235,000 Fewer Programmers by 2015 982
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!"
Big Deal (Score:1, Insightful)
Programmers == Carpenters?? (Score:5, Insightful)
Your own fault. (Score:2, Insightful)
They don't even have to be run by mobsters or be unreasonable or powerful. Look at SPEEA.
Worst case scenerio is you gain a little bit of appreciation for the uncertanty that faces a lot of factory workers.
Forrester Research? Pffft. (Score:5, Insightful)
Are details on who they are calling programmers? (Score:5, Insightful)
the, err, rest of the world (Score:2, Insightful)
> are moving work off-shore
Why do you think an American deserves a job more than some hard-working, enterprising person in Bangalore [or wherever]? (PS: I'm american.)
Oh, I wonder why??? (Score:2, Insightful)
1 - DMCA (nuff said)
2 - ***A (FTAA, NAFTA, IndiA , RIAA (for paying 25 million to a scheme that can be defeated with the shift key)
3 - Welcome to the Global World, it's about time America gets their ass pounded by it too...
Computer Science is not everything anymore! (Score:5, Insightful)
Of course this does not stop me from getting employed as a programmer if I wanted to.
Too many people in IT because it pays (Score:5, Insightful)
A couple of years ago I worked for a UK university and I was so disapointed at the number of people who had no interest in the subject but doing it awayway. It seems that people think you can get a high paying job in IT, so will get the degree in hopes of getting a job despite not having any enthusiasm or talent or skill.
Maybe this will be a good thing, we might see less people going into IT just because they think it will pay well.
A few years back... (Score:5, Insightful)
To me it looks like they just take the trend of the past 2 years, extrapolate it to 2015, think of a few pages worth of `reasoning' why the numbers go so much down/up, and, hey presto, a new raport available!
I love how that fallacy endures. (Score:1, Insightful)
Indian programers aren't better, and there is a good chance they're not cheaper, when the accounting is finished. What is true, is the guy who sells their services plays golf with the guy who signs the paychecks for programmers. And that guy's primary responsability is to allocate resources to solve problems he most likely doesn't understand in any meaningful fashion.
When that guy signs a pink slip, it's as much with the intent of pleasing his friend as it is helping his compnay through a process he doesn't understand, and through a proxy who also likely doesn't understand his business or the ones he takes on as customers.
They aren't rich and powerful because of what they know, but WHO they know. Rest assured when the morons are done exporting all the unskilled and skilled labor overseas, for essentially no reason, the next question they'll ask themselves is why all their managers are over here?
At which point the US becomes a gated community for the rich, with livin service industries.
I know I'm brushing up on my car detailing.
Not worried (Score:0, Insightful)
Suppose the mediocre programmers in India make $10,000 a year. A good U.S. programmer should therefore be able to make $100,000. Now before you call me racist, a good Indian programmer also == 10 mediocre Indian programmers. However, you can bet that they will get their ass to America to make a decent wage.
In conclusion, if you are good, you don't have anything to worry about. Also, I hope that most of the mediocre U.S. programmers find a different profession because I'm sick of having to work with them and clean up their mess.
Don't jump to any conclusions (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Whatever happened to... (Score:3, Insightful)
You've been importing way more than you've been exporting for years now. For a while foreign investors used these dollars to buy up American companies and other investments, but at the moment that doesn't look very promising (and the interest on dollars is way too low). As a result, the world doesn't need any more of the dollars you give them so the dollar is now falling as a rock.
Pretty soon, the rest of the world will be too expensive instead.
Re:the, err, rest of the world (Score:5, Insightful)
Why do you think a corporation deserves market protection from cheap foreign goods if they're exploiting the lack of labor protection?
If companies want to play the "global market" game, then either A) labor should have tarrifs or B) goods should not. Make it fair for everyone involved. Joe Normal will be able to afford to continue his lifestyle after being laid off in favor of people from Esbotsunania who do a quarter of the work for a tenth of the pay. At hourly wages, he'd probably even be able to buy more DVDs at hong kong prices, more toys for his kids imported direct from china without all those brand names. And afford cheap software written in India by the independent programmers who are not owned by American corporations (or those who defect from their outsourcing agreement and set up a competing shop).
Absolutely right (Score:4, Insightful)
Think of how much better off in terms of job security, benefits, and salary the IT industry in the US could be today had they unionized early enough. Protection could have also been built in to protect the proletariate from the export of jobs overseas. It's truly a shame.
Re:Forrester Research? Pffft. (Score:5, Insightful)
I'd like to see some research carried out on the speculation these guys (Forrester, Gartner etc) come up with.
They can't even agree upon present day issues, for example, the TCO of Linux is cheaper than Windows or vice versa.
What hope have they of predicting the future.
Translation (Score:3, Insightful)
"America and it's corporations will be less relevant to the rest of the world, IT-wise, in 2015."
Re:Programmers == Carpenters?? (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm sure, had Slashdot been around back in days of Steampunk, there would have been many articles cursing the disappearance of steam-engine related jobs, complaining that these days, steam trains were only used overseas, etc, etc. Meanwhile, the invention of the aeroplane would receive only a passing mention, everyone would think it was cool, then they would go back to complain about the decline in the use of steam technology.
Moving jobs overseas isn't a bad thing. One thing the third world is good at is being cheap labour*. One thing the third world is very bad at is innovation**. Westerners who are good at what the West does - innovate - will be as in demand as ever. Those who can't or won't work to remain on the cutting edge, well, there's no helping them.
* I'm not saying this is a good or a bad thing, just that it's a historical fact.
** Also a historical fact. Look at where the new knowledge was and is created over the last 500 years, in technology, pharma, media, you name it - in the West. Even big countries like China and Brazil use Linux, for example - they didn't (or couldn't) start from scratch.
For those thinking "I might be in the lucky half" (Score:3, Insightful)
Thanks to Open Source, (Score:1, Insightful)
Expect more jobs for telemarketers and less for engineers. That's progress.
Re:the, err, rest of the world (Score:3, Insightful)
Exactly !! if americans had got back isolated, then this outsourcing woud not have happened. I have wrote this in earlier discussions and would say it again. Outsouring is part of so called "globalisation" which is something amrica started , perpetuated and above all BENEFITED the most. More than any other country in the world america has contributed and benefited out of this process. Now you think its not good for you , because it starts to affect YOU ALSO. so it was ok as long as it was destabilizing third world economies and third world job market ? Then regarding charity, I wont even comment about that BS.
Re:Not to be partisan or anything (Score:3, Insightful)
is this a joke (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Absolutely right (Score:3, Insightful)
My father is in a union and has been for the better part of 30 years. He is very good at what he does and many times his supervisors have recomended him for raises based on merit. However, the union always comes back and says 'If we give him a raise we will have to give joe blow on 2nd shift a raise and he sucks'. In a union everything works based off the lowest common denominator, wages, contract negotiations, everything. There is also the problem that generally everything is geared towards seniority not skill. I would much prefer to work in an environment where my skills are rewarded not how long I have managed to stick it out at a company.
Also I don't want anyone but me negotiating my contract. I am the only one that has my best interests at heart.
Re:Too many people in IT because it pays (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Big Deal (Score:2, Insightful)
I'd rather have a less-successful developer as my boss than a successful one. At least a failed developer is less likely to micromanage. It's certainly possible to understand what you're managing even if you don't know all of the technical details. In fact, this is what most managers do.
However, ultimately it probably doesn't matter. Management is a completely different position and requires a completely different skill set than programming does. Some people will be good at it and some won't.
Amen to that (Score:5, Insightful)
Now, most of these IT Experts are unemployed. One of them followed my advice and became a succesful real-estate agent.
If you don't enjoy doing something DON'T BASE YOUR EVERYDAY LIFE ON IT.
common sense 101
Re:Family pressure (Score:2, Insightful)
I can't think of anything worse than having a doctor that doesn't enjoy what they do.
My experience has been that programmers who do it for the money alone tend to try to get by with as little programming as possible. Now apply that mentality to a doctor.
Re:Programmers == Carpenters?? (Score:3, Insightful)
This is not really true if you go back in history more than 300 years.
Back then Europe was a third world country. Most of the innovators lived in China, India or the Middle East. Several of their innovations are things like writing, the number 0, arabic (!!) number system, gun powder and I'm sure countless other inventions.
My guess... (Score:5, Insightful)
That said, it doesn't seem unreasonable that there will be a sigificant drop in software engineers over the next ten years. Why? Because there is so much research going into technologies to transform business workflow more quickly into customized (but not custom) applications for managing business processes. There are an enormous number of developers employed doing precisely that in one way or another, whether its a VB program for managing customer contacts, or a staff of Java developers building internally developed applications on data warehousing applications. All of that stuff is going to become much easier to transform from business requirements to final application. Not drag and drop, but a staff of ten may drop to a staff of five or six.
There will be a lot of jobs for senior level engineers, far less than now for entry-level positions. For those of you who are thinking you may be in one of those positions in ten years, well thats probably good or bad. Bad thing is, there'll be fewer positions to fill, but the upside is that it will probably turn the tide of people away from thinking CS is a quick and easy road to a high paying job -- and it'll be easier to progress up the ladder to senior and principal positions. I know a lot of guys now who get stuck with a virtual glass ceiling because the ratio of engineers to senior or principal engineers is so out of whack, companies just don't have that many positions for them.
I suspect a lot of software development positions will become more business-specific, as well. It'll be expected that anyone over a certain level has an ability to understand and work with the business side of a particular corporate structure. Foul smelling unkempt hacker types may have a harder time finding jobs in that kind of a market. But from a reformed foul smelling hacker type, its a lot easier to get laid if you clean up your style a bit.
Re:Programmers == Carpenters?? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Why? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Big Deal (Score:3, Insightful)
However, I agree about the notion that moving into management because you suck at what you currently do, might give you a bit of a surprise when you find out that you suck at management too.
Unions don't save jobs (Score:3, Insightful)
Unions can help protect the safety and working conditions, they aren't an answer when the workers just aren't competative.
Outsourcing beyond continents (Score:2, Insightful)
Instead, Denmark will become a place for project managers, systemarchitects, consultants and other people, who focus on the business and the client itself, not on the actual production.
Re:Absolutely right (Score:5, Insightful)
What is he sacks you for _asking_ for a raise? Have you got the money to sue your employer?
How about the guy in the cubicle next to you gets a raise, yet he's no better than you and does no more work than you. You ask for a raise and get turned down.
The boss decides to cut your annual holiday entitlement to 10 days to boost productivity.
Tough. AT least in a union there'd have been someone there to fight for you.
Re:Too many people in IT because it pays (Score:2, Insightful)
These numbers don't make sense.
Ahh, but they do make sense, because as Benjamin Disraeli said: "There are lies, damn lies, and statistics."
Straight-line extrapolation is accurate? (Score:5, Insightful)
Five years ago they did a straight-line extrapolation to predict federal budget surpluses as far as the eye can see. I don't see them anymore, do you?
Nobody can foresee the future. There are 10% as many telephone operators now as there were 40 years ago, handling ten times as many calls. Is that a bad thing?
Over that past 40 years I have seen engineers in high demand and engineers stocking grocery shelves. If it's bad now, give it five years and it will be good. If it's good now, give it five years and it will be bad.
That's the way it goes. Everything is not good all the time.
If you blow your brains out during the bad times, you miss the good times that are just around the corner.
virtual feudalism (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Absolutely right (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Absolutely right (Score:2, Insightful)
What is he sacks you for _asking_ for a raise? Have you got the money to sue your employer?
How about the guy in the cubicle next to you gets a raise, yet he's no better than you and does no more work than you. You ask for a raise and get turned down.
Sounds like a good time to start looking for something else.
The boss decides to cut your annual holiday entitlement to 10 days to boost productivity.
You should have made sure your contract covered the number of holidays that you could take.
Tough. AT least in a union there'd have been someone there to fight for you.
Maybe, thats by no means a given. If we are talking about far fetched senarios here lets talk about unions stealing pensions or skimming wages or taking dues and providing nothing in return. My father tried to leave the union about a decade ago and the other employees threatened violence. They slit all his tires, keyed his car, etc just to prove that he couldn't leave. He ended up getting the harrasment to stop by catching one of his coworkers screwing with his car and beating the sh** out of them. Of course, these are all far fetched senarios and by no means indicative of the average union.
I am not saying unions are all bad. I am saying that the premise a union is built on is bad. I, personally, am not willing to give up the freedom to dictate the terms of my employment to any third party. This is especially true of a third party that is seniority based and generally caters to the lowest common denominator.
The goal! (Score:5, Insightful)
The key for the industry would be to figure out what features of those other industries can be "enhanced" or "embraced" in programming. OSS can be the solution to such a problem, but it has to get big enough to knock down companies like MS...who have commoditized software to a fault. the neat thing about it though is that programming is a "market" and as more people get laid off from the "megacorps" they go out and start the next revolution without the old players. Look at how HP, Apple, NVidia, etc were founded...and realize that it should be about to happen again!
Re:Absolutely right (Score:3, Insightful)
There are unions for skilled workers... Government employees are usually members. (Don't laugh. Government employees include NASA and Ames and Los Alamos and the like, most of whose researchers are Union.) Boeing engineers have a Union of their own, too.
Even freelance photographers have a Trade Association, which negotiates and sets baseline rates for photo publication and re-use for its members... which is going to be a great deal higher than a solo freelancer is going to get.
The Teamsters or the UAW is not a good model for a technologist union... but such unions and trade organizations exist, and balance skill level, seniority and intra-organizational mobility very well. The days of the hired gunslinger are over... no-one is going to give you a six figure contract for a years worth of bug squashing, no matter how skilled you are. Instead, you'll see your salary rise and fall with the economy, and zero job stability. This is a great thing for management, but it suck rocks over the course of a career... provided you're able to maintain a career, as one long layoff can sideline you for good. (Over 50, with a BS in engineering or comp sci? Try getting a job, any job, that doesn't involve bagging grocieries or wearing a rent-a-cop uniform. Good luck.)
Unions smooth out the bumps... it can be depressing that salaries are lower than non-union workers, but the benefits are better and cheaper, and job security makes up for the loss of the "gunslinger" myth, especially if you have a mortgage and kids.
SoupIsGood Food
Been here before (Score:5, Insightful)
Remember when FrontPage came out? That was around 94-96 time frame(?), right about the same time every night school on the planet was offering "webmaster" *snicker* certification. Everybody and their dog was calling themselves a web developer. But it never nicked the market for people who could produce really professional looking high-end sites. Then came the marraige of web sites with a database back end and db skills separated the webmaster employed from the rest of the pack.
If you've been in IT a long time you're used to being a techno-chameleon. There will always be new things coming along that will open up new markets. And even if it doesn't, even if I finally transition out of IT into a different kind of business, look at the technical advantage I have. I can build my own web sites, know how to market and promote them, write my own db's, program my own applications, or tweak OSS apps to do something specific for me, run my own network. It puts me miles ahead of my peers in any other line of business.
20 years in IT and analysts keep coming up with the same crap, like some karmic manure spreader. Just keep your head on a swivel, bank cash when times are good, and don't get boxed in thinking the only way to make a living is working for someone else.
Re:Outsourcing beyond continents (Score:2, Insightful)
If all the programming jobs are not in Denmark, then where will the Danish project managers, system architects, etc... get their experience?
It's a slippery slope. That's all I'm saying.
Thats good for programmingdom (Score:4, Insightful)
Universities are churning out students of ADA, Pascal and Java, most of whom applied to the university thinking of the good fortunes of being in IT around 1998.
I doubt many of the developers of the applications in sourceforge will be in this number. A market booms, you get hundereds of thousands of extra golddiggers, then it goes bust, the golddiggers leave, the ones dedicated to the art stay, the market booms again, the golddiggers return, the experienced ones make good money and buy McLarens.
Fewer programmers mean a guy who can port Linux or NetBSD to a specialized ARM MCU will be more in demand, and will not get laid off like today. It by no means means the cults and culture that churn out the code for sourcecode will disappear.
Re:Programmers == Carpenters?? (Score:3, Insightful)
You have it backwards. They are hungry and poor because they don't innovate and create value. Even the ones that aren't hungry and poor don't do much by way of actual innovation.
Gloom and Doom (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Programmers == Carpenters?? (Score:5, Insightful)
However, paying for the training of offshore people to do the low grade work that has been previously done onshore is a tad dangerous.
All the 'high level' people that understand what the game's about have come up through the ranks of those junior positions to slowly acheive where they are.
The premise of offshoring seems to be "Well, we'll set up the whole of our operations abroad, where it's cheap, and automagically, when we need them, experienced people will join the organisation as we need them.". Except, due to most work at the lower levels being done offshore, thus most training being done there, the experience for the higher level jobs will be required to be performed offshore.
The setup then becomes one of having a shell company in the west, populated by a few suits with little technical knowledge, asking for a product from the real company investment (in workers and experience) in, say, India.
Now, with having few people trained (nobody can get a job in the west, so why study?), and no experience being gained (no job), then the raw ability to innovate in that area vanishes.
Lo and behold, the country that HAS the skills forms their own industries, and makes new products derived from their EXPERIENCE in the old (western initiated) ones.
With sufficient saturation of skill base, and lack of draconian legal restriction, new innovation is pretty much guaranteed. That's how the US managed to kick start it's high tech lead (the "Brain Drain" is still well remembered).
To put this in perspective, the Eastern Countries led development in technology for several thousand years. Only in about the last 500 has it lagged behind (except for Japan which is still at the forefront).
Now, after a period of 'sleeping', the East is beginning to fire up it's technology engine, and get in the 'Innovation' mode.
Definately not good for Western companies longterm, who are taking the short term view of a quick buck now.
And that buck, ten years down the line will most likely vanish into an eastern company who does exactly the same thing for a quarter the price or less.
Your reference to steam engines misses much of the point. Nobody here is crying out about losing jobs on a defunt system.
The point is, that if, once the planes and cars developed WERE actually all made in the 'third world', and all it's engineers and manufacturing were based there when the industry was in it's infancy, then the west would not be where it is now.
India would have the great roads, and the most advanced cars around would be of Indian manufacture. The west would now be playing catchup to the more established Indian markets.
The sad truth is that, these days, companies are run by accountants and lawyers. These are exactly the people who look at what the money does, and NOT at what happens to the world around.
Nobody seems to care about 10, or 20 years down the road. As long as the cash is on the table NOW, and LOTS of it, all is good.
Your premises seem to assume that the world is generally static, and moving one part of an ecosystem and transplanting it to another area en masse will make no difference to either one.
Read up on a good many disasters that have occurred that way.
Computing (and society) mirror nature very closely. The big industries are playing a very dangerous game.
Re:is Open Source part of the problem? (Score:3, Insightful)
Without open source, companies such as IBM, with hundreds of thousands of employees would share within the company and lower their costs, while the thousands and thousands of smaller companies that employ the majority of people would find it harder to compete because they would have to pay more salaries to write all this code themselves.
By reducing the competitiveness of small and medium sized companies, these companies would be less profitable and be able to pay fewer people.
While being inefficient will make a company need more people, it also reduces that companys chance of expanding and even of surviving, and hence is longer term bad for employment.
Society is much better off with increasing efficiency, as it increases capital return on investments which again makes it more worthwhile to invest in new ventures or in expanding existing ventures, and makes it more worthwhile to hire people.
Based on your arguments, developers should work as slow as they can, because it would result in a need for more people. However all that would achieve would be to drive those companies out of business or reduce their growth and prevent them from hiring more people in the long run.
BIG assumptions (Score:1, Insightful)
Using this same logic, given current trends, the world population [theatlantic.com] in a few centuries will be less than the current US population.
Re:Whatever happened to... (Score:3, Insightful)
You remember when Wal-Mart claimed everything was made in America. Apparently you missed the part where they got busted for fudging labels or some such and silently dropped the "Made in America" scam.
Re:Programmers == Carpenters?? (Score:5, Insightful)
Are you insane? Hammers, saws and screwdrivers aren't provided to carpenters, but materials that will stay with the customer, like 2x4 planks, I-beams, nails, are. Why on Earth would a programmer, that's not with a VAR, bring a computer to the job? A programmer's tools are nearly all insubstantial (the notable exception being books, but even those are going electronic [oreilly.com]). Programming is a skill, not a piece of hardware. You don't need a programmer to run a computer. You need the programmer to make the computer do something useful.
The constant equating of programming to an industrial process is without merit and has been debunked before by Fred Brooks, Steve McConnell and others. The construction techniques for software aren't as well understood or as systematized as those known to physical engineers and fabricators. This makes every software project mostly unique, although certainly experiences from previous projects will help the next one. McConnell identifies four legs of software development that must come together to get a successful production. These are people, process, product and technology. In reverse order, the technology piece is simply the OS, the hardware and programming language chosen for the job. The product leg deals with scope of the project, such as listing the required features, inputs, outputs and whatnot. The process bit relates to how the project is (or isn't) managed, risk management and customer feedback. The people aspect comprises the quality of the programmers doing the work. This can have a huge impact on the shipping product.
Outsourcing addresses only one leg of software developement: people. By reducing the cost of this one leg, the cost of the process aspect will go up. It remains to be seen whether paying for more management and process will produce more profitable results than simply working with the native talent pool of programmers. I suspect it won't for most cases. However, there will surely be some outsourcing success stories.
It's grossly unfair to expect the art of programming, which is hardly sixty years old, to be as well understood as construction, which has been a human endeavor for thousands of years. Those managers and market analysts that labor under this delusion are in for a rude surprise.
Re:My guess... (Score:5, Insightful)
Lets assume, as you do, there'll be a lot of jobs for senior-level engineers. Lets assume there are far less than now for entry-level positions. Now, *I'm* a senior-level engineer (13 years in IT). I wasn't senior-level when I entered the field, though -- I entered the field by doing data entry on registration cards for a software company and becoming known as The Guy Who Could Fix Macs. I know I'm not the only one.
Skilled industries (everything from programming to carpentry to electrical work) have traditionally depended on mentoring, apprenticeship, and a growth path that starts with you being at the bottom. If we're sending all our bottom-feeder jobs to India, where will our next senior people come from? They're not going to burst fully formed from the foreheads of the current generation.
Re:Regarding "941,584 programmers today" (Score:4, Insightful)
It really doesn't matter why it happened, or how the Clinton regime justified it. Trust me, there were enough programmers in the 90's to get the job done, and via organic growth (ie, American college graduates coming out of college with C/S degrees) we would have been able to handle the load. The Clinton administration sold you out, which is funny because you eagerly put them there and support them to this day.
Boil it down. Look at the facts. One point three million H1-B visas issued. One point three million software engineers/techs currently working in the United States. Pretty simple math. If Clinton hadn't been in office, it wouldn't have happened and you would still have a job. A good job at that.
-Nowadays, an even cheaper alternative to going through all that is just to ship the whole of your IT operations to India, no muss no fuss. Which brings us to today.
Perhaps had the floodgates not been opened bringing us the brown tide, this wouldn't have been the case.
And those are the facts. Boil it down to simple numbers and those are the facts. And yes, I hold Clinton responsible - completely.
One partial explanation ... (Score:3, Insightful)
Funny; I've heard a related but different explanation for the exodus of programming jobs: We have to farm out most of the development to other countries, because most of the world doesn't speak English very well, and you can't develop software in the US that works in any language but English.
Actually, my response to this tends to confuse them. I argue that there's no problem finding people in the US who can handle other languages. The problem is that American management is generally contemptuous of foreign languages, and won't support development of UIs in any other language.
This is based mostly on personal experience. I'm not fluent in any other language, but I know several well enough that I could produce a UI in them. And I have the sense to ask native speakers for criticisms and suggestions for improvement. (And I know how to find the native speakers.
But when I've suggested such things at work, the response invariably is to simply pretend that I didn't make such a pointless suggestion, and go on discussing important topics.
There is a common belief among Americans (and which is rampant in American management), that the rest of the world is learning English, so there's no need of any other language.
One of the real frustrations with working in the US is the difficulty of making even 8859-1 work correctly. Thus, I have guest accounts on machines in Finland and Sweden. When I copy files to my Mac Powerbook (using rsync or tar), the marked letters in the file names often come out garbled. When I copy a directory back, those garbled names appear on the remote machines. Macs sold in Scandinavia seem to work fine. But no amount of digging around in Help or FAQ or mailing lists seems to come up with anything that works for my machine. I'd have to recommend that if you want to develop something that works in Finnish or Swedish, you should not use a machine sold in the US market. (Windows machines are even worse, with their bizarre file-name transformations, though I must say that stuff that I develop on linux and *BSD machines seem to work fine when copied to Finland or Sweden.)
Computers are becoming common all over the world, and we really need UIs in whatever languages the customers speak. It should be no surprise at all that software development is moving out of the English-only American enclave.
Re:Straight-line extrapolation is accurate? (Score:3, Insightful)
You can't extrapolate todays numbers out 10 years. These figures do not take into effect deflation on wages that would occur if these numbers were true. More people chasing fewer jobs drops wages in the US. At the same time wages increase in offshore destinations as the standard of living increases. The labor advantage of offshoring is reduced, if not eliminated.
It also doesn't take into effect the inevitable backlash against companies that practice offshoring. It's not bad now, but once it's known that what would have been our economic recovery is being diverted to some third world country, and you will see protectionist politicians elected in 2 seconds flat.
Another wild card is the tax situation for these companies. At present they are playing a shell game with the present tax system. If the US were to adopt a VAT tax, then these overly long and complicated supply routes with rediculous markups would cease. If we were to tax profits for business performed in the US as opposed to profits for business within the US, the advantages of offshoring diminish. No more companies closing it's US headquarters and opening a new one in Bermuda, and being completely exempt from US taxes.
Re:better off (Score:2, Insightful)
Maybe, just maybe, a better solution would be for corporations and business owners to develop a better long term strategy around making their employees happier and more content in their jobs.
Re:Programmers == Carpenters?? (Score:3, Insightful)
Leave it up to businesses to decide who they want to hire. If someone wants to hire a team of Indian programmers instead of a team from California, or a team of Californian programmers instead of a team from New York or Michigan, so be it. It is that person's decision, and he/she will have to live with the consequences.
I'm sure there are a lot of Indian programmers who are all around better programmers than many US programmers. These programmers might cost more than some US programmers, and so businesses might choose them only if a high level of expertise is deemed necessary for a particular project.
If you are a programmer, do two things:
1) Do what you can to make yourself as skilled and valuable as possible
2) Be aware of trends that may make you extinct and act accordingly, even if it means learning new skills.
People have the idea that a human being should only be required to learn one trade during his lifetime and should be able to earn a decdent wage at that trade, whatever it happens to be. That is rediculous.
People have work done offshore becaue the price and quality are better than work done in the US, or at least they seem to be.
sql*kitten is right on target that innovation will remain in the west, and grunt work will flee to places of cheaper labor.
So, if you feel like your programming job is grunt work, be ready for it to disappear.
It's the Data That Bugs Me (Score:2, Insightful)
Here's my problem. I don't want my Credit Information, Health Information, Criminal Records.... in a country that does not have to abide by the laws of the United States.
I know that their are bad people in the US, but if they get caught, they go to jail.
Re:Too many people in IT because it pays (Score:3, Insightful)
I honestly have never been able to understand why someone would choose a career they have no great intrest in simply because they could make fairly good money.
They want to have a nice home. They want to provide a comfortable lifestyle for themselves and their family. There are lots of interesting things you can do but there aren't all that many interesting things people will pay you well to do.
Re:Programmers == ARCHITECTS (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Whatever happened to... (Score:2, Insightful)
(*) The classic example of this is the empty lot in a city or the lot with a broken down building on it. The owner is holding out for windfall profits (i.e. speculating) and meanwhile people who could be profitably utilizing that land or building are kept from participating in the economy.
And there are fewer farmers too (Score:2, Insightful)
A century ago, something like half the U.S. population worked on farms. Now it's down to a couple percent of the population, if that.
Let's say it went from 50% to 5%. Does that mean that 45% of the work force is unemployed?
Of course not. The environment changed and people adapted. Those who did not adapt, perished.
What did that 45% do? They got jobs in new fields that never existed before... In the last 100 or so years, we have seen the dawn of automobiles, airplanes, assembly lines, radio, TV, telecommunications, and computers. We have seen the government expand without bounds - the dawn of the income tax, the Social Security Administration, the Securities & Exchange Commission, and so on. Those areas have been responsible for creating a couple of jobs now and then...
Anybody who is intimidated by this forecast is not interested in ideas, success, prosperity, or progress -- just drawing a check and playing with toys.
Put another way, imagine a village in a remote corner of the world. This village is five miles away from the nearest water. A good samaritan comes in and drills a well for them so they don't need to spend literally all day just meeting their basic needs. Do the village water boys fret because they are losing their jobs?
That said, I don't put much stock in a 10+ year forecast like this. These folks don't even know what happened yesterday.
Bottom line: your cheese is going to move, but you don't yet know how. Learn to adapt - learn to think - and don't get too comfortable.
Re:Programmers == Carpenters?? (Score:3, Insightful)
Your analogy is wholly broken. The steam engine was obsolete, and that is why workers were no longer needed for them, not because the jobs supporting steam engines were being moved overseas. I doubt you mean to say that computers are obsolete, too? And what is the modern version of the airplane from your analogy?
Why I did engineering.. (Score:5, Insightful)
Right now, CS/IT employed people could benefit from getting organized and professionalized to the degree to which engineers are. Engineering associations look after things like H1B visas (although I'm not an American), and other political policy matters that can directly impact your life. There seems to be an inability of extreme reluctance to do this though, largely because I suspect there are a lot of extremely good programmers without (formal) qualification.
I'm not talking about unions - historically engineering associations have been very outspoken in this respect, but then again, historically engineers weren't employees for the most part, either.
I've always drawn a distinction between programming as art, and programming as a matter of business. Art doesn't always make you money while you're alive.
Re:Programmers == Carpenters?? (Score:5, Insightful)
The programmers who treat it as an art are usually computer scientists even if all they think they're doing is programming and all it looks like they're doing is programming. Look at any of the developers on the Linux core kernel team and you'll see a guy who treats programming as an art. I know this because I've seen their code. Superficially it looks like they were just programming but you can't create an OS kernel by just programming. Management does not really understand this and will attempt to hire a batch of grunt programmers and then dictate that they write the kernel in Java. And the grunt programmers will agree, set up XP pair programming teams, require test-first design and will still fail.
So the grunt managers and the grunt programmers will get outsourced to India where they will continue to pass or fail at random at a tenth the cost of the same team of Americans.
Here's the magic piece of the puzzle that Microsoft is looking for: OSS projects have such high quality because OSS projects by their very nature do not include grunt programmers. Grunt programmers have no incentive to work on such projects. That doesn't mean that all computer scientists work on OSS projects, but it inevitably means that all OSS projects are populated by computer scientists of varying degrees of skill and experience (Except when a company is paying people to work on the project, that opens a door for grunt programmers.)
Here's another thing you can put in your crack pipe and smoke; large companies will inevitably have a large number of grunt managers who don't understand computer science nor event the business logic of the requirements they're presented. These are the guys dictating that the entire CRM application should be implemented as a set of JSP web pages because that's the latest buzz in the industry. If a small company emerges that has both managers and computer scientists who understand the requirements and can dictate the implementation of their program, they will take market share (and be profitable) from the larger company, even if they're using an all USA based team and the larger company is using an all overseas one.
Simple Statistics to a Complex Issue (Score:3, Insightful)
That, of course, is NEVER the case.
They're trying to extrapolate a complex system with lots of variance with simple trends. It's meaningless. It ignores politics, aging, innovation, lack of innovation, economic shifts, and bloody near everything else.
A few examples from my own experience:
The sad part is people are going to look at these simple numbers and base important personal and business policy off of them.
What's the future? Hell if I know. I just don't think anyone else does either.
Re:Time for a career switch... ... back to college (Score:2, Insightful)
If you think acadmia is nirvana, you're mistaken. Better to stop feeling sorry for yourself, get smart, find a niche, and develop a real product that you can charge money for (skip the OSS kool-aid).
Re:Absolutely right (Score:3, Insightful)
Unions used to be good. Today they are not.
Unions are good when there are real enemies and real problems. Think about it, if you paid your Union dues every month, and the Union did _nothing_, you'd be pretty mad about paying them, right? Therefore, the Unions are always manufacturing problems to fix, which usually involve screwing over someone.
I think anytime a Union is created, it should have an end-goal, at which point it will dissolve. There are too many organizations in America today without end-goals, who continue to stay around long after their usefulness is over, but noone has had the balls to say "wake up! It's over!"
Most Unions fall into this category.
Going Out of Business USA (Score:2, Insightful)
It really isn't hard to figure this out. If one man is forced by his government(by taxation) to markup his labor 150% and another doing the same job does not have to do this, the choice between who to hire is absolutely clear!
Imagine two canned drinks of equal brand etc. You are the consumer. One machine selling charges $1.00 the next door machine charges $2.50 for the same drink. I am reasonably certain almost anyone would buy the cheaper one all other factors being equal.
This is the choice in Computer Programmers. The US programmers must mark their wages up 150% or more to pay the US taxes on their wages. We can go into why and all those other issues some other place. They have to do it! The issue here is that nothing else is going to happen but the decline of US Jobs until the USA fixes its tax system to account for the taxation differentials in the rest of the world.
Many people do not realize just how true this illustration is. The compounding of the US Income Tax actually makes this markup much higher than I have stated. (4 Layers takes it to 93% of Gross or a Markup of about 1200%) When it is reversed out even at the 150% rate most US Workers are cheaper than their foreign Competition. Yes the USA Labor is Cheaper, it is our TAXES that are so DAMNED expensive.
With the war situation and many other issues there is little prospect that the US Congress will lower taxes much any time soon. So Americans had better get ready to put up the "Going out of Business" sign on their government shortly unless they wake up and fix their tax system which was debased by NAFTA and GATT and the other "Free Trade" agreements.
I am sure some people will not cry at the prospect of fiscal ruin for the USA but I would suggest that it is nobody's interest and is not a good prospect. This points out the arrogance of those who dismiss the issue as unimportant or just a change in the economics of the world. This is in fact a trade war against American Citizens (and green card holders) by the United States Congress!
IT Dinosaurs (Score:3, Insightful)
The next wave after offshore will be outsourcing all IT functions to outside vendors. After that comes COTS (Commercial Off The Self) solutions. COTS means the end of IT departments. I'm sure that many will argue that their business "needs" custom inventory tracking software because their business " really" is different. How many MBAs do you see demanding custom spreadsheet programs? The truth of the matter is we should not need IT departments. We need programmers. Very very good professional programmers at that, but we don't need droolers writing VB front ends to badly written legacy Cobal inventory programs. Businesses need IT as bad as they need IT departments to go away.
Re:Programmers == Carpenters?? (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Forrester Research? Pffft. (Score:1, Insightful)
I believe the Economist in the last week or two was predicting a 50% shift in IT work to "Offshoring". Maybe we should hope Forrester is right...
Re:Programmers == Carpenters?? (Score:3, Insightful)
Most OSS programmers do so to fulfil their own need, they need (say) a good-quality driver for their photo-quality inkjet printer, so they go and do it. they will not like spots and blemishes on their photos, or the truly HORRIBLE colour rendering the M$ driver for one of my printers produces.
The number of small things containing software is increasing, and will continue to do so. There may be a decreasing demand for programming skills in the IT industry, but what about all these clever little things which are produced in what at first sight is a hardware industry? Microcontrollers, embedded web servers, set-top boxes, toys, clever central heating controls (energy efficient), engine management computers (just a few that I thought of...). There may be no big projects (who ever NEEDS a new OS, Bill please note!) but there will be an abundance of small ones. People who understand how to make software interact with the hardware will always be in demand.
This may of course be a symptom of stagnation in the large IT companies (the Convicted Monopolist stagnated at birth of course), with the shift towards small businesses who will produce small, useful things.
There may be falling demand for those who know only VB, or Access (I never bothered to learn either!), or maybe even Java, but I doubt that there will be a loss of demand for the more difficult things, and the need for high-quality, safety-critical software will continue to rise.
As I think you are saying, the mediocre with little interest in the job may need a career change, but those with the determination to adapt will not be short of work. I don't think that absolute ability is all that matters, you don't need to be a super-genius to pick up a few languages and instruction sets to a level where you can get fully up to speed on any one of them fairly quickly. Not so long ago, I was offered a job doing hardware and software design, programming a PIC in assembler. The interviewer knew I could do it, although I have never touched a PIC before. Had I accepted the job, I would have spent quite a few evenings studying the PIC data books..... If I wanted to be a C programmer again (it was a long time ago...) I would go and write a program or two, maybe a bit of OSS, just to get back up to speed. You really do have to be prepared to put in your own time and effort to stay on top.
I can't comment on anywhere but the UK, but we have a desparate shortage of plumbers. It is easy to earn a good living, so I am told. Again, something which you don't need to be a super-genius to learn. I have re-done 3 houses, and my manual skills are not the best. It would not be too hard to get up to speed in that area, for a complete change. I suspect that almost everyone has the capability to learn a second useful skill, possibly very different from your main job skill. NOW is the time to learn something else, just in case, or even for a bit of variety. It may even be fun!
Re:Going Out of Business USA (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Going Out of Business USA (Score:5, Insightful)
US labor is more expensive due to the cost of living. I would hardly take a job at the same wage Indian programmers are getting paid because I can't buy groceries as cheap as they can, or live in a house for as cheap.
You are correct in a change in economics in the world; 20 years ago outsourcing technical jobs would have been almost impossible because of the capital requirements to test and build products, the high cost of communication and goods transportation, lack of an educated workforce, and trade barriers. However, this might be bad for individuals (sadly, including me) but not for the country as a whole. Society is better off as a whole due to the basic economic theory of competitive advantage.
While "Free Trade" agreements do have serious problems - for example, labor is cheaper in India in part because US corporations don't have to worry about pesky things such as unemployment insurance, safety, environmental restrictsion,and a host of other workers' rights there - in principle they do benefit rather than harm to this country. Your complaint about the tax system is misplaced; the government's main culpability in this is helping guide the country to such a high standard of living that we have priced ourselves out of many labor markets.
High corporate tax (Score:3, Insightful)
You are correct that the US does have a low personal income tax rate (not the lowest, the article you quote specifically states that Hong Kong has lower taxes), but that's only part of the story. The US corporate tax rate is actually quite high. This may seem a bit odd since one of the real selling points of business in the US used to be it's low corporate tax rate, but that is no more. Even many of the countries that are often called "socialist" or even "communist" countries by many Americans, ie Canada, Sweden and Norway, have lower corporate taxes than the US.
Here are some numbers for 2002 [cato.org]. As you can see, only Italy, Belgium and Japan have higher corporate tax rates than the US. The main thrust of the problem is that the US corporate tax system hasn't really been updated in ages while most other countries have reduced their tax rate singificantly since the mid-90's. The above article also briefly makes mention of corporate tax avoidance, something that seems to happen in the US more than most other countries. It suggests that the somewhat dated corporate tax laws almost tend to encourage the "creative accounting" practices, with Enron being put forth as the obvious example.
Cost of living isn't the answer that you're looking for, it's the lower cost of doing buisness that is pushing companies to countries like India and China. Certainly the wages of the workers has a lot to do with it, but that's far from the only thing. If low worker wages were the only requirement for these things then everyone would move their business to Africa where wages tend to be the lowest. On the flip side, we also aren't seeing the rates of job loss in places like Hong Kong where the cost of living and workers wages are very high.