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U.S. News Announces the 2019 Best Jobs:
U.S. News & World Report [...] today [January 8] unveiled the 2019 Best Jobs. The rankings offer a look at the best jobs across 15 categories – from best-paying jobs to sectors such as business and technology – to help job seekers at every level achieve their career goals. The rankings take into account the most important aspects of a job, including growth potential, work-life balance and salary.
For the second year in a row, software developer takes the No. 1 spot as the Best Job overall. Statistician ranks at No. 2, followed by physician assistant at No. 3 and dentist at No. 4. Occupations in health care continue to show promise due to a combination of high salaries and low unemployment rates, taking 44 of the 100 Best Jobs and the majority of the Best-Paying Jobs. With an average salary of $265,990, anesthesiologist tops the list, followed by surgeon, oral and maxillofacial surgeon and obstetrician and gynecologist, respectively.
"Health care occupations continue to dominate the U.S. News 2019 Best Jobs rankings, with demand in the field highest for workers to fill roles such as nurse practitioner, physician assistant and physical therapist," said Rebecca Koenig, careers reporter at U.S. News. "That's good news for students and career changers, because it takes less school time and tuition money to prepare for those positions than it does to become a physician or surgeon."
Nearly a decade after the end of the Great Recession, unemployment in the U.S. has reached historic lows. With an overwhelming need for labor, companies have started relaxing their standards and expediting their hiring processes, giving workers the upper hand in the job market.
How do these rankings match up with your experience?
(Score: 2) by fyngyrz on Monday January 14 2019, @06:22PM
Like anything, there are good circumstances and poor circumstances.
I did hardware engineering involving considerable support software and sales of the resulting systems for decades; the whole thing was a constant struggle, and while I admit to paying my employees well plus bennies, no one got rich at it, and there were some really scary (as in, will we even be able to get through this) moments. We always did, but I lost one heck of a lot of sleep and my hair turned white early.
I completed a switch in tasking to entirely software in the mid 1990's. While I won't say the process wasn't uphill, it was far more reasonable, sustainable, and in the end, gainful than doing hardware was. The end result is I work at home, do whatever I want (or not), am still making money, am also writing free stuff in areas of considerable interest to me, and my job-related stress levels have reached near-zero. The employees who stuck with me are all in similar circumstances now; we keep in touch. Financially, I have zero problems.
I credit this successful end result — one of the "good circumstances" by any reasonable metric — to just a few basic policies, few of which I see followed by many other software enterprises. They seem intuitively obvious to me, but don't lead to incredible levels of success in the immediately upcoming financial quarter, so perhaps that's part of why they're not in play everywhere. But frankly, if you can see further than a few months out down the balance sheet, I remain utterly convinced that these are the basic plays one should be making all along.
I've talked about some of them previously in several different venues and contexts. Predictably, I suppose, I got some argument. But I have my results, which are really pretty hard to gainsay.
In the end, I think the poor circumstances can typically be laid at the feet of very bad hiring and operating practices. If you can manage to avoid those, and you actually like writing software, doing so can be a decent job.
I also think there are many lurking opportunities resulting from today's common practice of building stuff on slow, overweight frameworks and abusing the customers with things like subscriptions. If you can code well, you can make relatively lightweight products that are faster, cleaner, and consequently more useful than the call-home-infested crapware typically being pushed out the door by many of the major players. If you're looking for an opportunity, you might not have to look any further than pretty much any market segment that has moved to cloud and/or subscription and/or anything that requires "phoning home."
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Surely not everybody was kung fu fighting?