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Nsutton

macrumors member
Original poster
Dec 29, 2009
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6 Feet Under
What would you say is the most profitable job to go into in a few years? (Just curious)
Web Design
Web Development
Programming

Opinions?
 
There is some overlap between "web development" and programming. When I think of "web design" I picture the end-to-end development including artistic design of logos, color schemes, Flash animations, pixel-by-pixel spacer graphics, stuff like that, then wrapping all that content in a website back end that perhaps uses databases and code to dynamically generate the pages.

I would be a terrible web designer because I have very little sense of style and even less ability to manipulate pixels in Photoshop. But I could easily write a program that, say, reads data fields from a text file, or XML file, or SQL database, and wraps it in chunks of display code to show on a webpage, or takes a web form of user data and processes it.

Most profitable? I don't know, that would depend on what city you're in, how big the company is (your own business? a small startup? a huge corporation? a government job?).

I can give you some figures from personal experience, though. Starting salaries, junior level, 2 years experience, Canadian dollars. I had a job offer to be the IT guy and website developer for a reasonably large company (couple hundred employees across the country). The offer was about $50K. I got several offers for software engineering (programming) positions from a few large companies (thousands of employees) ranging from $55K to $64K.

I think, generally speaking, "software engineers" make more money than "web developers" or "IT professionals". A lot of the work and training is the same though.
 
I googled "dice salary survey 2009" which was a suggested phrase from Google. The top result was a PDF document which listed average salary for "web developer/programmer" as 69k and "software engineer" as 90k. They did not list "web designer" or "programmer" specifically, nor did they give the standard deviation.

There are many other websites that have this sort of information. I looked at Dice, because they are a website for job searching in information technology. Most of them break out salaries by job title and there are many similar job titles resulting in a range of salaries.

I get the feeling that website workers have more flexibility to work independently (if they choose). That's because there are a lot of websites that don't need to be that complex and a single person could possibly do all the work. I'm not sure if that makes them more "profitable" or not.
 
Pick whatever you enjoy the most and are the best at doing and become a rockstar in that skill. Becoming a rockstar in whatever IT skill you have is much more related to your income than the actual skill you pick to follow.
 
It seems a lot of programming type jobs are going either offshore or to short-term contracts. I've been at this game long enough and it is scary to see the tactics the companies are taking.

In the end, find something you LOVE doing, do it to the best of your ability and keep a back-up plan available should the bottom drop out.
 
What would you say is the most profitable job to go into in a few years? (Just curious)
Web Design
Web Development
Programming

Opinions?

Programming is just a skill, like carpentry or brick laying.

The brick layer who makes the money is the one who sees a gap and builds a bridge, not the one who sits around asking people what they want building.

Even if your bridge is unstable and crumbly, you will still be richer than the master mason who could never see the gap that needed to be bridged in the first place.

If you want one in-demand skill for the next 10 years, learn statistics.
 
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