What's your goal? Do you want to be an "on call" lackey that gets yelled at whenever some rogue user futtbucks the network and have to interrupt your LAN party to come in on a Sunday afternoon so the marketing tool can get his report ready for the sales meeting Monday morning all while making $60k a year or...

Do you want to be an on call lackey that gets yelled at whenever some user can't operate the software you wrote for them because they're trying to make it do something for which they never ever specified a requirement to you while making $160k a year?

 

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$60,000/year? LoL


Boy, are you out of touch.

 

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To give this guy some accurate information, I thought I'd look on a single company's jobs site to get a baseline of salaries:

This is all from the same area, so you're not comparing San Francisco wages to Wyoming wages, etc.


All these positions are the same level:

Application Engineers: $95,000 / year

Network Engineers: $95,000 / Year

Web Developer: $98,600 / Year

Operations Engineer: $99,300 / Year

Java Developer: $95,000 / Year

SQL/Database Engineer: $117,000 / Year


Now, these are not entry positions, nor are they long time employee positions.

If you're newer, expect 10-20% less salary, if you're a longtime employee, expect 20-30% more salary.


I just picked this range, because there were job listings for all these positions at the same "level".


So, if you want to make great money...learn SQL. However, if there is anything worse than staring at code all day, it's staring at SQL database code all day.

 

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They are good for people that wish to stay consultant programmers. It will give you an edge over others (at least in SE WI)