AS a programmer, you just need to excecute orders from your boss and statisticians. You do what you are asked to do, mostly programming. Those orders are usually direct and not much of intelectual level. Although programming may be time consuming, it's not difficult from my point of view.

On the other hand, statistician requires more responsibilities, including the design of the study, reviewing/writing protocol and grant proposal, meeting PI, and most importantly, laying out the whole analysis and monitoring plan for the whole study. As a statistician, you not only need good knowledge in statistics, but also good communication and writing skills cuz you need to explain things well to nonstatisticians.

As to future career prospective, statistician is more promising than programmmer(of cuz if you are a senior programmer after many many years, your pay may reach 100 K/year,but that's pretty much the top ceiling for a programmer.)

For me, being statistician is more fun. You get to know different projects and you have the chance to build up the whole thing. It's a kind of accomplishment for your career. For programmer, even though successfully writing out a big complicated program is an achievement too, you are just carrying out orders from others and not being innovative.

HOWEVER, strangely enough, entry level programmer is paid MUCH HIGHER than entry level statistician, given you have the same degree........Don't know why.

thanks! I just started learning SAS and find it fun. The instructor is a statistician....she is very good at programming, too.

谢谢大家啦，回答得好详细。我没什么远大志向，看来以后就找个做市场统计的公司干干活了。SAS!记住了，一定会用心读。

不好意思，SAS是什么东东呀？
。。。我太土了。。。

tutututututututu

How about STATA?
Do you use STATA when you run regression?
I'm using STATA. I learned SAS a little bit, but has forgotten it.

STATA is more helpful for Economics, somewhat popular in academics, but not very popular in the industry, and it's not as powerful as SAS -- imagine running 10 Million record in STATA.