You write the thing, then spend most of your time working out why it does not do what you meant.
Click through it
Pay, the path, pros and cons and the facts on one printable page. Good for a wall or a guidance counsellor.
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What you earn and what it costs to get there.
Median
$135,980
Junior
$82,460
Senior or staff
$214,670
The national median is $135,980 a year, and the bottom tenth start near $82,460. This is the highest median of any career on this site that you can reach in four years. The catch is that the range hides enormous variation: the same title pays very differently at a large technology company and at a small regional employer.
$82,000 to $110,000
Junior developer, most of the country
Large technology companies pay far above that for new graduates, often with stock on top, but those jobs go to a small number of people and the interview process is brutal. Most developers start somewhere less famous.
$214,670 or more
Senior and staff engineers, mostly in big technology firms
Above a certain level the pay comes as stock as well as salary, which is why totals at big firms can exceed the survey's cash figures. It also means a chunk of your income depends on a share price you do not control.
Tuition, fees, exams and kit. Not rent, food or travel
No licence is required, so the low end is a self-taught route: a few paid online courses and months of building things you can show. That door is much harder to walk through than it was, because employers now get hundreds of applicants for junior roles and a degree is the usual filter. The high end is four years of a computer science degree at a public university at your own state's rate, around $11,000 a year in tuition and fees. Two years at a community college first, at about $4,000 a year, then transferring to finish, cuts that to roughly $30,000. Bootcamps sit in between at $10,000 to $20,000 and their hiring results have fallen sharply.
File the FAFSA (Free Application for Federal Student Aid) first. Given the salaries in this field, an in-state public degree pays itself back faster here than almost anywhere else, so borrowing heavily for a private school is rarely worth it.
Stock grants
Common at public technology companies. They vest over several years, which is deliberate: leaving early forfeits the rest.
Remote and hybrid work
Still widespread in this field, though large employers have pulled some of it back.
Good health coverage
Technology employers compete on benefits because they compete for the same people.
No licensing costs, ever
Nothing to renew, no board, no exam fees. Your skills are the credential.
The exact path from high school to qualified.
A degree is the normal route and the safest one. It is not the only one, but the alternatives got harder.
High school
Grades 9 to 12
Math as far as you can take it, plus any computing class. Then build something small on your own and finish it. Finishing is the skill.
Computer science degree
2 to 4 years
Four years at a public university, or two years at community college then transfer. The University of Washington's Allen School, for example, offers both a computer science and a computer engineering bachelor's degree.
Internships
Summers
Two summers of real work before you graduate is the single biggest factor in landing a first job, and internships at large firms pay well.
The interview gauntlet
1 to 6 months
Technical interviews in this field test problem solving under pressure. People prepare for months, and that preparation is separate from your degree.
Junior to senior
5 years in
The first two years are about learning a real codebase and a real team. Senior titles usually arrive around year five.
Math, especially discrete math and calculus
Degree programs are math heavy, and it is the most common reason people drop out of them.
Computer science or programming
Any language. What you are learning is how to break a problem down, not the syntax.
English
Developers write constantly: documents, explanations, arguments for why to build something one way.
Physics
Good training in modeling a messy real thing as something you can calculate.
There is no board, no license and no protected title. Anyone can call themselves a software developer, and employers screen on interviews and on work you can show instead. The exception is a narrow one: a few states license software engineering under professional engineer rules for safety-critical systems, and defense, medical device and aviation employers apply their own certification requirements to the software itself rather than to the person. For almost every job, what matters is whether your code works.
Community college transfer
Two years at in-district rates, then finish at a state university. The cheapest version of the standard path.
Registered apprenticeships
Technology apprenticeships are registered with the federal apprenticeship office and pay while you train. Still uncommon, but they exist and they are real jobs.
Military and government
Federal technology roles are posted on USAJOBS (the official federal hiring site) and some do not require a degree if you can demonstrate the skills.
Bootcamps, with caution
They worked well when employers were desperate. Junior hiring tightened, so check a school's published outcomes before paying anything.
Things you don't need, but that help.
Backend and distributed systems
The machinery behind the screen. Harder to learn, harder to replace, better paid.
Machine learning
The best-paid branch right now, and usually the one that expects a master's degree.
Security
Developers who genuinely understand attacks are rare and in permanent demand.
Boring industries
Insurance, logistics, healthcare and utilities pay less than famous technology firms but hire steadily and lay off less.
Finished projects, public
Two or three things you built and shipped beat a long list of tutorials you followed.
Reading other people's code
Most of the job is changing something somebody else wrote years ago. Practice that deliberately.
Explaining things clearly
The developers who get promoted are usually the ones who can make a non-technical person understand the trade-off.
Patience for debugging
Long stretches of being stuck are normal, not a sign you picked wrong.
Assistants that generate code are now part of the job, and they have changed what a junior developer does. They are fast at the routine parts and confidently wrong on the rest, so the valuable skill has shifted toward knowing what to ask for, spotting what is wrong, and understanding the system well enough to be sure. Junior hiring did get harder after 2023. The work has not disappeared, but the bar for the first job went up, which makes internships and finished projects matter more than they used to.
Day to day, pros and cons, where you'd work.
A short team meeting in the morning to say what you are working on. Then long blocks of writing and reading code, most of it inside a system that already exists. Reviewing someone else's changes and having your own reviewed. Something breaks and you go looking for why, which can take ten minutes or the rest of the week. Meetings about what to build. Most of the day is thinking and typing, sitting down, on a screen.
The good
The hard parts
Things people don't tell you.
Working developers spend far more time reading existing code than producing new code. Almost every task starts by understanding something somebody else built, often years ago and often without notes.
Banks, insurers, hospital systems, retailers and government agencies employ enormous numbers of developers. The famous technology firms get the attention, but most of this workforce writes software for industries that do something else.
Unlike nursing, law or electrical work, there is no register and no protected title. That is why interviews in this field are unusually long and technical: the interview is the licensing exam.
In 1999 the Mars Climate Orbiter was lost because one piece of software worked in pound-force seconds and another expected newton seconds. Nobody had checked that the two systems agreed on units.
Last checked September 2026. Pay figures are typical full-time annual amounts in United States dollars, based on Bureau of Labor Statistics wage data and published pay scales. They vary by state, employer and experience. Tuition is for in-state students at public schools unless the card says otherwise.