“The Least Meaningful Job in America” is a Slate article. Look at the small green circle at 29% “high meaning” and $103,000 in median annual pay. That’s “Computer Software Engineers, Applications” and it pretty well screams “Go to medical school so that you can at the top right of the chart instead.”
What do readers make of this chart? Can we rely on data from PayScale? Is it simply that people whose lives are meaningless choose computer nerdism or does computer nerdism render a person’s life at work meaningless?
I liked how janitors rated their Job Meaning higher than airline pilots.
I never met a software person I’d want to go fishing with. Of course I haven’t met them all, but the few I worked with were not “happy folks.” Competent, yes. Fun to be with, no. Quiet and dry without the grace of irony. No juice. And after few drinks, sullen.
Interesting chart. Occupations on the left include many in which customers are not thanking the workers up close on a frequent basis, including writers and software engineers. When’s the last time you thanked someone in person for publishing an article or fixing a bug in retail software? Needless to say, toll takers rarely get thanks. Those on the right are interacting with many grateful customers daily – doctors, clergy etc. Incidentally and by the way, thanks Philip for the interesting link and blog. 🙂
Software is now enabling all those professions, as evidenced by every conceivable business moving to San Francisco, so it should be the most meaningful. If you want to have the most influence in healthcare, you have to write software.
Software engineering is an “art” that requires a lot of creativity and keeping up with the technology. Unlike arts, however, you don’t get to showcase your work in a gallery and get kudos for it. Instead, your CTO, CEO or PLM is the one who showcase your work and get all the kudos.
Back to the chart and the data: the irony is, you can thank software engineers for enabling this interesting chart. I wander if the team who created that website and the chart are now second guessing their courier.
@jack: Maybe the fast pace of change is the reason software engineers report low happiness. Does anyone use Ingres, OS/2 Warp or MySpace? In a few years, will anyone use Google+ or Lyft? Our industry has produced a graveyard of products that almost made it. Lines and lines of code, sleepless nights in server rooms, insane deadlines and clever hacks that are now, collectively, worthless, and exist only as a bootleg backup copy made for sentimental reasons by an employee, if it hasn’t been completely deleted.
But the graph is really interesting. Who report similar meaning to software engineers? writers, photographers, graphic designers, film editors, multimedia artists, model makers, and cooks. Apparently making stuff doesn’t feel very meaningful.
Conceit seems to help in terms of ‘meaning’, and this can explain why both physicians and clergy seem to be so strongly convinced of the importance of their jobs.
Very interesting article, thanks Philip! As far as working in software being meaningless (or not), it depends very much what your software is used for, I suppose.
Maybe the attitudes reflected in this study explain why software development is so dominated by East and South Asian immigrants: American culture just assigns it to a category marked “only suitable for immigrants, stay away”. I wonder if this cultural force is strong enough to ensure that the children of these immigrants will all run away from software to become lawyers?
Software engineers are among the most highly paid employees in any firm across the world. It’s not at all meaningless from my point of few. If you are software engineer and have an experience of 2 3 years, you will definitely have better job opportunities. Software Engineering is an art and only a few people understand it completely.