235,000 Fewer Programmers by 2015

RonMcMahon writes "According to a CNN Money article, Forrester Research is predicting that there will be 235,396 fewer Computer Programmers and Software Engineers employed in 2015 than there are today in America. This is a 25% reduction in the number of positions from today's depressed numbers. This sucks. I know that many companies are moving work off-shore, but wow, that's half the population of Wyoming!"

Time for a career switch...

[Anonymous Coward]

I think I will start looking now or perhaps move to India.

I knew I should have gone for an EE degree

[Knetzar]

Or maybe I should go and get my MBA in the next few years

wow i was going to guess...

[stinkfish]

...235,395 fewer!

So what will all these people do?

[danormsby]

This is a lot of people changing career. What will they all be doing though?

Will they be:

Professional hover-board racers?

Anti-gravity technicians?

Time-travel holiday sales people?

Re:Whatever happened to...

[Frequanaut]

It's too expensive

So what the hell are DeVry / ITT gonna do?

[Anonymous Coward]

I thought there were "hundreds of thousands of unfilled jobs in IT"? I'm gonna sue these bastards and get my money back!

Re:Big Deal

[Amiga Lover]

(damned mozilla)

> you better start looking elseware

What a neat term for software made by overseas contract programmers

"Elseware"

Is nothing sacred?

[CompWerks]

I just want to sit in my cube, program and interact with as little of management as possible.

I should of known it would never last...

Job Security

[Anonymous Coward]

Computer programmers just need to start using the goto keyword and global variables more and do less code documentation and object-oriented programming.

My prediction

[presearch]

I predict that by 2015, we'll have 235,00 more error dialogs that say "Some program fail, please you now restart".

Yay!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

This could mean less buzzy-buzz-talk from incompetent people and more REAL programming for competent freaks.

Finally, IT will by sane again.

Re:Computer Science is not everything anymore!

[Directrix1]

Yeah, I see positions for lead mathematician all the time. Good choice.

Re: So what will all these people do?

[Black Parrot]

> This is a lot of people changing career. What will they all be doing though?

Flying car salesmen.

Re: Forrester Research? Pffft.

[Black Parrot]

> I'd like to see some research carried out on the speculation these guys (Forrester, Gartner etc) come up with.

Heh, get them to 'research' each other's performance.

Hahahahahaha !

[Krapangor]

If don't specialize in non-commutative geometry, gauge and QF theory or homology of perverse sheaves now, then you will be sooo fucked in some years. I mean every jerk can do FEM, non-smooth optimization, commutative or Riemannian geometry these days. Have I mentioned that Hilbert spaces are trivial ? And universities everywhere are outsourcing their researches on Frenet spaces to Columbia already !

Re:Big Deal

[TedCheshireAcad]

Oh come on. All managers really do is tell you to put the new cover letters on the TPS reports, and make sure you got the memo.

extrapolation?

[Ubi_NL]

sounds a bit like this Elvis joke:

In 1977 there were 150 Elvis impersonators. By 1999 there were 35,000. If this rate of growth continues, by the year 2019, more than one third of the world's population will be Elvis impersonators.

Re:Not worried

[Anonymous Coward]

> A good U.S. programmer == 10 mediocre Indian programmers

Actuall the following is also true,

A good indian programmer == 10 mediocre US programmers
or

A good programmer == 10 mediocre programmers

By 2015 computers will program themselves....

[gatkinso]

...and Kazaa (!) will have long since launched the nuclear strike...

Solution

[Anonymous Coward]

Why not push half the population of Wyoming off-shore and keep the programmers?

Good!

[Anonymous Coward]

Means more competition!

Oh wait... That's not good in a job market is it?

Error message from 2015

[HarveyBirdman]

"Dr. Ganesha has detected a negative karmic dispensation in your system. This state of digital being was unexpected, and most likely the work of Narada, the mischief-maker. Please, under the graces of Krishna, restart your computer to restore balance."

Oh, and Narada, the mischief-maker is not to be confused with Mentos, the fresh-maker.

Re:extrapolation?

[sopuli]

This reminds me of this joke, which extrapolates exponentially:

When I turned two, I felt a great anxiety. In just one year, I had doubled my age. If this goes on like this, I thought, by the time I'm five, I'll be sixteen.

Re:I knew I should have gone for an EE degree

[the_mad_poster]

...WILL take you places, regardless of your skillset.

This explains a lot about my company.

lets off-source all business consulting!

[peter303]

Business consulting like Forrester, McKinsey, Deloitte-Touch, etc. does not require a physical presence in the USA. Hopefully all these people will be outsourced to Asia, where consultants are much cheaper.

What's more important?

[splinterBR]

You know, based on all of these cock-eyed predictions, I think the most important thing to take out of this posting is that there's only a half-million people in Wyoming. Seriously, any slashdotters from Wyoming out there??

No crash like Snow Crash

[DCheesi]

Looks like Neal Stephenson was wrong: "microcode" is not one of the things we'll be known for in the future. He was right about the "pakistani bricklayer's idea of prosperity", though. Oh well, at least there's always High-Speed Pizza Delivery...

Look on the bright side!

[Anonymous Coward]

The article does not say that there will be fewer jobs worldwide, but fewer in US. This is simply a result of companies moving to places where the salaries are lower, like India which has a giant population of well educated engeneers and programmers willing to work while you sleep.

So, what can you do? Look on the bright side, why don't you just move your self to some pleasant place where a lower salary still makes life pleasent? Relocating yourself will put you in the first row since you are not only well qualified but also know the language and the buisness.

- I wouldn't mind a relocation to say Rio de Janeiro, less pay, more sun and more beautiful girls... Hey, anyone, I'm willing to dump prices to do this! Go surfing in the day, go programming in the night, this must be life!

And remember, money is worth nothing untill you spend them!

Prediction on Forrester

[MrWa]

At the current rate of decline, I predict that Forrester will no longer be a company by 2005.

Re:Programmers == Carpenters??

[gagy]

Maybe you're sitting a few cubes over from me, and you don't even know it. But isn't it interesting how we both have time to yak on slashdot all day complaining how our jobs are being outsourced, while our productivity is obviously 0? :)

A better way to measure this

[dstone]

235,396 fewer Computer Programmers... wow, that's half the population of Wyoming!

For those whose base unit of measurement is not 'Wyomings'... if we lined those programmers up head-to-toe, they would stretch approximately 250 miles from Silicon Valley out into the Pacific Ocean heading towards Asia. At that point, of course, many would drown.

Alternatively, if the computer programmers were laid end-to-end, the chain would be longer than 4,000 football fields. Of course, it would be dangerous leaving so many nerds lying down in fields if football players were around.

Somewhere, the lawyers are finally laughing

[dstone]

Lawyer A: "What do you call 235,000 fewer programmers by 2015?"
Lawyer B: "I dunno."
Lawyer A: "A good start."

Re:Major issues that ought to be addressed

[EvilTwinSkippy]

You know, it just occurred to me, the eventually all the customers may move to India, too. Leaving just the Indians to compete with the Indians.

Re:Big Deal

[Anonymous Coward]

There's less competition. First of all, there are fewer managers to compete with, and second of all, for the most part, they suck at management too.