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!"
Re:Big Deal (Score:5, Interesting)
Will this match the population reduction? (Score:5, Interesting)
Hopefully that will reduce the supply of programmers enough so that the good ones will still be able to find jobs.
I beg to differ... (Score:5, Interesting)
I think after awhile with enough uproar from consumers, their slumping tech support award will cause them to follow suit for the average joe as well.
I think we can extrapolate this to all of the other area of IT, especially programming. You still need a high level of written and oral communication to perform your job effectively. That is whyI think this big push for over seas IT jobs will eventually backfire in the face of big business.
Are you in the real world? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Too many people in IT because it pays (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
There are a lot of places you can make good money apart from IT but people seem to have got caught up in the IT boom period and thought that IT was the only way to make good money and those not in IT would be at a disadvantage somehow..
Major issues that ought to be addressed (Score:3, Interesting)
I see this as a "what I want" syndrome that is going to bite people in the ass in the long run.
First off you have the american side of it. The CEOs will ship the jobs off shore, americans will lose jobs and have to go on pogey. So yeah, the CEO makes a short-term profit but pays for it in taxation in the end.
Second you have the foreign side of it. They're willing to sell their time for a heck of a lot less than the americans [leading to the questionable quality issue which is another debate alltogether]. However, in the long run thy're just poising themselves to earn the least amount of money possible. [e.g. no long-term profit].
So really outsourcing is a nearsighted "fix".
However, there are several real concerns. Often software developers are paid way too much for what they produce. $70k/yr to produce buggy programs [re: name the last 10 windows games...] is excessive. Also this is partly americans own fault. Everyone and their brother is now a "computer scientist" [having finished their 3wk course at Devry or what not]. Now the CEOs are just pushing this farther by grabing rice farmers and what not and calling them computer scientists.
So in reality y'all are gonna taste your own medicine in the end!!!!
MUAHAHAHAA
Tom
Excellent! (Score:5, Interesting)
This is a great market readjustment.
Something the article didn't mention (Score:5, Interesting)
this. [ieee-kc.org]
So, the jobs that will probably be lost are the ones that suck anyway, the ones that require just painful coding line after line of repetive garbage.
The jobs that will be left will be the high-paid positions of QA-- the ones to go through all that garbage written by the lowest bidder and fix it. O the joy we will have.
Re:Too many people in IT because it pays (Score:3, Interesting)
Not if the job counseling professionals have anything to say about it. Every time a manufacturer shuts down a plant around here, you hear them advising laid off workers to get training in "high tech", because that's where the jobs are today and in the future. <sarcasm>That must be why it only took me (ex-analyst, 15 years experience) almost a year to land an entry-level tech support job that pays what I made 10 years ago.</sarcasm> A friend who works for a local tech training outfit moans about all the people in her classes lately who can't even find their way around a keyboard.
Re:Whatever happened to... (Score:4, Interesting)
While the expected outcome of retraining for some segments of the blue collar workforce (older, less skilled) may have been overly optimistic, the idea wasn't at all hypocritical, it was logical -- a guy that worked with machines might likely have become retraied for running a more sophisticated machine tool or something.
Unfortunately, retraining can't take into account the zeal at which corporate management has decided to move ANY job which pays more than minimum wage overseas. In an era in which Wall Street considers a company with jobs that pay something akin to middle-class wages as having "uncompetitively high labor costs", then there will be nothing to retrain for, except operating the fryer at the local corporate fast food place.
In that reality, retraining is fruitless. But we're racing to the bottom, creating a plutocratic society where government and industry collude to create a handful of very wealthy people and a sea of working poor, with little in between.
Pride was sold long ago for cold hard cash (Score:1, Interesting)
Are you joking? I am an American, and let me tell you, ever since Dubya was appointed by the Republican-appointed justices of the Supreme Court to the presidency, it has been downright humiliating to be American. At least, it is if you are anywhere to the left of Gengis Khan, or get your news from a source other than Rupert Murdoch's propogandists.
Our defining aspect at one time was our high regard for personal freedom, even when it might be less practical than other alternatives (remember when Japan was on the top of the heap and pundits were commenting on how America had "too much individualism" to compete?). This of course was back when "the American Dream" was a dream of freedom and liberty, and the opportunity to achieve one's potential
American pride you ask? At one time we deserved it, but ever since the 1980s when we sold out our most basic principles of freedom and democracy for a little short term economic prosperity, a War on Drugs, a War on Political Incorrectness, a War on Terrorism, and now, lately, a War on Thought, we don't have a hell of a lot left to be proud of at all, Saddam's capture notwithstanding.
Certainly not enough national pride to keep our firms from moving their IT operations offshore and entrusting their sensitive corporate secrets to foreign contractors
Re:Too many people in IT because it pays (Score:5, Interesting)
But I wonder - what are they considering programmers? Are people who do drag-and-drop VB6 and don't code and won't move to VB.NET programmers? Are people who can handle data efficiently in Office considered programmers? I know that the COBOL programmer population is supposed to decline by 15% over the next four years due to retirement and death [cobolwebler.com], how many other "programmers" will cease to be because they themselves cease to be or the need for their position (read: not outsourced, just not neccessary) ceases to be.
Actually, there's another point - a lot of people are VB6 programmers - 3+ million of them last count. There are VB6 badasses out there, don't get me wrong, but there's bound to be a large number of them who are simply put not programmer types and can't hang with newer stuff like VB.NET so they won't upgrade and at some point they'll have to change career paths. 235,000 out of 3 million isn't all that much.
And wait a minute. Quoth the article: 235,396 fewer ... This is a 25% reduction. Is the article saying that there are only 941,584 programmers today? At all? That's crazy - there's like 90,000 COBOL programmers alone. These numbers don't make sense.
Re:A few years back... (Score:5, Interesting)
> think of a few pages worth of `reasoning' why the numbers go so much down/up, and, hey presto, > a new raport available!
Are you suggesting there's somethign wrong with that? It's what all the analysts/consulatants/investment bankers seem to be doing, surely it must be right!
I once suggested during an intership that they quote errors, or at least reduce the number of significant figures from 9 to 1 or 2 when predicting market volumes 10 years in the future... all i got in response was blank stares...
crazy world!
Ponxx
US Dollar crash could be good for programmers? (Score:3, Interesting)
With the way the US Dollar is going, I'm not so sure.
Indian workers were being seen as 40% cheaper in surveys done 6 months/a year ago (at least, that was the number being thrown around by the media). Now consider that the US Dollar has crashed in value by 12% against the UK pound (and more, by the Euro) in the LAST THREE MONTHS. With the deficits the US is running, and with the Euro presenting itself as a viable reserve currency, I think we could see the US dollar slumping further. This means American workers become more affordable, as Indian workers will seem to be demanding 30-40% more pay (or more, as the Indian economy improves).
The US-Rupee exchange rate has remained reasonably stable for the last few years, but with the giant swings against the Pound and the Euro (both belonging to major trade partners of India) it would not be unreasonable to expect this to change.
Re:Absolutely right (Score:3, Interesting)
Once the PC took off, and the demand for PC software soared, there was still too much demand for software and programming for industries and businesses that never had it. Computers were foreign and something like a database required real work, and there was enough of it at high wages that unionization seemed foolhardy.
It was only in the mid to late 90s when "Office Space" style management demanded uncompensated long hours, began seeking guest workers, outsourcing and other mass-production techniques which lowered the once lofty profession to assembly line status did unionization even START to feel like a reasonable conclusion. But even then, there was a sense of denial about joining a union since it made one feel less white collar and more blue collar, which for many has dramatic self-image and social consequences. Furthemore, the dot-com demand for IT workers duped many into believing they belonged to a new priviledged class who simply surfed from job to job or project to project, and that this, like double-digit stock market returns, was just another part of the new economy.
You could probably form a union (or more appropriately, a guild), but it would have to do more than focus on the traditional labor-management conflicts over pay and work rules, it would have to offer something to management, such as supplying members with bonafide skills (no paper MC*Es or others who flooded the IT market in the late 90s), supplying tech support for its members or products produced by its members (a more organized version of on-line support), and so on.
But I don't expect it to happen soon; there's still too many good IT jobs out there, and too much self-identification with white-collar professional status for it to succeed. Although perhaps another 5 years of jobless recovery combined with massive immigration and outsourcing, and there may be a change in attitude.
Comment removed (Score:4, Interesting)
Lack of CS Education, market correcting (Score:3, Interesting)
Is there any reason to be shocked that when salaries go up because there aren't enough people in the field that more people will enter the market? It just so happens that the people entering the market aren't in America?
Most college grads make $20k-$25k in entry level jobs. Entry level engineering jobs were traditionally in the $45k-$50k range (adjusted for inflation, I'm looking at the last few years). Entry level programmers were making $60k-$75k out of college.
That is a market out of whack. That pulls more people into the field and they happen to be overseas.
The problem isn't just salaries and cost-of-living, our exploding taxes/regulations (particularly payroll) tax is problematic. While rates haven't been rising (except in 93), the costs are relatively higher. For high-wage jobs, the comparison is no longer Western Europe (where the lower US cost structure provided a competitive advantage) but non-Japan Asia, where the US cost structure is higher.
Remember, to "outsource" you have to hire people on your end that can oversea outsourcing (MUCH more skill involved than being a lead developer, you have to speak geek to people in a different time zone, so you can't walk over to their cube, the spec needs to actually make sense or you lose a day or two turn-around with info requests), pay for the management on that end, and pay for the counter-parts overseas that speak English and understand the requests from the client.
It is really expensive to outsource. People talk about the salaries being 10%-20% of the US, but somehow the cost savings are in the 20% range on company financials. Want an easy way to fix that?
Drop the "employer-side" of the payroll tax (there is 14% cost savings), and reduce employee taxes by 6% (and cut salaries accordingly) and all of a sudden, there is no cost savings to oursourcing.
To keep the jobs high-paying in the US, you simply have to get the costs of doing work in the US down.
For every dollar that the company spends on you (forget overhead), you are lucky if 55 cents makes it into your bank account.
The good thing, is that when these companies overseas get more demand, salaries will go up. This will eat away at the cost savings. In addition, the non-oursource members of society will start to decry the "rich" over there, and adopt a punative tax structure like ours, and the advantage will go away.
After NAFTA, certain manufacturing companies that were going under in the states anyway set up plants in Mexico for labor-intensive and capital-light production. Within a few years, wages/costs went up in Mexcio, and those plants shut down and the work was outsourced to Asia. But in the mean time, Mexico has joined the global economy.
Labor-intensive proceses will always move to cheaper locations. It puts more profits in US companies that use it, and salaries move up. A rising tide lifts all boats, and the US will find a new innovation to replace the 20 year old microcomputer to build our next waive of growth.
Alex
Re:Too many people in IT because it pays (Score:5, Interesting)
All I hear on the radio is: "Hey, sick of your job? why not become microsoft certified and make money for doing nothing?!?"
Or on TV: "I was a trucker, never did anything in my life... but then I decided to go to ITT Tech and now after 2 months of distance learning, I'm THE network administrator for a fortune-500 company!"...
People actually buy that bullshit...
I mean... come on.
I also see a lot of people that one day, when it was time to decide to chose a career, decided "Hey... computer talk is cool... I want to be cool!" and also "Hey, I'm pretty good at warcraft III, I probably have some hidden talent for computers, I should go and be a programmer"
I hope they all die.
Re:Too many people in IT because it pays (Score:3, Interesting)
I know someone that I work with that can't program for beans (even though she has a masters in Software Engineering) but she sure knows how to "Email." I also know far too many good programmers that have been jobless for over a year which prooves management doesn't know how to tell the good programmers from the bad ones.
Re:Regarding "941,584 programmers today" (Score:2, Interesting)
Now we know why nobody has a job. One million programmers, and one million H1-B visas issued.
Anybody that voted for Clinton, it tech, and is unemployed - guess what, you did it to yourself.
Think I'm joking? Look it up.
Re:Programmers == Carpenters?? (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:Regarding "941,584 programmers today" (Score:3, Interesting)
I voted for Clinton, in tech, and I'm unemployed. I also have a decent grasp on the facts. The H1-B program was started to meet a need in the United States. We had companies with massive tech needs and not enough workers to fill the positions (I know, sounds crazy today, doesn't it?).
However, given that these numbers (1,282,000 computer programmers and software engineers) are from the year two thousand, before the massive layoffs of the past few years really started happening,
What happened is, companies started tightening their belts in the face of our brand new shitty economy. It occured to a lot of them, "Hey...why don't we just hire a bunch of H1-Bs instead of American programmers?". This was possible because at the time the number of H1-B visas issued was still at dot-com levels. The law states that a company can only hire an H1-B to fill a slot if the compaqny is incapable of otherwise filling that position. So corporations got creative, posting jobs with ridiculous requirements for a paltry salary. Leave it out there for the required length of time, go to the Department of Labor crying "We can't get anyone for this job!", and bring on the H1-Bs.
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.
I know it's certain peoples reflex to breath heavy and blame Clinton for everything, but you need to step back from your Fox News rhetoric for a sec and examine the facts.
Re:Big Deal (Score:3, Interesting)
In my case: I'm a skilled US steelworker, trained at own expense (welder/fabrication) and I've seen my career degraded by management continually pushing the desired skill level down to nil over the last 15 years. Enter foreign competition during the same time. Recently (last year) I started going back to school for comp sci.
I now believe that [begin sarcasm] it would be OK to flip burgers and mop floors for 80 hrs a week if only Uncle Sam didn't call it "middle class".[end sarcasm]
Seriously, I don't think this kind of crap will end until the economy implodes under the weight at the top. Until then, there will be fewer and fewer "middle class" people who can afford the products/services so hyped -
gtg now before I get violently pissed, even. And BTW, I'm a non-union republican feeling your pain ATM.
Re:Programmers == Carpenters?? (Score:5, Interesting)
Actually, the book is Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies by Jared Diamond [amazon.com].
Diamond argues that two cultural families have become dominant in the world - the fertile crescent culture which is the root of today's European and American cultures and Chinese culture which has spread throughout Asia. He further argues that these cultures are dominant for no other reason than environmental and geographic reasons. Both these areas had wild versions of a variety of domesticable staple agricultural products, readily domesticable draft animals, and room to spread out.
Other "root" cultures did not have all these factors. For instance, inidiginous Americans had no draft animals while horse and oxen were available in Mesopotamia. Corn was not readily domesticable in its wild form, and several thousand years passed before the right mutations occured to make corn a good staple crop whereas the wheat, barley, and oats that grew wild in Mesopotamia were easily domesticated. When corn was domesticated, it took a very long time for corn farmers from central America to spread through the deserts of Mexico and the American Southwest to the Mississippi valley. (The great plains are virtually unfarmable without more modern plows and draft animals because of the tough sod.) The Mesopotamian farmers spread far into Russia, the middle east, and Europe before running into barriers.
Re:Big Deal (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm not saying that steelwork is easy. Shit, I can't do it, so I'd be the first to hurt themselves. There are a few perceptions of programming. One is the science, another is engineering. A third is simple programming.
The science will live on for a long time. It's coming up with new ideas and new ways of doing stuff "better".
The engineering.. it's the architecture and making sure things run like well oiled machines in real life.
The simple programming unfortunately, is what's getting deported or seen as easier. Anyone can become one of these. It's the learning of the simple things and applying them. Writing a program to do factorials, writting something that throws some data into a database. Even web-applications. It's menial programming.
Stuff like writing a web browser, an OS, a painting program, an mp3 player.. HARDER stuff that takes some research and analysis of how it would be implemented for everyone's best interests will always be in demand. It's what gets released as shareware, sometimes freeware (winamp) or opensource, but more of the good ones tend to be commercial.
Re:Time for a career switch... (Score:5, Interesting)
Wages will be going up very fast. Many of these outsorcers have fairly long term commitments and can raise their prices and renogatiate at will. Plus reports show wages going up very fast in India (a tech. union there would do wonders for this
Plus, there is starting to be a consumer backlash agains non-english as a first language tech. support. What was bad tech. support years ago is now becoming bad tech. support that you can't understand.
Recent Time Magazine article predicts the opposite (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:The real question (Score:3, Interesting)
It seems that many organizations use that excuse when people complain about outsourcing. I live in Indiana, and here the Department of Workforce Development was recently forced to cancel an outsourced programming contract with an Indian company [com.com] after a massive outcry from unemployed developers in Indiana. The "Workforce Development" department is responsible for dispensing benefits and coordinating training for the unemployed. Unemployed programmers, many actively seeking freelance gigs to pay bills after losing full-time positions, felt slapped in the face when the very agency charged with helping them was doing them direct harm by sending lucrative work (paid for with tax dollars) overseas.
The point is that we fought back, and you should too. If your government wants to outsource IT work, you tell them hell no, you won't stand for it. Make them hire local companies. Make them plow the money back into the local economy--your livelihood may one day depend on how loudly you protest now.
Business 2.0 Agrees With You (Score:5, Interesting)
Unfortunately you can't read the article [business2.com] anymore without paying, but they make a pretty convincing case in the Sept. issue, showing how some models predict an increase in the # of computer-related jobs (they claim the tech sector will soon return, if it hasn't already, as the fastest growing sector in the American economy). Couple this growth with baby boomers retiring, and you get a very tight labor market.
You see, though some of us might not see it everyday (including me), apparently a large percentage of today's programs are baby boomers who are nearing retirement. Starting in a few years there will be large percentages of the programmer population leaving the job pool. In recognition of this, many large companies are already returning to handsome bonuses and good pay.
Having said that, I do suddenly realize that there is a difference in terminology. I shold not talk about the "number of programmers" here, but rather the "number of IT jobs." That is, include project managers, MIS directors, and all kinds of people who are technically oriented, may do some programming or other admin, but are not strictly speaking programmers. So also keep that in mind with this article--how broadly do they use the term "programmer?"
Re:Programmers == Carpenters?? (Score:5, Interesting)
Programming requires constant thought/creativity. (Score:5, Interesting)
I think that programming requires a lot of expertise. I'd like to find someone else to do some programming for me, but I find that there are too many decisions that affect the quality of the product each hour that I program. I have not been able to find someone else capable and interested in making those decisions.
In my whole life, I haven't seen even one perfectly designed program. I haven't seen even one perfectly designed web site. For example, I was just looking at the Creative Labs web site [creative.com]. There is no large photo available of the products! Creative Labs says, "With over 200 million sound cards sold, Sound Blaster is the world's most trusted PC audio brand." (Under the heading "UPGRADE to Superior Stereo Audio Quality".) After all that business experience, Creative Labs doesn't even provide useable photos of their products.
What will be the result of the work of bored Indian programmers, who are bored because they have to follow some poorly developed specifications, and have no control over the design of the program, and no way to talk to the customer? Eventually the code will be a tangled mess, and will be thrown away.
In the 70s, hiring PhDs was very popular. Then companies found the drawbacks. PhDs were not willing to do the tedious work that exists in every project. Hiring offshore programmers is popular now, but I think companies will slowly begin to realize that good programming requires a high proportion of extensive thought.
Re:Not to be partisan or anything (Score:4, Interesting)
I don't know about that. In his first campain he talked alot about the government investing in the national infrastructure. Then he got elected had some talks with Alan Greenspan, and decided that would be a bad idea for the economy and went back on his campain promises. He also decreased the deficit every year he was in office, exactly what you want to do during a good economy. Perhaps he could have done more to temper the bubble, but he certainly cannot be blamed for feeding it.
From what I understand it was one of the most tempered and drawn out bubble we have had in a long time. I blame the bubble on the tech industry, and the longevity on a wise FED chairman, a president willing to listen to him, and a congress willing to cooperate with the president on lowering the deficit. I likewise blame todays recession on natural business cycles, but will blame tomorrows problems on a president who goes against the advice of a wise FED chairman, and cuts and spends wrecklessly.
Then again, in the macro-economics class I took, one of the co-authors of the text was one of clinton's original (first term) economic advisors, so my understanding might be slightly biast, although I have read other sources.
Re:Time for a career switch... ... back to college (Score:0, Interesting)
Enough of trying to spending hours upon hours trying to explain to pointhairedbosses that corporate wide standards are a good thing.
I'll never have to implement a god damn SAP system again. Those things are the modern version of slave boat masters from Roman days, except they follow everyone. It helps HR people be that more cold and calculating while maintaining the "I have no idea how anything happens in business, especially your department, but I'm good in conflict resolution, and I love shopping!"
So I am going back academia to earn a living getting government grants.
I never broke six figures in the IT game anyway (got real close in late 2000 though), and there is no money there anyway. My last job only paid $160 a day, and days lasted from 8.5 hours (minimum, otherwise it wasn't a "day") to an average of 10-12 hours. I was laid off a scant month after I signed my contract, and because they paid me as a subcontractor from the five months preceding my eventual hire and layoff, they didn't have to pay me unemployment. Of course, I don't have a chance in hell of getting hired back in the future, because my job is going to India.
Thanks Bush! Thanks Congress! Thanks for giving big corporations huge tax incentives to move overseas! Thanks for giving the wealthiest 5% huge tax cuts so they'll never know near-poverty, like I do. Thanks for cutting back college grants, so even though I only earned less than $12,000 last year, I still only qualified for $1700. (WTF is $1700 going to do towards tuition? nuttin).
And especially thanks to Enron, MCI and Tyco. You fuckers put us in this mess, collapsed the economy by wholesale lies and fraud, forcing competitors into ruin trying to compete with your fictious earnings and growth reports. Because of you, not anyone at any dot.com, America's last industry is in smoldering ruins. And you go free! MCI still gets government contracts! They got the contract to put up a cell phone network in Iraq!
And here's a special thanks to the 6 million supposed supporters for Dubya - the first American president to START a war. The first American president who detained American citizens, in the United States, without charging them, or intending to charge them, locking them up for unlimited amounts of time for "investigative reasons".
So, thanks to giving corporations unlimited access to their leaders, they have removed the checks and balances not just in their own industry (which is resposible for payments-in-kind of futures contracts, the primary motivator to overstate earnings on financial reports), but throughout government.
Do you know that we are holding over 660 men at Camp X-Ray, in cages, like dogs? Only a handful of them have seen a lawyer, and only Westerners, and only recently. They are isolated physically, with masks, goggles, earmuffs and tied up for most of the day. This is psychological tortue. And that's what they let us see. What goes on inside their interrogation rooms where prisoners are walked in, and wheeled out on gurneys is another matter.
I'm sure our torture methods are not permeantly disfiguring or life threatening, and that's what allows the walking shitsticks pretending to be human beings to go on, pretending to be human beings.
So, thanks to the 49% of the country that did vote for Bush, and those who still support him, we have a hitler in office. A man who says religion plays a huge role in his political decisions, but still managed to execute nearly 150 people.
My job in IT, and countless like them are dissappearing - and whats most disturbing is that our industry is only 35 years old! Only 10 of which did our industry emerge from specialized functions to become an sizable group, and already we are sent out.
So thank you, America, for sitting back, watching your reality TV and 4 hours of sportscenter every night and allowing all this to happen.
Re:Programmers == Carpenters?? (Score:5, Interesting)
Programmers = Carpenters, & Analysts = Archite (Score:3, Interesting)
Moore's Law! (Score:1, Interesting)
The reason I bring that up is simple: This article is predicting a very unpredictable trend. In other words, the article is utter bollocks. How does the programming market (or nearly any aspect of computing) compare to where we were twelve years ago? Did most of the code in 1991 come from automated code generators?
There is NO WAY that the market for programmers is going to remain so static that a trend like this can be extrapolated for over a decade; and even if it could--who cares. Yeah, that's a lot of jobs but it's a lot of jobs over a LONG time! It's about the half-life of a typical career, these days (higher, in fact).
In 2015, if we find that the market for domestic programmers has dropped by what this article predicts, then it'll only because all of the market forces will have changed against each other and miraculously cancelled each other out--NOT because "current trends continued."
(Posting anonymously, because I've already modded people up in this article)
Re:Forrester Research? Pffft. (Score:2, Interesting)
As for moving jobs off-shore, way back when there were some great programmers in India who couldn't get jobs at all. Then some company A) laid off ten idiots making $100K each, B) gave the Indian programmers peanuts, and C) got great code back. So every other company started doing it. The problems are that there were never all that many great programmers, and that most of them want more than peanuts now (walnuts at least).
Slowly (far too slowly, but that's business ("free market is an efficient allocator" my left foot (well, alright, as compared to everything else we've tried, sure, but really))) businesses will realize that
Oh yeah, and eventually some Indians might decide "hey, we've got money, but we've run out of people that we can even claim are programmers. How about we offer these contracts to some un-employed people in the US. They'll jump at the chance to work for minimum wage."...
In all, I expect this to hurt, but even out and get better eventually.
Re:Time for a career switch... (Score:2, Interesting)
Who is producing all those Indian engineers (Score:2, Interesting)
There is one aspect of the discussion of offshoring US software engineering jobs that I have not seen discussed much: where are all of these Indian software engineers coming from?
India has been and remains, by US standards, a poor country. The roads are terrible and inadequate. The electric power infrastructure is so bad that companies than can afford it have their own power generation. Hunger is a big problem and much of the Indian population is still agrigarian. Violence inspired by religion is not uncommon and the ruling party in India makes use of this violence near elections. India borders Pakistan, which is considered by many the most dangerous country in the world because of its political instability and nuclear weapons. In short, India is not a country that can afford a first world level educational infrastructure of high schools, colleges and universities.
India does have the famous Indian Institutes of Technology. These are world class schools that have classicly sent Indian students on to graduate schools in the United States and Europe. Howver, IIT only graduates a few thousand students a year. In addition to the IIT grads there are Indian students who graduate from Universities in the west.
As the US and European job markets have turned bad, some Indian H1-B visa engineers are returning to India. However, it you add up all of the engineering graduates from IIT, Indians who went to foreign schools and the returning H1-B visa engineers, the sum does not seem to be sufficient to supply all of those jobs that are being moved from the West to the East. So where are all these people coming from?
Some are coming from what I call the "Matchbook School of Computer Programming". These are the kind of schools that used to advertise on the back of matchbooks in the United States. They teach basic Java, Visual Basic and ".NET" programming. Their students have no background in algorithms or design, but they can crank out simple software, especially GUI software. I've noticed that many Java programmers in the United States seem to have little command of algorithm design beyond the use of the class libraries, so the barrier to entry for Java programmers seems low.
Obviously I have no statistical information on any of this beyond the speculation I've listed above. I am certainly not writing that the problem does not exist. I am just trying to look at the real issues, with as little histeria as possible. Although much of the focus is on India, my guess is that the real problem is the combination of a set of lower wage countries: India, China, Russia and Eastern Europe. The combined number of skilled engineers (e.g., a software engineer who actually knows what N * log(N) means) is a significant threat to the US work force.
There is a lot of thoughtless blather in this whole discussion. Not only regarding the issue of where all these foreign engineers are coming from but also regarding the course that US engineers are supposed to take. The classic line, echoed in some of this discussion is "retraining". But no one answers the question: toward what? This is because no one knows.
Sometimes it is easy to forget why I went into this field long ago in the days of the punch card. I went into software engineering because I love it. I am still not ready to give up on my field (perhaps this makes me a dinosaur slated for extinction).
I have spent over twenty years building my skills as a software engineer and computer scientist. This is a hard and demanding field. I constantly read articles and books. I writes software not only at work by in my free time. Good software engineers, who can not only engineer complex systems but actually write clearly to document these systems are rare in any country. I still hold out the hope that there will be jobs in the future for people with these skills, although I admit things look bleak now. But these are bleak times. The question I try to answer is: what is a factor of these bleak times and what represents structural change?
Re:You'll always have a job if you have a clearanc (Score:2, Interesting)
All good up here, eh? (Score:2, Interesting)
I amaware of several small-time IT consulting firms which have been bought out by US firms as the average salary here(when converted to US dollars) is damn near half of what the same person would demand in the US. Add to that free health-care and a government which loves to hand out billion dollar contracts Canada is fast become the "off-shore" location of choice.
Re:Programmers == Carpenters?? (Score:3, Interesting)
Declines in military power often lag declines in innovation, though. By the time the Ottoman Turks (a later group than the Seljuk Turks) came on the scene in 1289, Saladin was almost 100 years dead, there had been no effective Caliphate since before Saladin, and the cities of Iraq had been devastated by the Mongol invasions. Even so, the Ottomans spread like wildfire until the conquest of Constantinople in 1453; after that their conquests dragged for quite a long time before they were stopped at Vienna in 1683, and repulsed in the 18th century.
As a scientifically active culture, the Islamic world really began to fall behind around the time of the invention of the printing press (which was banned for use with Turkish and Arabic in the Ottoman Empire until 1729). China was damaged by the Mongol invasions, but it was really the Ming isolationism that caused them to fall behind as a scientifically active culture.
Re:Programmers == Carpenters?? (Score:3, Interesting)
I forgot the part about the printing press. It's funny, you could say that the Ottoman/Islamic empire began to die when strong protection for "intellectual property" was in place (that is no easy way to copy Koran). :-)
Thanks for the historical details...
Re:Too many people in IT because it pays (Score:2, Interesting)
and if "computer talk is cool", i know hell just froze over. I'm a geek damn it... computer talk is dorky and geeky and i'm proud to be both.
now the really sad part is, I've met some coders working on their masters (i'm using the term coder very loosly here) who can't figure out how to do the simplest most basic debuggin on windows.
(now mind you, I said windows... linux i could understand...but if u can't figure out how to configure dial in windows and you're working on your masters.... that's just wrong...)
I probably could go on for ages...(i unfotunately went to a school that still teaches cobol and i'm still quiet bitter about the fact that i've been forcebly truned into one...erghhh.... )
well, that's my 2 cents..
Alien.