In 2014, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported an annual median salary of $38,370 for medical and clinical laboratory technicians. The BLS also predicted 30% employment growth for these technicians from 2012-2022, which is much faster than average.
Software engineers design and guide the development of programs that computers use to make life a little easier for the rest of us. Although self-taught programming skills can land you a job, formal education is the best way to achieve a job with more design responsibilities and higher pay.
Number one is hiring. We hire engineers with software development ability and proclivity. To SRE, software engineers are people who know enough about programming languages, data structures and algorithms, and performance to be able to write software that is effective. Crucially, while the software may accomplish a task at launch, it also has to be efficient at accomplishing that task even as the task grows.