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:

Data Scientist: $128,240, 16 percent
Statistician: $79,990, 34 percent
Information Security Analyst: $88,890, 18 percent
Audiologist: $73,060, 29 percent
Medical sonographer: $62,540, 24 percent
Mathematician: $103,720, 21 percent
Software engineer: $97,990, 17 percent
Computer systems analyst: $82,710, 21 percent
Speech pathologist: $71,550, 21 percent
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:

Newspaper reporter: $37,200, -9 percent
Logger: $35,160, -4 percent
News broadcaster: $37,200, -9 percent
Disc jockey: $29,010, -11 percent
Enlisted military personnel: $27,936, N/A
Pest control worker: $30,660, -1 percent
Retail sales person: $21,670, 7 percent
Ad sales person: $47,890, -3 percent
Taxi driver: $23,210, 13 percent
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.

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Be happy, crunch numbers

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