CareerCast.com releases its 2011 Jobs Rated Report, showing Software Engineer as the top job.
In the 2011 Jobs Rated Report released last week by CareerCast.com, the number one job was Software Engineer. The job has gotten a boost from the development of apps for iPods, tablets, smart phones and other devices.
According to the report, Software Engineer topped the list as the hottest job of 2011 thanks to its low stress, great outlook for employment, strong income growth potential, few physical demands and a high environmental ranking. Rounding out the five best jobs are Mathematician, Actuary, Statistician and Computer Systems Analyst, while Roustabout (someone who works on an oil rig), Ironworker, Lumberjack, Roofer and Taxi Driver ranked as the five worst jobs.
Tony Lee, publisher of the Jobs Rated Report, says that a college education played a large role in this year’s rankings. He said, "Not only do the top 5 jobs pay more than twice as much when comparing mid-level incomes as the bottom 5 jobs ($83,777 per year vs. $30,735 per year), they all benefit from a college degree and math skills.”
To see the 2011 rankings of all 200 best and worst jobs, click here.
Justin James considers Silverlight, Windows Phone 7, mainstream development alternatives, Web development maturity, and the economy topics worth watching in 2011.
2011 is here! While I don’t like to make predictions per se, I do like to explore what topics I think may be important to developers for the next twelve months. Let’s jump right into my look ahead for 2011.
Silverlight
2010 was the year that Silverlight (and with it, WPF for apps that need access to local resources) gained real momentum. The more I play with Silverlight, the less it frustrates me, though lots of aspects of the technology still rub me the wrong way. In my opinion, the "patterns and practices” people pollute Silverlight’s ecosystem; they waste a lot of time and effort on a million frameworks to do things that address a couple of stylistic and academic concerns at the expense of increased complexity, indirectness of code, and significantly raising barriers to entry.
Fortunately, I learned that you don’t need to do things the way these folks push. In fact, the default, out of the box Silverlight development experience is very similar to WinForms (for better or for worse), and the learning curve is not nearly as bad as it appears when you first survey the landscape. This is particularly good news because, in 2011, enough development is moving to Silverlight and WPF that folks who don’t have the time and energy to learn new development paradigms will be moving to it.
Windows Phone 7
In my TechRepublic columns about Windows Phone 7 development, I note that the experience hasn’t always been pleasant. While aspects of Windows Phone 7 development still frustrate me, it is a much better experience than its competition in terms of writing applications.
I don’t know if Windows Phone 7 will be a big hit, but if it’s a success, it will be a late bloomer like Android. Remember, Android was anemic until the Droid 1 was released just over a year ago, and now it’s a big hit. That said, I think that Android is the odd man out right now. The development experience is tough because of the fragmentation. You never know what resolutions to expect, for example, or baseline phone functionality. Even on a particular model, you can’t expect a particular version of Android. With iPhone, BlackBerry, and Windows Phone 7, you do.
RIM has lost an incredible amount of momentum, and none of its recent attempts at regaining it have looked promising. Palm’s WebOS is on ice until HP figures out what it wants to do with it. Symbian has huge worldwide success except for the United States. iPhone continues to move crazy unit numbers. If Windows Phone 7 becomes a hit, it will be at the expense of RIM and Android. I think Android has enough problems, and Windows Phone 7 has both enough potential to pull it off. Windows Phone 7 is already quite good in ways that Android isn’t, both to developers and users. If I were an Android developer, I would be watching Windows Phone 7 to see where it goes.
Google Tech Talks January, 25 2008 ABSTRACT In this talk we examine how high performance computing has changed over the last 10-year and look toward the future in terms of trends. These changes have had and will continue to have a major impact on our software. A new generation of software libraries and algorithms are needed for the effective and reliable use of (wide area) dynamic, distributed and parallel environments. Some of the software and algorithm challenges have already been encountered, such as management of communication and memory hierarchies through a combination of compile--time and run--time techniques, but the increased scale of computation, depth of memory hierarchies, range of latencies, and increased run--time environment variability will make these problems much harder. We will focus on the redesign of software to fit multicore architectures. Speaker: Jack Dongarra University of Tennessee Oak Ridge National Laboratory University of Manchester Jack Dongarra received a Bachelor of Science in Mathematics from Chicago State University in 1972 and a Master of Science in Computer Science from the Illinois Institute of Technology in 1973. He received his Ph.D. in Applied Mathematics from the University of New Mexico in 1980. He worked at the Argonne National Laboratory until 1989, becoming a senior scientist. He now holds an appointment as University Distinguished Professor of Computer Science in the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department at the University of Tennessee, has the position of a Distinguished Research Staff member in the Computer Science and Mathematics Division at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), Turing Fellow in the Computer Science and Mathematics Schools at the University of Manchester, and an Adjunct Professor in the Computer Science Department at Rice University. He specializes in numerical algorithms in linear algebra, parallel computing, the use of advanced-computer architectures, programming methodology, and tools for parallel computers. His research includes the development, testing and documentation of high quality mathematical software. He has contributed to the design and implementation of the following open source software packages and systems: EISPACK, LINPACK, the BLAS, LAPACK, ScaLAPACK, Netlib, PVM, MPI, NetSolve, Top500, ATLAS, and PAPI. He has published approximately 200 articles, papers, reports and technical memoranda and he is coauthor of several books. He was awarded the IEEE Sid Fernbach Award in 2004 for his contributions in the application of high performance computers using innovative approaches. He is a Fellow of the AAAS, ACM, and the IEEE and a member of the National Academy of Engineering.
