys get worked to the bone and beyond! :eek:
 
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