Software engineers are very confident that their hacking skills will someday make them millions, according to a new study.

The survey, commissioned by Seattle-based code automation company Chef, specifically found that 56% of engineers believe they will become millionaires.

According to Glassdoor, the average software engineer makes $73,000 per year, whereas programmers working in New York City make $85,000. 

The company polled 1,000 developers across the U.S. to compile its findings, reports Re/code. The average software developer plans to stay at his or her job for nine years, and 25% of those polled said they plan to stay at their current job for more than 10 years. 

Software developers also say they're happier than their non-developer friends, according to Chef. More than 80% of those polled said they're more satisfied with their jobs than their peers who aren't engineers. The majority of developers (69%) also feel they're position is recession-proof, and 91% of them say they're the most valuable employees at their company.

Software engineers may say they're happier with their jobs than the friends working in different industries, but that doesn't mean they're completely stress-free. Several programmers have written blog posts or have sought advice through online forums concerning a condition known as the "imposter syndrome."

The imposter syndrome is a condition that makes it difficult to accept credit for your work. You often feel that your coworkers and the people around you are more talented than you are, and that any accomplishments you've made are the result of luck. The syndrome was first documented by Dr. Pauline Rose Clance and Dr. Suzanne Imes. 

An increasing number of those working in Silicon Valley also feel pressure to maintain a young appearance, as The New Republic detailed in a lengthy feature story last month. The New Republic reported that even people in their 20s had requested Botox treatment from Dr. Seth Matarasso, who works in San Francisco. Older programmers sometimes feel they have to prove that they're skills aren't outdated and that they can still compete with young, fresh-faced hackers, The New Republic reported. 

Despite the stresses that may come with the job, there's no denying that computer programming is one of the best industries to be a part of these days. U.S. News rated software developer as the best job in the country earlier this year. 

SEE ALSO: A 55-year-old developer tells us what it's like to face homelessness in youth-obsessed Silicon Valley

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ServiceNow is absolutely killing it in the cloud computing software world. And Fred Luddy, the company's founder and visionary, has a new plan to keep it that way.

ServiceNow had an awesome IPO in 2012, the first company to go public after Facebook's IPO disaster, and has been firing on all thrusters ever since.  It just reported a solid beat-the-street quarter, too, telling investors that it expects to grow 2014 revenues by about 55% to finish at $652 million to $657 million. Analysts had previously expected $644.24 million.

The company's flagship offering helps companies diagnose and manage tech problems when glitches occur, and automate routine technical tasks, so a human doesn't have to.

Next up, Luddy wants to turn you into a programmer, giving you the freedom to write the apps you need for work for your PC, smartphone and tablet, with no programming experience whatsoever, Luddy told Business Insider. You would just point, click, drag some stuff around and you have yourself a new app.

About a year ago, it introduced the basic service for this, called "ServiceNow App Creator" and on Tuesday it introduced an app store where those homegrown apps can be shared, called ServiceNow Share.

This is a concept called "citizen programmers." In 2009 Gartner predicted that by 2014, 25% of new business apps would be created by non-programmer business users.

That hasn't exactly happened. Most of us are still dependent on our IT department to give us a new app for our smartphones, tablets, SharePoint or the web app to do our work.

Or we go out and find a cloud app that works, and buy it ourselves. While that helps us, it has created an IT security horror called "shadow IT." That's when a company's sensitive data winds up stored in all kinds of places in the cloud, or on devices, that the IT department doesn't know about. Good for hackers. Bad for keeping the company's materials secure and compliant with laws that regulate how they protect information.

There's is a rising tide of companies trying to change this move to shadow IT by offering citizen developer tools. These include TrackVia, Interneer, Appery.io and ServiceNow.

So instead of using someone else's cloud service, you create the app you want yourself. For instance, business users have created apps that reports maintenance issues in office cubicles, handle requests for marketing materials, track equipment loans, and so on.

The downside is, your company would have to buy a subscription to ServiceNow App Creator. It's not something you can fire up on your own.

We recently spoke with Luddy about this concept of the developers and his ultimate vision for his company:

BUSINESS INSIDER: Why are so interested in turning business users into citizen developers?

FRED LUDDY: Ordinary people should be able to create meaningful applications for their organizations. I was deeply frustrated by, to create an application in an enterprise environment, you have to know a myriad of languages: SQL, Java, Javascript, CSS, HTML.

That's just not right. People used to create [business] forms on typewriters. Why should it be any more difficult than that?

I had an experience where I was in a ski shop called Dave's ski shop in Tahoe City. I rented skis and the whole thing was completely online. I asked the guy, 'Who did the programming?' He said, 'Nobody did any programming. We used this thing called Google Docs.'

That's the answer you want: How to get people to do things with technology where they don't even think is programming.

BI: What's been the impact of this on ServiceNow so far?

FL: My drive has never been about money. My drive has always been about putting a smile on someone's face because their lives got a little less painful.

The thing I'm most envious about Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook is that he has 1 billion+ happy users.

I want a billion+ happy users. It's that simple and it has nothing to do with money.

BI: So, once you get a billion people all writing their own apps, what happens to the professional developers? Do their jobs die?

FL: There's always going to be room for programmers. Do you know who the Luddites were? It's a question like the Luddites in the industrial revolution.

Right now you have a lot of programmers doing a lot of mundane things and we want to liberate those people from doing the mundane things.

There's so many opportunities now with new technologies, from big data analysis to building platforms like ours that enable real people.

The value of technology is equivalent to the number of people that can take advantage of it. The demand for the programmers of the world has risen by orders of magnitude.

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Spend more than a nano-second in the tech industry and you'll soon hear the complaints about the lack of women in the tech field.

You'll also hear how programming is one of the best jobs that offers great pay and perks.

Working mom Tina Lee put those two thoughts together and decided to learn to code to open up her career options. Lee lives in San Francisco, surrounded by these high-paying jobs. She had been working at the State Controller’s Office and with the non-profit ZeroDivide Foundation.

Lee quickly became frustrated by a lack of choices that suited her needs. First off, she needed childcare. But she also wanted the experience to be social, where she could meet other moms, and get actual hands-on help from instructors working in the tech industry.

Despite a growing number of coding bootcamps sprouting up, none are aimed at moms. On top of that, Lee wanted one that would teach her basic skills while and let her explore multiple coding options.

So she created her own combination boot-camp and moms group: MotherCoders. She recently completed the first pilot.

"MotherCoders lets you explore whether y0u want to be a web developer, user interface specialist, graphic developer, bundled into one program," Lee told Business Insider.

Six moms participated in a six-week pilot program, including a couple of scientists, a civil engineer, a graphic designer, Lee says.

Next up, Lee is trying to raise $150,000 to create a regular class schedule that can handle more moms. The money is needed to rent the facility which includes a full childcare site, she says. (We learned of her project through the Anita Borg Institute, which supports women in tech from grants and other resources.)

After that, she plans to roll out MotherCoders to cities nationwide, she tells us.

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The tech industry is a sleep-deprived bunch that seems to worship insomnia.

There's Marissa Mayer admitting to 130-hour workweeks at Google, pulling at least one all-nighter a week and sleeping under her desk when she had to.

There's Twitter and Square cofounder Jack Dorsey who worked 16-20-hour days in 2009, 8-10 hours a day at each company, shrugging it off with a "I don’t sleep much, but it’s enough."

The "nap room" and the "nap pod" have become normal features in a tech company's office space.

And it's not just tech executives. A 2013 Gallup poll found that Americans sleep on average about 6.8 hours a night, not eight. We're using those extra hours we spend awake to work from home on our smartphones and tablets.

But sleep deprivation has consequences. After reading our article on how stressed out computer programmers are, pressured to work 24/7, and how they suffer from "imposter syndrome," Dr. Bob Albers of the New Mexico Center for Sleep Medicine emailed us.

That's when you're  sure that all the other coders you work with are smarter and more skilled than you are and you fear being found out as a fake.

Albers suggested that a lack of sleep might actually cause "imposter syndrome."

He told us,"Inadequate sleep impairs positive emotional memories, yet retains most of the negative emotional memories (we may view ourselves as imposter)."

He also said people need more sleep than they think they do.

"Sleep is primary for the restoration of the brain, yet many promote myths of needing little sleep. Inadequate sleep is rarely mentioned, when writing about the stress of work. Articles may suggest adequate sleep (which young people think means 5-6 hours per day), but never discusses research supporting 7-8 hours. I would suggest that a programmer would be more productive and accurate with 8-9 hours of sleep, daily, not just the catch-up on off days."

So how can you tell if you are getting enough sleep?

These two viral videos posted by YouTube channel In59Seconds can help. 

This first one is a sleep deprivation test. It's a visual test of a scene. A sleep deprived mind sees it differently than a rested mind.

The second is a trick to help you wake up feeling refreshed called "the 90-minute rule." It helps you calculate when to go to bed in order to wake up at the right time, refreshed.

By the way, there is an app for that, the Sleep Cycle alarm clock. Put it on your bed while you sleep and it determines when you are in the light sleep cycle, the best time to wake you.

It has an 4.5-star rating out of 5, from 67,000+ reviewers.

That's the kind of happiness that only a good night's sleep can bring.

SEE ALSO: The Stress Of Being A Computer Programmer Is Literally Driving Many Of Them Crazy

SEE ALSO: Marc Andreessen Gets All The Credit For Inventing The Browser But This Is The Guy Who Did 'All The Hard Programming'

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When Theresa Preston-Werner, wife of GitHub co-founder Tom Preston-Werner, issued a public apology over the scandal that caused her husband to resign, she hinted that he was already working on something new.

This might be that something:  Code starter.org, a non-profit that wants to give free computers to kid programmers. For every $250 raised through donations, it will send a child an Acer Chromebook laptop, pre-loaded with a bunch of programming languages.

Codestarter.org is actually Theresa's existing non-profit startup, previously named Omakase. Omakase is a TechStars New York 2014 company that initially had a much bigger mission. It wanted to crowdsource charitable contributions by pooling donations and sending them to a different charity each month.

One of the charities it supported was CoderDojo NYC, an organization that teaches kids to code. Omakase raised enough to donate 20 Acer Chromebooks and decided that this was such a big hit, it would focus the entire company on that task, Theresa explained in the company's blog post.

Since the company shifted its focus, the startup has already raised enough cash to cover another 108 laptops, Theresa said.

According to the old Omakase website, Tom was always involved as a strategic advisor. But at Codestarter.org, he's listed as a co-founder, too. His wife is still the CEO.

Theresa and Omakase were embroiled in the controversy that ultimately led Tom to resign from his CEO role at GitHub.

A few months ago, GitHub employee Julie Ann Horvath publicly quit the company and accused the Preston-Werners of harassment. An internal GitHub investigation found no evidence that Tom Preston-Werner harassed anybody, but did find he'd made "mistakes and errors of judgment."

Last month, Theresa wrote a public apology indicating those mistakes had to do with making some GitHub employees feeling "pressured by Tom and me to work pro-bono for my nonprofit."

The controversy was shocking because Tom Preston-Werner and GitHub (with its super hip San Francisco offices) is a highly admired Valley company and a great success story. GitHub offers a service that helps open source developers manage their projects. It's used by everyone, from the hobby programmer to the White House.

In 2012, after years of being profitable without any VC cash, GitHub raised $100 million from Andreessen Horowitz — the largest investment from the legendary VC firm.

Tom Preston-Werner's involvement with Codestarter.org may or may not be his next full-time project, but it should certainly make a lot of kids very happy.

SEE ALSO: The 20 Most Valuable Enterprise Tech Companies In The World

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After all the news about rampant sexism in the tech industry and the lack of women entering the field, here's some good news: a record 40% of incoming students enrolling at Carnegie Mellon's Computer Science program are women.

Yes, that still means women are a minority in the program, but it is an all-time record for the school, the university said in a press release:

"The last time that a class of first-year computer science majors came close to including 40 percent women was in 2000 during the first dot com boom."

And a school record for CMU is fairly significant because it tends to have higher than average graduation rates for women with computer science degrees, it says. Women earned just 14 percent of bachelor's degrees in computer science in the 2012-13 school year nationwide, according to the most recent Taulbee Survey.

However, at CMU, 22% of its computer science grads were women that year. It's been averaging 21% women grads since 2008, it says. 

This record may be beat as soon as next year. Enrollment of women in the program has been steadily increasing: about 29 percent and 34 percent of the 2012 and 2013 freshman classes, respectively, the university said.

Plus, the university also received a record number of applicants for the computer science program overall — almost 6,200 — indicating that more young adults are looking for careers in the tech industry where the jobs are plentiful. It expects to accept 142 freshmen into the program in the fall.

Now, it's true that enrollment numbers are not the same as graduation numbers, but this is definitely a step in the right direction.

SEE ALSO: The 20 Most Valuable Enterprise Tech Companies In The World

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A high school in Florida has axed "Little Brother," a best-selling young adult novel that follows the story of a 17-year-old computer whiz, from its summer reading program for promoting "hacker culture."

The Booker T. Washington Public High School's librarian and English department had already approved the book, but the principal recently reversed this decision after reading reviews of the novel.

According to a blog post from the book's author and Boing Boing editor Cory Doctorow (via Ars Technica), the principal said the book painted a positive view of questioning authority and "hacker culture."

The principal also mentioned that one parent had complained about profanity as well, but Doctorow said there's no profanity in the novel.

"In short, he made it clear that the book was being challenged because of its politics and content," Doctorow wrote in reference to the school's principal.

The school proceeded to cancel the summer reading program and placed the book on its optional reading list for 11th-grade students taking AP English instead. 

Here's the official synopsis for "Little Brother:"

Marcus, a.k.a “w1n5t0n,” is only seventeen years old, but he figures he already knows how the system works–and how to work the system. Smart, fast, and wise to the ways of the networked world, he has no trouble outwitting his high school’s intrusive but clumsy surveillance systems.

But his whole world changes when he and his friends find themselves caught in the aftermath of a major terrorist attack on San Francisco. In the wrong place at the wrong time, Marcus and his crew are apprehended by the Department of Homeland Security and whisked away to a secret prison where they’re mercilessly interrogated for days.

The book debuted at No. 9 on the New York Times best-sellers list for children's books in the chapter books category in 2008. 

Doctorow's publisher Tor Books has agreed to send 200 copies of "Little Brother" to Booker T. Washington High School after the school's faculty asked for his help in fighting back against censorship. Lithograph posters displaying the novel's full text are also being sent to students for free.

SEE ALSO: Software developers are terrified of what happens when they hit age 30

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Google is offering vouchers to any women and minorities interested in learning how to code, CNET's Seth Rosenblatt reports.

In a blog post from Gregg Pollack, CEO of the Code School, Google is paying for three free months for any women and minorities interested in tech to expand their skills.

While Google is also offering the same vouchers to the women in attendance at its annual I/O developers conference this week, the search giant has released an online application that’s available to women everywhere. Google says its available vouchers for women number in the “thousands.”

This new initiative comes just days after Google published a diversity report that revealed only 30% of its employees are women, while African-Americans and Hispanics only comprised 1 and 2% of Google’s tech employees, respectively. Google said the current state of its company diversity is “miles from where we want to be.”

Google did say at its I/O keynote, however, that there were twice as many women in attendance compared to last year.

The search giant also recently launched its $50 million “Made With Code” initiative, which aims to help close the gender gap in tech. (That particular enterprise is unrelated to the Code School vouchers.)

Outside of Google, the Labor Department says only 20% of software developers in the U.S. are women, while only 12% of computer science degrees today go to women.

Megan Smith, vice president of Google’s X division, said the company’s initiative to encouraging women in tech is all about “debugging inclusion.”

“We shouldn’t feel guilty about our biases,” Smith said. “We should wake up and do something about them.”

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In honor of the 30th anniversary of Tetris, one fan decided to bring the popular game to a new platform: his t-shirt.

Luxembourg resident Marc Kerger uploaded a video of the unique t-shirt to YouTube, showing how you can actually play Tetris on the shirt. Adafruit originally discovered the video and posted it on its site.

"I always wanted a playable t-shirt, well now I made one myself," Kerger said on the video's page.

Kerger made the Tetris shirt by inserting an Arduino Uno, 4 AA batteries, and 128 LEDs into the garment.

This is how the shirt works:

First Kerger plugs the shirt into the Arduino unit.

Then the shirt lights up as the Tetris blocks fall down.

Kerger can press the buttons on the shirt to move the Tetris shapes.

And this is what happens when you lose.

Kerger suggests playing this in the background while watching the video: 

SEE ALSO: The 15 Highest-Grossing iPhone And iPad Games

SEE ALSO: Steve Wozniak Was A Total Boss At Tetris

SEE ALSO: Here's How To Play '100 Balls,' Which Is Quickly Becoming As Popular As 'Flappy Bird'

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Spark, which is building a software system for internet-connected devices, has raised new funding.

Today, it announced a $4.9 million Series A funding round on Tuesday led by Lion Wells Capital, O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures, SOSVentures, and Collaborative Fund. The company also accepted funds from a “consortium of strategic angel investors.” This is in addition to the $567,968 it raised in last year's highly successful Kickstarter campaign.

The company also announced a new cloud-based operating system for its connected products, called Spark OS.

CEO Zach Supalla said Spark OS is unique as a cloud platform because it’s open source. While Apple has HomeKit, its own platform for internet connected devices, and Android has its own home development tools, Spark wants to be a one stop shop for developers that want to be on both platforms.

“There’s technical and structural advantages [to using Spark] but the biggest and most important thing is that our system is open,” Supalla told Business Insider. “Everyone wants to build their products but everyone’s creating their own ecosystems — like Apple’s HomeKit and Wink, where everyone wants you to play in their world — but you also want to make your product self-sufficient.” 

“You don’t want to be an Apple accessory, you want your things to be able to play on their own too. With an open source system, we’re not tying you to our ecosystem, we’re giving you your own ecosystem and you can build your products using Spark to work with iOS and Android and Nest and Wink — all those things — and never be reliant on any of them. You control your own destiny.”

Last June, Spark introduced its Core development kit on Kickstarter to much fanfare, attracting more than 5,500 backers. The Spark Core is a tiny cloud-powered development platform built with a small ARM Cortex M3, a Wi-Fi nodule, and compatibility with the Arduino microcomputer so hackers and programmers can build cool wireless technologies like security cameras, motion detectors, and even remote-controlled cars that all run over Wi-Fi.

Now, a year later, Spark OS is poised to power a new wave of Wi-Fi-enabled products including its Core device, as well as other products currently in the works including Niwa and CleverPet. Spark is also working behind the scenes with a number of big enterprise companies, which could not be named as their products are still in development.

“Spark [Core] was all about development tools, helping people build connected products. But now we’re also figuring out how to deploy connected products,” Supalla told Business Insider. “When you’re shipping 100,000 connected light bulbs or security systems, how does the system work to connect these products to manage them and learn from the data they’re producing and get them to do smart and intelligent things?” 

Since last year’s big Kickstarter launch, Spark’s team has grown from four people to 12, and will grow to about 20-25 people within the next few months. Supalla had targeted makers and the growing hobbyist community centered on building things with technology, but said he was surprised to discover that customers wanted to use Spark to deploy across thousands of devices for work and enterprise purposes.

This is a big opportunity for a company like Spark. According to a report from cloud analytics and policy company Netskope, there’s an average of 397 cloud apps per enterprise, but more than 3/4ths of those apps are not “enterprise-ready.” So people are turning to the cloud to get stuff done, but the clouds aren’t quite there yet. Spark hopes to change that. 

“There’s a lot of excitement about the Internet of Things, but one of the challenges is that there were no tools upon which to build,” Supalla told us. “A lot of people that come into the space are coming from the web world, where you’re used to frameworks and programming languages so you’re never starting from zero, you’re building upon other layers. Whereas in the Internet of Things, everyone starts from zero, from the ground level, which makes these products really hard and risky. So basically, there’s been a lot of excitement, and we’re taking away a lot of that cost and risk. The time and energy it takes to build a product from scratch, we can potentially cut off 6-9 months off development time and millions of dollars from R&D so you’re not starting from zero.”

SEE ALSO: Here Are 10 Apple Patents We Want To See Become A Reality

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We're shattering stereotypes about developers and coders by finding the most attractive guys and gals in the business. 

We do this every year—here's our list from last year, from 2012, and from 2011.

We're accepting nominations for our 2014 round-up. If you know someone who belongs on our list of the hottest coders, programmers, engineers, and developers around, tell us! Send your suggestions (along with a link to the person's Twitter or LinkedIn profile) to mkosoff@businessinsider.com.

SEE ALSO: The Sexiest Developers Alive!

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A free iPad app called ScratchJr, which was created by the MIT Media Lab with help from Tufts University and the Playful Invention Company (PICO), says it can teach children between the ages of 5 and 8 how to code.

MIT and its “Lifelong Kindergarten Group” developed the Scratch programming language alongside to make it easy for kids to create “stories, games and animations,” but Forbes’ Jordan Shapiro said the Scratch team redesigned and simplified the interface to make it more accessible for younger kids.

“I downloaded ScratchJr and then handed the iPad to my six year old,” Shapiro writes. “He was instantly engaged.”

According to Mitchell Resnick, one of the creators of the Scratch language, “traditional programming languages were not designed with kids in mind,” but the original experience was really built for children 8 years and up. So the Scratch team tapped Marina Bers, a professor of child development at Tufts University, to create a programming language that was “appropriate for younger children, carefully designing features to match young children’s cognitive, personal, social, and emotional development.”

“As children code with Scratch and ScratchJr, they learn strategies for solving problems, designing projects, and communicating ideas,” Resnick said. “They learn how to divide complex problems into simpler parts, how to iteratively refine and improve their work, how to remix and build on the work of others, how to persevere in the face of challenges. These skills are important for everyone, not just people who will grow up to become scientists, engineers, or computer scientists.”

Check out Forbes’ full interview with Resnick here, and watch the video detailing the ScratchJr app below.

SEE ALSO: There's An Easy Fix If Your iPhone Is Charging Slowly

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This semester, a record-breaking 818 Harvard students — nearly 12% of the entire college — enrolled in one popular class, reports The Crimson. 

The course, Computer Science 50: "Introduction to Computer Science I" (CS50), pulled in 100 more students than the 700 that signed up last fall, making it the single largest class in the course's 30-year history, as well as the biggest class at Harvard College this semester. 

Economics 10a: "Principles of Economics," which attracted more students last year, now comes in second with only 711 currently enrolled.

CS50, taught by David J. Malan, PhD., provides an introduction to computer science and programming, covering topics such as algorithms, software engineering, and web development, according to Harvard's course catalog. Students also learn computer languages including PHP and JavaScript.

As STEM-based occupations — those in science, technology, engineering, and math — continue to be some of the highest-paying and in-demand, it's no wonder so many students are clamoring for a chance to learn these valuable skills. While computer science used to be a specialized skill set, it's now widely utilized across a number of industries.

"Harvard students are smart people," Harry R. Lewis, director of undergraduate studies for Computer Science, told The Crimson. "They have figured out that in pretty much every area of study, computational methods and computational thinking are going to be important to the future."

A recent study supports this, finding that students with strong math and social skills earn more money over the course of their careers.

SEE ALSO: 19 Incredibly Impressive Students At Harvard

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While there's debate over whether there's a shortage of qualified tech workers, there's one thing no one argues about: Tech companies pay their employees well.

We've heard of senior engineers getting a base salary of $160,000, with stock options and other benefits on top. Some interns are earning 7,000 a month, which amounts to $84,000 a year.

So we sifted through job-hunting site Glassdoor to find the best-paying jobs listed on that site, at the best tech companies, according to Glassdoor's ranking of the best places to work.

We listed the highest-paying job on Glassdoor, plus salaries for two common tech jobs: a senior technical role and a software engineer, at each company, to give you a sense of what those jobs pay as well.

No. 20: Salesforce.com, $319,000

Salesforce.com's top-paying job listed on Glassdoor is for an executive vice president at $319,347.

A senior technical staffer gets, on average, $130,233.

A staff software engineer gets, on average, $112,942.

Employee rating: 3.8 out of 5 (Rank 20)

Headquarters: San Francisco, California

What it does: Salesforce.com offers a cloud computing service that helps companies find and support customers. 

No. 19: eBay, $320,679

eBay's top-paying job listed on Glassdoor is for a vice president at $320,679.

A senior technical staffer gets paid, on average, $178,080.

A staff software engineer gets, on average, $120,424.

Employee rating: 3.8 out of 5  (Rank 19)

Headquarters: San Jose, California

What it does: eBay is an ecommerce site best known for letting consumers sell stuff through online auctions.

No. 18: Texas Instruments, $156,530

Texas Instruments' top-paying job listed on Glassdoor is for an applications engineering manager at $156,530.

A senior technical staff get, on average, $125,778.

A software engineers gets, on average, $91,633.

Employee rating: 3.8 out of 5  (Rank 18)

Headquarters: Dallas, Texas

What it does: Texas Instruments is a semiconductor manufacturer.

We're constantly writing about the over-the-top salaries some software engineers make in Silicon Valley, where the need is high and talent is scarce.

But the truth is, not every company pays its software engineers a huge salary.

We asked job-hunting site Glassdoor to sift through its massive database of salary information to come up with a list of the companies that pay the best, among the most biggest companies in the world based on market cap. (Note: Glassdoor only included companies in which at least 20 software engineers reported their salaries in the past two years.)

The results are interesting: Being a software engineer (also called "programmer" or "software developer") is a good paying job, no matter where you work. But even in the tech industry, software engineers are not, on average, getting outrageous paychecks. And one huge retailer, known for low wages, pays its developers surprisingly well.

GE, $80,235

Company: General Electric

Average salary for a software engineer: $80,235

Market cap: ~$257 billion

Employee satisfaction rating: 3.6 (out of 5 points)

% of employees who think the business is going on the right direction and will improve in the next 6 months: 26%

Employee comment:"GE will constantly provide you with great challenges which will push you to your limit every day. The management tends to be friendly, and most people there care about you as a person and employee.” – GE Software Engineer (Louisville, KY)

Verizon, $86,859

Company: Verizon

Average salary for a software engineer: $86,859

Market cap: ~$206 billion

Employee satisfactionrating: 3.2 (out of 5 points)

% of employees who think the business is going on the right direction and will improve in the next 6 months: 48%

Employee comment:“Good benefits, flexible work environment, use of latest technology, diverse set of people to work with, education benefits, nice recreational facility.” – Verizon Software Engineer IV (Irving, TX)

Comcast, $91,984

Company: Comcast

Average salary for a software engineer: $91,984

Market cap: ~$140 billion

Employee satisfactionrating: 3.1 (out of 5 points)

% of employees who think the business is going on the right direction and will improve in the next 6 months: 48%

Employee comment:

"Good salary, great benefits package, generally relaxed atmosphere. To its credit, Comcast is attempting to emulate other successful high-tech companies in order to attract more high-tech talent, but these efforts have been only marginally successful thus far."– Comcast Senior Software Engineer (Littleton, CO)

Chris Granger, a former Microsoft engineer and the founder of Light Table, a popular code editor that’s one of the top 10 technology projects on Kickstarter, announced his newest venture. It's called Eve.

Eve a powerful database “that allows you to build anything from a simple website to complex algorithms.” And users won't need any prior coding background: According to Granger, Eve is "our way of bringing the power of computation to everyone, not by making everyone a programmer but by finding a better way for us to interact with computers.”

In a blog post Monday, Granger announced $2.3 million in seed funding from Andreessen Horowitz’s Chris Dixon and Hunch engineer Tom Pinckney, among others. “Chris and Tom had plans to create a company like this and have been thinking about the problem ever since Microsoft killed [Visual Basic 6],” which was the company’s programming language that was intended to be easy to use.

Other investors, like Y-Combinator president Sam Altman, MIT Media Lab director Sep Kamvar, and web developer Zubair Quraishi, all previously tried to make programming more accessible, as well.

This is the company's goal:

Imagine a world where everyone has access to computation without having to become a professional programmer - where a scientist doesn’t have to rely on the one person in the lab who knows python, where a child could come up with an idea for a game and build it in a couple of weekends, where your computer can help you organize and plan your wedding/vacation/business. A world where programmers could focus on solving the hard problems without being weighed down by the plumbing. That is the world we want to live in. That is the world we want to help create with Eve.

Eve, according to Granger, will look similar to Microsoft Excel, in that it’s more about reorganizing column and rows in tables to “program” what you want. But by creating a simple tool, Granger hopes Eve can be close “to the ideal we’ve always had of just describing what we want and letting the machine do the rest.”

With the fresh seed round, Granger hopes to hire “a few new developers and a designer” to help answer one specific but difficult question: “how do you invite a billion people to program without them ever knowing about it?” The designer will be challenged to “own the personality and feel of Eve,” while the engineers will focus on databases, queries, and “crazy UIs.”

“We are stoked for the future that Eve and LT will create together and I hope you’ll join us for the ride.”

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Everyone is talking about CS50 — the Harvard introductory computer science course that saw more than 800 students enroll, making it the most popular course at Harvard this semester. Its rise has been dramatic: Just a few years ago the class attracted fewer than 100 students and in 2005 had only around 20 students attend a computer science lecture by Harvard drop-out Mark Zuckerbeg.

Currently, only about 10% of students enrolled in the course have any kind of background in computer science. The rest are taking it purely out of interest.

I wanted to see what the fuss was about so I sat down and watched Dave Malan, the course's lecturer, introduce students to the world of computer science. With no background in programming, I expected to get lost fairly quickly. But Malan is innovative and engaging, and I soon realized that his course was designed precisely with comp sci illiterates like me in mind. Malan is wildly popular because he has figured out how to make computer science fun. More importantly, he's figured out how to make it easy. 

Here are some of the highlights and takeaways from Malan's introductory lecture: 

You can use algorithms to make huge problems really small. 

Malan introduced students to the concept of algorithms by introducing a problem: How do we figure out how many people are in the lecture hall? While counting people individually or by 2's would eventually lead us to a final number, it would take a very long time — much longer than it would take for an algorithm to do the work for us. Taking steps 1-5 as one complete step, Malan shows how using an algorithm it only takes 8-9 "steps" to count 400 people. 

There's more than one solution for most problems.

Malan describes algorithms as a kind of divide-and-conquer approach that gains speed the larger a problem becomes. He illustrated this by tearing up phone books. To find a particular name, Malan explained, most people would flip to the middle of the phone book, see what letter they land on, and go either backwards or forwards alphabetically from there. Landing in the 'M's but looking for the 'F's, Malan tore out the half of the phone book from 'M' onwards. "There!" he proclaims. "In one step you've halved the problem." 

You can use an RSS Feed to create a Lolcat of the day.

Malan then moved on to explain what an RSS Feed is, using the wildly popular meme Lolcats. "An RSS feed is basically just a big text file that has a lot of links," Malan said. He demonstrated how he went about making a "Lolcat of the Day" feature on CS50's website by downloading http://icanhas.cheezburger.com's Lolcat RSS feed and embedding it into the course's page. Easy as that. 

You know more about computers than you think.

This was my favorite part of the whole lecture. According to a survey taken of students enrolled in CS50, only about 10% felt "more than comfortable" taking an introductory computer science class. The rest felt either "less than comfortable" or fell somewhere in the middle. Wanting to calm students' frazzled nerves, Malan showed a clip of Alaska senator Ted Stevens talking about the internet to show students that there was always someone who knew less than them about computers.  

Malan reassured students that as long as they know more than this guy, even those with the most limited computer knowledge can learn how to program. 

All programming comes down to some very basic math involving two numbers: 0 and 1. 

Using the number '123' as an example, Malan demonstrates how traditionally, numbers get their significance depending on the column they are in. Binary, or the system of 0's and 1's that we use to program computers to do virtually everything, works in much the same way. Each digit in binary takes on a different significance based on the column it is in.

You can translate Cambridge's zip code, and virtually anything else, into binary.

Apparently, the above translates to '02138,' though figuring out how to code something in binary was already a bit above my head.

Still, this was only day one of the course, so I'm willing to be patient. I already feel like I have a better grasp of the technology at the heart of modern society. I'll take the second course soon and post the highlights here.

SEE ALSO: The college majors with the highest lifetime earnigns

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As a tech lifestyle reporter at Business Insider, I often write about programmer culture, telling stories of awesomeoffice perks, parties, and late-night hackathons. 

But when it comes down to it, my liberal arts degree gives me little ability to understand the difficult work programmers spend all their time doing. 

I had heard about Khan Academy, the nonprofit online learning platform backed by big-name investors like the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and Google, and how effective and fun its programs are.

When Salman Khan, the founder of Khan Academy, started the site in 2006, it was just a series of YouTube videos he had made during his time away from work as a hedge fund analyst.

Eight years later, Khan Academy largely follows the same video format, though on a much greater scale. As of February 2014, the site had 10 million monthly visitors, a huge leap from 144,000 at the beginning of 2010.

Even Bill Gates himself has endorsed the platform, telling TIME, "I've used Khan Academy with my kids, and I'm amazed at the breadth of Sal's subject expertise and his ability to make complicated topics understandable ... He started by posting a math lesson, but his impact on education might truly be incalculable."

I decided to give it a try. 

How It Works

Khan Academy has a huge selection of classes in subjects ranging from biology and organic chemistry to world history and macroeconomics. In the computer programming section, they offer courses in introductory JavaScript, games and visualizations, and natural simulations. 

Since I'd never taken a computer science class before, I chose the easiest class, "Intro to JS: Drawing & Animation." A menu showed all of the tasks I would complete in the course — 101 in total. 

Like other Khan Academy classes, the JavaScript course is structured around a series of video walk-throughs. The student is then given challenges and projects to try out each skill. 

First, I learned how to code some basic shapes. During a five-minute video, Sophia, one of the Khan Academy instructors, drew some rectangles at various points on the screen. 

It seemed simple enough. In my first challenge, I used the commands I had just learned to make an "H" out of rectangles. It took just three lines of code. 

After a bit of tweaking of the numbers, the computer determined that I got it right — and gave me some points as a bonus. Those points would later go towards earning badges and upgrading my profile. 

To the left, you can see the code I wrote, with the results on the right. A fun character congratulated me.

Things Get Tougher

The course quickly became more challenging, and in the second section, I learned how to color in shapes. That wasn't too tough in itself, but the end of the section brought on the first of the projects, which I would later come to dread. 

Projects are when the program gives the student a set of objectives to achieve in his or her code. Since each one involves a good deal of creativity, other Khan Academy students or coaches are asked to evaluate projects to make sure they met each objective. 

In the first project, I was asked to use the shape commands I had learned to make something that looked like dinner. I decided to use my drawing and coloring skills to make a pizza.

It took me a bit of time to figure it out — I'm new to programming after all — and I was happy with it for the most part. Another user gave me a passing grade on my pizza.

One cool aspect of Khan Academy's projects is that once you finish a creation, you can save it to the system as a "spin-off," and anyone else in the programming course can build on it. 

When I finished my pizza drawing, I scrolled down to see what the other Khan Academy coders had come up with for this particular project. The system displayed the drawings that had received the most votes from other users. Those were much more impressive than mine. 

I tried not to be too disheartened by the comparison, though some of my drawings took me quite a bit of time.

As you can see in the evaluation criteria for my next project, the program asked me to draw an animal with at least five shape commands and variables for width and height. 

He was pretty cute, though I probably made the coloring too light. 

Again, some people were able to make some amazing things from what was a relatively simple assignment. Here were some of the most impressive spin-offs from the "Draw an Animal" project that I drew the penguin for. 

It got even more fun — and complicated — when I learned how to animate my drawings. I could do things like make a train drive across the screen, or make a sun increase in size until it exploded.

Of course, that was child's play compared to what experienced programmers could do, but I was excited about how much I was learning in such a short amount of time.

And as I learned more and more skills — text, strings, functions, loops, arrays, and object-oriented design — I was able to incorporate them into more and more complicated code. 

It was difficult, but I started to really enjoy the results. 

What I Thought

As I worked my way through the course, it seemed to become more difficult to get evaluated. I'm not sure if it was because not enough people had progressed through the course to have the skills necessary to evaluate my work, but sometimes I would have to wait a few days before someone would give me a passing grade that would allow me to move on.

I found that a little annoying since I was trying to complete the class after work hours, but someone with more spare time might not.

Overall, realizing how difficult coding is gave me an entirely new appreciation for the apps and programs I use every day. Small things like an extra semicolon or improper placement of a line of code could set off an entire program.

The skills I learned were elementary in comparison to the work that professional programmers do regularly. That was pretty eye-opening.

Though I found programming difficult, I thought Khan Academy was a fun and accessible platform on which to learn it. I could tell that the course was geared towards younger people, with lots of cute characters with their own names and personalities. When I made a mistake, I didn't get a glaring "ERROR" message but an adorable little creature that said "Oh noes!" Things like that helped when the going got tough. 

I don't think I have a future in programming, but I'm glad to have gotten a new perspective on the industry I cover. Plus, knowing that I was using a nonprofit organization that seeks to help anyone get access to a free education was an added bonus. 

Bill Gates would definitely approve.  

SEE ALSO: A Former Googler Explains Why It's Critical For People To Learn To Code

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Khan Academy is an online learning nonprofit company that aims to make high-quality education free for anyone with an internet connection. 

What was originally a one-man operation — former hedge fund analyst Sal Khan would make educational videos after work — is now a global initiative with funding from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and Google. 

Bill Gates himself even uses the platform. 

As of February 2014, the site had 10 million monthly users, a huge increase from the 144,000 who were on the site in early 2010. 

I recently used Khan Academy to take a coding class that taught me JavaScript through a series of videos and challenges.

One of my instructors was Pamela Fox, an engineer who previously spent four years working in the Developer Relations department at Google. She also teaches coding classes for GirlDevelopIt's San Francisco chapter, and previously worked as a front-end engineer at Coursera.

We caught up with Fox to get her thoughts on why coding and online education are so important.  

Business Insider: What made you decide to join Khan Academy?

Pamela Fox: I was spending an increasing amount of my free time on teaching people to program, and I realized that I wanted to do that full-time. I explored various ways I could do that, like in classrooms or coding academies, and decided that I was most interested in doing it at Khan Academy, where I could also use everything I've learned about online education and community building. At Khan Academy, I'm both an engineer, coding up the pieces to make it a great learning platform, and a content creator, putting together tutorials and exercises.

BI: How has it differed from other places you've worked, including Google?

PF: The biggest difference with Khan Academy is its business model: it has none. Companies I've worked for in the past have been for-profit, and they have had to find a business model that works for the products they offer, and that drives many of their decisions. Khan Academy is a non-profit that receives donations based on the worthiness of our product, a free world-class education, and that changes how we make decisions. Instead of having to ask ourselves whether a particular feature or content might drive profits, we have to ask ourselves if it will significantly increase the quality of the education and the quantity of students it can reach. If we keep driving those numbers up, then we will hopefully keep receiving donations.

We still have to make many similar decisions — we still want to grow our user base, we want to keep them active, we want to cut costs where possible — but there's a different fundamental drive under those decisions. I personally thrive better in the education-driven company than profit-driven company, because I'm much more passionate about the former than the latter, and I'd rather stay up all night contemplating "how can we teach better?" than "how can we make more money?"

BI: What was it like to develop your course for their platform? Any challenges unique to online courses?

PF: This was my first real foray into online video lessons. Before Khan Academy, I was familiar with teaching in classroom settings, talking at conferences, and writing articles, but I did very little with online video.

It is a very different thing to deliver a lesson to a virtual audience than an in-the-flesh audience. I can't interact directly with my virtual audience, I can't cater my humor to their particular senses, I can't use body language to express excitement. Instead, I have to come up with five minutes that will work for pretty much everybody, and educate them in an engaging way. I've struggled the most with reducing verbal tics (which become more obvious in recorded form), injecting humor that doesn't feel too scripted (though it definitely is), and trying to have a radio voice as smooth as Sal Khan's (impossible!). I've learned a lot and would redo many of my lessons now, but even five minute lessons take a while to record, and it's often not worth it to lose their subtitles and translations.

Besides the recorded lessons, there are many other aspects of the curriculum, like the coding challenges and the freeform projects. Generally, it is hard to develop curriculum that will work for such a wide range of learners, but it's also really fantastic to be able to give the same curriculum to such a huge number of learners, because I get so many data points about what works, what doesn't work, and what is just too dang confusing.

I love learning about learning, and now I get to do that at scale.

BI: Teaching girls how to code is a hot topic right now. Why do you think it's important to learn how to code?

PF: There's a huge effort around teaching kids to code, and much of that comes from software companies that realize there won't be enough CS graduates to fill their engineering jobs in the future.

That's a great reason, of course, but it's the belief of many and myself that computing needs to be a part of general literacy, even for those that don't go on to have "software engineer" as their job title.

It's the kind of skill that people across many industries can benefit from, because programming helps us automate and speed up tasks. I know of a firefighter who programmed an Android app to help his team fight fires faster, and of a psychologist that's using programming to study how little kids learn about the world. As a kid, I used programming to assign chores to my siblings!

Even if they don't program in their job at all, many people now work with programmers, and it's helpful for everyone to speak the tech lingo.

So, whether or not you grow up to be a full-time programmer, you will be a better equipped human being if you understand the power and potential of programming.

As for girls in coding in particular: there are specific efforts around girls and minorities, because they are significantly underrepresented in CS. There are myriad reasons for those differences, much of them boiling down to false assumptions in our culture and socioeconomic privilege. Thankfully, multiple organizations are dedicated to improving those numbers.

At Khan Academy in particular, we also saw a difference in our male/female numbers with our programming curriculum, so we partnered with DonorsChoose.org and Google's Made With Code initiative to encourage more female students to code. I'm happy to report that we're now much closer to gender parity, though we likely have more work to do on the socioeconomic front.

BI: What kind of advice do you give students who might be intimidated by coding?

PF: First, let me make this very clear: They're not alone.

I've seen a few campaigns tout how "easy" coding is, and that worries me. That implies that if a new coder doesn't immediately get it, then they're dumb. That's not the case at all.

Coding isn't easy — it's complex. It involves learning new syntax, learning logic and control flow constructs, understanding how a computer works, coming up with problem-solving strategies, visualizing a program's state in your head. It's a lot to take in, and it can take time to wrap your head around all of that, and everyone will move at different paces.

However, coding is increasingly more approachable for new learners, thanks to the huge number of online and offline resources, and it's a skill that once learned, can empower you with the ability to create and solve problems to an extend that few other skills can. That's why we're all so excited about teaching people to code now.

It's okay to be intimidated by learning something new — I still get plenty intimidated by new technology that I have to learn -- as long as it doesn't prevent you from starting. You can:

• Start small (our first coding challenge is only 3 lines of code, as we know there's so much already just to write those 3 lines).

• Try different approaches (a friend of mine tried 5 different online courses before he found the one that worked for him, learning styles differ!).

• Find a community to support you - friends, family, online mentor, local meetup group. If a community doesn't exist, start one- you'll likely find a few people near you that are also interested.

You'll hit walls sometimes, and you'll want to give up, just like with everything you learn, and that's a good time to take a break, rant with a peer, try something new, sleep and try again tomorrow. Just don't give up entirely!

BI: Are there any other Khan Academy classes you'd like to take?

PF: So many! I want to re-learn all the math I once knew, of course, but I'm particularly interested in learning a few new topics: Probability & Statistics (to help me do better data analytics), and our NASA partner content (because, you know, space is cool, and maybe our future home?).

SEE ALSO: I Took An Online Coding Class, And Now I Have A Huge Appreciation For What Programmers Do All Day

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As we've previously reported, many tech workers, particularly software developers, are under intense pressure to work insane hours.

The myth is, they should be so passionate about their jobs that working is the only thing they want to do.

This myth doesn't happen to be true. People that work all the time aren't better, more productive or even more passionate workers.

Research shows that productivity typically declines after 40 hours a week. A Stanford student research project specifically found that overworked coders working 60-hour weeks produced less high-quality code than refreshed people working 40-hour weeks.

Nevertheless, the pressure exists, particularly in the startup world where money is tight, deadlines loom and the all-nighter culture rules.

But there may be a glimmer that a backlash against this myth is starting to happen.

A startup CEO got slammed on Quora when he posted a question complaining that his employee, a new dad, insisted on leaving the office between 6 p.m. and 7 p.m.

He wrote:

I manage a young startup company in the valley. My only employee is great but he is also a new father. Which means leaving work between 6 and 7 pm. I understand him but it's hard for a startup that the commitment lasts for work hours only. What would you do as a CEO?

By today, there were 65 answers or so essentially telling the guy something like this, "Ok, so you are upset that he is not working at the stereotypical, and completely inaccurate, 80-100 hours per week. Are you only getting 50-60? Seriously? I find that I get the maximum amount of work done at around 50 hours per week. It falls off sharply after that point."

Or this, "Too many companies think it is natural for developers to work late hours."

Or this:"The new father neglects his kid(s) to work until midnight? Are you going to post a question about your employee not staying around until 1 am or 2 am next?"

The CEO was so universally trounced by his attitude, that he eventually updated the question to clarify: "The problem is not that the guy is leaving early per se ... the question I have is more with the rigidity of the time even when something more urgent is needed."

In other words, the new dad was absolutely insisting that his evenings would be spent with his baby, and not doing "urgent" work when the boss called. The boss was looking for ideas on how to cope.

To that, the people had this simple advice: "If you want a night shift hire somebody else to cover that."

The responses are a good sign that work life balance may soon arrive more broadly in in the tech industry, maybe even at startups. But, sadly, the question also means it hasn't really arrived for everyone.

SEE ALSO: The Stress Of Being A Computer Programmer Is Literally Driving Many Of Them Crazy

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