The company crunched a lot of factors in coming up with its 0-100 scoring system, with the major ones being salary, something called "growth outlook" (defined by CareerCast as "expected employment growth through the year 2022, as forecast by the Department of Labor"), environment, and stress. Let's look first at the top 10 best jobs, as brought to you by the mathematicians at CareerCast. The accompanying numbers represent median salary and growth outlook:

1. Data Scientist: $128,240, 16 percent

2. Statistician: $79,990, 34 percent

3. Information Security Analyst: $88,890, 18 percent

4. Audiologist: $73,060, 29 percent

5. Medical sonographer: $62,540, 24 percent

6. Mathematician: $103,720, 21 percent

7. Software engineer: $97,990, 17 percent

8. Computer systems analyst: $82,710, 21 percent

9. Speech pathologist: $71,550, 21 percent

10. Actuary: $96,700, 18 percent                                 

Now for the top 10 worst professions, the bottom feeders on the CareerCast list, with newspaper reporter emerging as the worst of the worst for 2016:

1. Newspaper reporter: $37,200, -9 percent

2. Logger: $35,160, -4 percent

3. News broadcaster: $37,200, -9 percent

4. Disc jockey: $29,010, -11 percent

5. Enlisted military personnel: $27,936, N/A

6. Pest control worker: $30,660, -1 percent

7. Retail sales person:  $21,670, 7 percent

8. Ad sales person: $47,890, -3 percent

9. Taxi driver: $23,210, 13 percent

10. Firefighter: $45,970, 5 percent

One can argue that six of those jobs — newspaper reporter, logger, news broadcaster, disc jockey, military personnel and firefighter — draw individuals that like a bit of adventure, uncertainty, excitement and even danger in their professional lives. For them, nothing could be worse than staring at a computer screen, crunching numbers all day long.