I did this for a while. There are some good aspects to this job - you tend to get plenty of vacation, futher education and conferences are well supported. Sal

I did this for a while. There are some good aspects to this job - you tend to get plenty of vacation, futher education and conferences are well supported. Salaries are only the low side in my experience, definitely not great - but when adjusted for pensions and stability (very difficult to get fired), there isn't much to complain about. There are also some really horrible elements to this job. For starters, the stability - which sounds great - means that you will truly be surrounded by dead weight. Utterly unmotivated people work in some of these departments. It really got to me, to the point where I couldn't stand to be there anymore. A pension is great, but I'm not going to hover around for 30 years in a spiritually dead place (I'm not exaggerating here). I'll find another way to save for retirement. Another problem is that the jobs almost never lead to the top. There are a few CIO/style or "Chief Architect" style jobs at universities, and those are pretty sweet gigs for those who get them. But if you have a job in a non-academic department, you're definitely a cost center, the definitive in-house programmer. There are very interesting projects in academic departments, but expect what I'd call a "parchment ceiling" - ie., you can't progress without the right degree. In a software company, people seem to like grad degrees, but if you can bring it, they'll put you in a high impact position with a lot of creativity and automony. At a university, the Ph.D grant-holder is in charge. Period. The dev is more or less a (decently paid and well appreciated) paraprofessional. This was just my experience (I worked for a university as a dev for almost 3 years). Overall, I'd say that unless you really want the stability, don't do it.