Career leaderboards are misleading, indulgent, and hopelessly alluring. But if the details of individual professions are normalized away, strong trends become clearer, as in CNN’s Money Magazine survey of the Best Jobs in America 2009 where Software Developer holds the #12 position and numerous related careers cluster nearby.

It’s not unexpected to see IT rank high, but it is noteworthy that it remains so dominant on the boards after the financial crisis, a decade of outsourcing, and considerable layoffs from industry leaders. Looking at just six of the top twenty jobs, it’s obvious where the value is coming from: problem solving.

• #1 Systems Engineer
• #5 IT Project Manager
• #8 Network Security Consultant
• #12 Software Developer
• #16 Software Project Manager
• #17 IT Business Analyst

The term “programmer” doesn’t appear in the list because the technologists and technicians that fill these roles bring talent to their job that is abstract, analytical, instructive, and oftentimes preeminently human. These are qualities that transcend things like frameworks and languages and demand a much more informed and opinionated view of one’s problem domain. It’s difficult to train for these roles because by their nature they demand a diversity of experience in workplace culture and technology that’s quite difficult to build expediently.

The collective “career” here is one of information engineering, which includes everything from specialty problem solving (deep technical knowledge), human concerns (user experience, productivity), and systems engineering (architecture, security). The importance of this knowledge to the success of a project cannot be understated, where the potential for savings and innovation on one hand or expensive mistakes on the other is usually disproportionate to the recognition actually given these engineers.

The appearance of so many analytical careers in the job rankings is a sign that this is changing, and despite the rise of the global marketplace and the offhand rounds of “unavoidable” corporate layoffs, the skills necessary to really drive technology are being better understood and proportionally valued than in years past.

As a developer, you want to be thinking along the same lines. A computer is no more necessary to “development” or even “programming” than a calculator to calculus. The place where thoughtful developers can really strike an advantage is in extending their problem solving skills to encompass other areas of related business. Moving from from programmer to developer. Then from developer to engineer. And then, ultimately, to a place of abstraction where you are most effective at conceiving, evaluating, and building solutions.

These aren’t new ideas about the IT field, and they have long been understood well by practitioners, but my sense is that this is the first time that the issues are being well understood by the business world at large. If the dotcom bubble is an example of the public embracing technology and casting it in a powerful role, then it was done without appreciation for the parts that were valuable and the parts that were vestigial. Having spent the better part of a decade trying to regain the respect that was lost by way of shallow, grasping hipster tech, I hope that as the recession eases the market emerges with an increasingly realistic view of complexities and value in technology and information systems.