Best jobs in America infographic

Paul sez, "We have been putting this together for a week or so and thought you might like it. Looks like I am going back to school to be a systems engineer, haha."

I like that they've color-coded for "low-stress," "benefit to society" and "satisfaction." However, on these three counts, I'm unsurprised to see that "science fiction writer" didn't make the cut. When I was 17, the school guidance counsellor got in some software that would help you figure out what career to set your sights on. I completed its questionnaire and hit return, and an instant later was advised to become a "geriatric nutritionist" (that is, someone who prepares meals in an old folks' home). Even today, I sometimes feel like I missed my calling. ("Science fiction writer" wasn't on that list either).

Best Jobs in America (Thanks, Paul!)

Previously:

I write books. My latest is a YA science fiction novel called Homeland (it's the sequel to Little Brother). More books: Rapture of the Nerds (a novel, with Charlie Stross); With a Little Help (short stories); and The Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow (novella and nonfic). I speak all over the place and I tweet and tumble, too.

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cinemajay

Best = more money eh? I know quite a few physicians who earn a lot less than $100k–many can hardly stay in business after malpractice insurance costs.

I call shenanigans.
toriokyo

Typical. Despite armchair quarterbacking on the “accuracy” of the infographic (who hasn’t heard yet that statistics lie?), the information designer who created the opportunity for all of us to understand and debate this information is never mentioned. High stress, high benefit to society, and depending on who you work for both fun and a helluva future. (what about the money you ask? What’s that?)
Anonymous

And to think, I Engineer Systems for fun, as a hobby! Golly.
Anonymous

We had to take that test to find out our perfect profession based upon our personality…I was told Cheese Maker was a perfect fit.

I remember having to take that test two more times to even get close to what I wanted to be, an Illustrator. I finally was able to nail commercial artist, even though in order to get that I had to suggest that I wanted to work in a cave by myself for low pay and never own a new pair of shoes. Pretty harsh reality in 11th grade.
plover

This infographic is highly inaccurate.

I can only speak directly to my profession, but the vast majority of psychologists aren’t making anywhere near $172,000.

http://www.apa.org/workforce/publications/09-salaries/index.aspx

Someone added another $100,000 to that average psychologist’s salary to spice up the story. And, NONE of my physician friends (with the exception of those who work as executives in pharma) are making those kinds of salaries either. You’re just not going to make this kind of money in the “helping” professions in *most* cases.

This graphic also avoids factoring in opportunity costs … what are the costs of postponing the start of your major earning years until your mid-30′s, as most PhDs and MDs do?

Crappy data, aside from any issues about whether one should wear a skirt and/or cape to work.
- dculberson
  
  If you re-read the captions to the graphic, you’ll see that the larger figure is the “top pay,” meaning the highest paid person in their sample group in the field. The smaller number is the “median salary” which exactly lines up with the APA data you linked to. So your rebuttal was actually supporting the infographic.
  
  I do know of a few clinical psychologists making well north of $100k (some closer to $200k) so definitely believe that the $172k figure is likely as an upper bound to the salary range.
moosehunter

ythis is more like the best job according to a IT manager.

its biased

where are the Trades?
I know hundreds of perfectly happy machinists and rough engineers that would hate a IT job.

It takes all kinds, and the mentality that makes a good IT dweeb, isnt the same as one that enjoys working with your hands.

where are the Makers? the doers of things..

button pushers are good, and possibly happy, but sombody has to make the buttons
- Anonymous
  
  “where are the Makers? the doers of things..” they are in IT… Making and Doing stuff that “makes” everyone else more effective at their jobs…
Rob Beschizza

I remember that software! It told me to be an architect.
Antinous / Moderator

It doesn’t seem to factor in the horrors of training. A physician specialist, for example, endures:

- 4 years of pre-med, you pay the school a fortune and you actually have to work your ass off
- 4 years of med school, you pay the school a fortune and you still actually have to work your ass off
- 4 – 8 years of residency, 80 to 100 hours of work per week and you start out at crap wages
- several years of fellowship, decent wages

Nor does it mention what they’re paying out for things like malpractice insurance.
- Jonathan Badger
  
  The supposed horrors of physician training seem to be more or less the same as those undergone by scientists (postdocs are basically the resident equivalent), and yet for some reason not only is a PhD less financially bankable than a MD, nobody seems to make TV shows and movies about graduate students and postdocs like they do for med students and residents.
  
  Okay, scientists don’t have to worry about malpractice insurance, but pretty much everything else applies.
  - Moriarty
    
    One difference is that MDs generally pay for their own education and go hugely into debt to do so, while most PhDs do not (applies in America, don’t know about elsewhere). The differences in pay are, like most differences in pay, largely explainable by supply and demand. As for why there are lots of medical TV shows and few grad student TV shows, it’s probably for the same reason there are lots of cop shows: there is lots of readily graspable human drama inherent to the job.
Stefan Jones

I remember being utterly frustrated with those career counsellors and their software.

* * *

I have a want-ad newspaper clipping I keep meaning to scan in:

“WANTED: TRANSGENIC ANIMAL TECHNICIAN”

Which for a minute had me thinking they were looking for an uplifted raccoon or Bowman’s Wolf or something.
- maryr
  
  #4: Yeah, you don’t want that job. That job is going to be labeling and cleaning mouse cages, if you’re lucky. If you aren’t lucky, you’re going to be killing a lot of mice.
Amphigorey

Yet another instance where male is the default case and female is the special instance.

(I say this because all the human figures that represent jobs are identical to the figure that represents the male portion of the labor force. The female figure is only shown as part of the gender infographic; it does not appear at all in the main body of the chart.)
- dculberson
  
  The only mistake they made was putting the dress on the women silhouettes at the bottom. Otherwise, using the same profile for everything makes sense, and wearing pants does not make a silhouette male.
- Antinous / Moderator
  
  Why are we still using June Cleaver’s silhouette as the symbol for women?
- erissian
  
  Some of them are men, the others are women in pants. Towards the bottom is a single eccentric woman in a cape.
Anonymous

I always thought US currentcy only had 2 decimal digits. 100 cents making a dollar, but for a software developer they list “79,400″. It cannot be possibly be 80k$ a year. That would be far more than a software developer can possibly get. 80$ a month is far realistic.
- Anonymous
  
  RE: ANON#6 : Indeed. Properly trained software developers/systems engineers willing to work hard and meet deadlines can command 80K-150K in the U.S. to fix the heap of broken promises left by the swathes of unwashed hordes and prior wanted-to-be-software-developers: poorly trained and woeful, unknowing ignorance, attempting to cash in on what’s left of their notion of the American dream.
Anonymous

I didn’t notice much correlation with the adulterers.
http://www.boingboing.net/2010/03/10/most-adulterous-prof.html

Hm . . .
BoydWaters

I am compelled to recall the “Mork & Mindy” episode where Mork describes the way professions are determined on Planet Ork: at age 7, the kids all line up to be scanned by the Machine. You saw this line of all these kids, one by one they’d stand on this platform, while the Machine intoned “School-teacher!” “Football player!” “Cook!”, and then, “Female Impersonator!”
Anonymous

No telephone handset sanitisers?
newtomato

That software said I should have been a Park Ranger – every year the same thing. Funny thing is I have wicked bad allergies, which would preclude that job. Thank goodness I became a cosmologist. I’m not allergic to dark matter or the CMB.
Anonymous

Elevator Constructor: trade, paid training ($55K/year), $110K/year in the right region (pay depends on the union), nice benefits. You can do cool things like rappel in elevator shafts, stop the elevators between floor for a quickie or bypass the stops thanks to your magic keys.
Minuses: greasy stained hands; not a ton of girls.
Anonymous

that’s weird. every software developer I know makes well under the $79,400 that chart speaks of.
- Anonymous
  
  My conjecture:
  Most of the software developers you know live where you do, and you happen to live in a place with lower than US median cost of living?
Anonymous

Examining the chart:
Highest job growth -> Hispanic.

Well I’ll be.
apoxia

My future career is number 23. Too bad I’m not in the US and therefore won’t be paid in USD.
lewis stoole

which one is least likely to consistently wash his/her hands? if 30-40% of doctors are “too busy”, then what are the odds these guys would? any responses from the 6-figure vectors out there would be appreciated along with an explanation.
Cicada

Ah, happy #13. If not for the nurses and patients, it’d be just about perfect.
Anonymous

Italian, security consultant 36,000$/year
you make me sad

i need a green card.
thefuture

The infographic representing the division of the labour force by ethnicity is pretty misleading. The height of those silhouettes is proportional to the number of workers rather than the area, greatly exaggerating the proportion of whites in the labour force.
Anonymous

All this and no-one has yet made any joke involving lion taming, hats, and aardvarks? For shame.
Anonymous

I remember taking this big long (100s of questions, some of the duplicated) survey and then my answers were compared to the responses of people in various professions to attempt to determine what I would be interested in doing. Seemed pretty accurate to me, there was NO profession where my responses were well correlated with those of the workers. So it turns out, I’m not particularly interested in doing ANYTHING. I had barely statisticly significant correlations with musicians (although I have NO sense of rythm) and interestingly enough female (despite the fact that I am male) police.
TuesdayWeld

When I was in high school, the software didn’t exist, so we had to do the fill-in-the-bubbles, #2 pencil method. It told me I should be in a jazz combo. (I have never played an instrument.)
Moriarty

Wait just one second! These rankings are different than the Wall Street Journal rankings of a few weeks ago. Obviously, the situation has dramatically changed very recently. Yup, that’s the only explanation.
Blaine

So… in some sort of Freudian Mind Slip, I read the entire posting under the delusion the title was “Blow jobs in America”.

I was having trouble processing a few of the facts, but… it actually still made sense.
artboy

I have a better job than these, I’m an exhibit prototyper at a science museum. It doesn’t pay as well, but I don’t care.
george57l

I remember that software – it told me I should become a professional pedant with a sideline in parochial curmudgeonliness. There’s no resisting fate, so …

I always cringe when I hear ‘anesthesiologist’. But this graphic has both ‘anesthesiologist’ and ‘anesthetist’. Can anyone explain why the science of anesthetics when practiced in the US by a doctor is practiced by an anesthesiologist, but when supported by a nurse is practiced by an anesthetist? (As this graphic seems to be telling me.) I would genuinely like to know what the real or perceived differences between these two terms are – I haven’t heard a USian use the word anesthetist in donkey’s years.

After all, what they do is anesthetise you, they don’t anesthesiologise you.

(And it is, of course, anaesthetics not anesthetics, but I’ll pander on that point for now.)

Anaesthetist: Yet another perfectly cromulent word embiggened unnecessarily. This is my second worst “every time I hear it I cringe” word, after burglarize (= burgle). I’m waiting for the appearance of the burglarizologist, who will no doubt be a specialist in burglarizologistics. But I note that burglar does not appear in this graphic – I wonder where they would fit in?
- Robert
  
  Probably because “anaesthesiologist” means “one who studies anaesthesia” while “anaesthetist” means “one who practices anaesthesia”. Ologists are supposed to know more. In theory, ha ha.
  - george57l
    
    I’d rather have an anaesthetist who practiced than an anaesthesiologist who studied.
- Moriarty
  
  I’m just insulted that they don’t mention anesthesiographers. Or anesthesiometers.
Anonymous

My wife is an OT and she doesn’t make close to that money. That’d be nice though.
Lady Katey

The best job is the job you love.

Too much focus is put on paycheck numbers in this country.
Anonymous

In the San Francisco Bay Area, software engineers easily make $80-150K.

IT systems engineer is NOT a relaxing job.
Anonymous

I can’t believe systems engineer or network security came in as low stress!! As a sysadmin I had many MANY high stress days. It’s much more calm now that I am a software engineer. Although I too am not making the magic 79,000. I blame layoffs (so I have to restart at a new company) and living in the midwest.
Anonymous

Why isn’t artist on the list? Our median salary is whatever we can make working retail or factory work (or as college professors), and the top pay is truly astronomical if we get some wealthy patrons, add to that we help society as a whole, are our own bosses, and only have to work as much or as little as we’d like in a nice, low stress, usually solitary environment.