Long-Term Prospects

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Job Satisfaction

General quality of life statement

High pay, high employment rate, and ever-increasing job opportunities? Software engineering sounds like a pretty sweet deal to us. It's basically a golden ticket to the kind of life where you get to own a white tiger and ask everyone to call you, "Commodore."

So what's with that scarily low job satisfaction percentage? Significantly less than half of the software engineers out there are happy with their careers. Well, the fact is, programming can be frustrating. More than one program has collapsed because of a misplaced comma or an inadvertent letter or a spilled soda.

That last one can cause hardware problems too. Yikes.

Anyways, sometimes the job is going to consist of hunting through lines of code for hours on end, wondering where the single error was made, until you're ready to just give up. On everything.

Yes, this job will offer you security. Job security. Financial security. Security for the passwords to your special overseas accounts. (Sh, we won't tell.) Er. Despite all of that security, we want to warn you that you shouldn't go into this job just for the money. Because it is really demanding, it is really time consuming, and it requires OCD-level attention to detail.

Take it from us: don't end up that 57%, ruing your career in computing and wishing you'd gone into something fun. Something relaxed. Like the Fine Arts.

Groovy, baby.

25th Percentile Salary

Median Salary

75th Percentile Salary

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