More on the best jobs

Following up on my previous posting about Money magazine ranking software engineering as the best job in America is the Reuters article linked from the title above. They've got more information about the methodology used, which seems to suggest that they didn't introspect very much regarding what produced their numbers.

For example, they list college professors second, but they lump together university and community college, part time and full time, tenure track and non-tenure track. The result, is a statistic that the average work week is 30 hours and the average number of vacation days is 31. But, as anyone who works in academia will tell you, full-time faculty work many more than 30 (or 40, or 50...) hours per week, and generally faculty don't get any paid holidays (other than national or state holidays). The low work week is probably a result of including part-time faculty, who I strongly suspect would like to work more hour but who can't (perhaps because their employers would then have to pay them benefits). I don't know where the vacation day figure comes from. Faculty typically don't teach during the summer, but then again they don't get paid then either, unless they have research grants (in which case they're working many more than 30 hours/week doing research).

On the other hand, flexibility and creativity assessments seem more reasonable. So, perhaps the frenzy of the dot com bubble being over, workloads and stress have become less of a factor in the software industry?