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Is The Software Industry Dead?
A reader writes:" Ok. So I'm about to graduate and then I come across this story:
Do Software Firms Have Bright Future?
None other than Larry Ellison of Oracle thinks that the best is behind us and that software is a dead industry. What does the rest of slashdot think? Will that shiney new degree be worthless? " I think it's safe to say that it's not dead - but that the times it once had aren't going to return; e.g. tulip blubs sell well, but not like they used to.
no
People are always willing to pay someone else to create a tool for them.
Because gaming software seems to be at as healthy a level as it has ever been.
There may be a rebirth of sorts. For every process, that is slow, may be sped up by an automated system. Whether it is mechanical or electrical, it can happen. For the electrical solutions to a slowprocess, computers tend to speed it up. As I write, I'm getting more done via computer, just by the fact that I can touch type. I've adapted and can work better.
Do all problems need a computer? No. Hopefully, we will never turn down that road. But, wherever custom solutions are needed, and there is a lot of need for custom ones, programmers are needed. Systems analysistssts, graphic artists and dbas.
--
"I'm not bright. Big words confuse me. But Wanda loves me and that should be enough for you." - Cosmo
just put everything in the kernel of the OS.
who needs separate software?
...
The software industry _deserves_ to die. They haven't even kept pace with free software, and none of these new fangled games/programmes are original.
Remember the days of Dungeon Keeper and Theme Hospital? When was the last time you played a game that was genuinly new and exciting, that could keep your attention for days without getting repetative.
Remember when the release of a new word processor got you more than a few more animations for the little annoying paperclip?
At least with all of the big companies gone we might get some innovation back (something that free software seems to be pretty good at) - and there might be a few less illegalities and irregularities to worry about as well.
Best of all, it might kill off DRM/TCPA in one fell swoop. Yipee.
Beep beep.
your degree would have been worthless anyway if you weren't flexible enough to use your technical knowledge to apply it to business. Even if the IT field it going downhill, capitalism isn't...not yet at least
Dont worry about what he says. This is the guy that has been trying to replace PC's with Dummy terminals (well maybe smart terminals). The software industry may get worse because of outsourcing to 3rd world countries where the labor costs are lower but it will not just die.
"If ignorance is bliss, why aren't there more happy people in the world?"
Resent studies of the IT companies in Denmarks claims things are getting better. We won't see the unrealistical high payments anymore and companies aren't allowed to go five years without making money.
Generally the IT companies are beginning to look more like every other company. They grow more slowly and more securely than they did in the 90'
Who care what the Oracle guy says anyway. He said to much crap already.... Hey Larry, SHUT UP.
I think it is safe to assume that .. they still sell, but not as well as they used to. it's all about subscriptions now.
the software industry is "dead", or as you put it
software without the possibility of subscriptions just won't cut it.
Like anti-virus, etc. (virus definitions) now that's a good gag.
I find it weird that computer industry is the fastest growing industry and people are starting to declare it dead. Especially when it hasn't reached its full potential. There's still plenty of growth left, especially in the entertainement business. 'Real' virtual reality etc. will employ tens of thousands of people.
not the software industry. If you look at open source/power personal PC trends it is the high dollar software and hardware vendors that are in real trouble. It is interesting to note that most people here view MSFT = bad and Linux = good, but really both provided computing power to everybody at a much lower cost than some (Orcale, Sun, etc.) would like...
Onward to the Aether Sphere!
tulip blubs sell well, but not like they used to
Yeah, spelling checkers are popular too.
-=Maggie Leber=-
That free software is dead by default as there is no profit - currently, though, some of the most innovative software is coming out of it. Game development on the other hand...
It only smells that way.
Modest doubt is called the beacon of the wise. - William Shakespeare
It's pining for the fjords
If I seem short sighted, it is because I stand on the shoulders of midgets
If so, then can you imagine everyone not needing software?
I don't think that software is dead by a longshot. It may not grow explosively like it did during the 80's and 90's, (but then again, it might) but I don't see it going away... ever.
There will always be a need to process data for as long as man exists. If we don't need to think up new and better ways to do that, I'll be very surprised.
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
I am also going to be graduating with a computer science degree. When I started four years ago this was the degree to have if you wanted to be guaranteed a job. Now it seems run-of-the-mill and it does not set you apart from the masses whatsoever. In job hunting, I have found that if you only have a computer science degree you are not going to easily find a job. Everyone wants experience or special abilities. For this sole reason I am staying on in college another semester to get my philosophy degree to set myself apart from all the other generic computer science grads. No longer will a cpu sci degree be enough. It's sad how things have changed so badly in the last four years......
Give it a look
I graduated this time last year.. and it seams that the graduate state of mind is very similar to what it was last year. No, your not going to have recruiters tracking you down like telemarketers. But, the industry is not dead either.
If you were in it to come out making 80K+ while working a 40 hour week... then you'll probably end up dissapointed. Otherwise, if your a code junkie, you probably won't have much trouble finding a job that you enjoy.
Is your degree worthless?... well thats really up to you.
Look at it this way. The fundamentals of a car haven't changed since the model T. It still has wheels, an engine, and a transmission to link them. But I would hardly say the best of cars is behind us. Nowdays, we have 200k miles reliability, 30mpg fuel consumption, from cars that can run 11's on the strip with a little work. Computers/Software industry is much the same way. The easy bang for the buck software is written(word processing, etc). These won't change. But there is automation programming, simulations, AI, and many other aspects which we still on the cusp of breaking through. No, the software industry isn't dead. We're just gonna have to work harder to make quality products. I predict the 1-3 year devolpment cycle(okay, I know that's a general statement) as being replaced by a 5-6 year cycle. It takes time, and money to write good software. But the market is still there. They're just much more cautious now.
If you want to make a successful business writing software I suggest going after small and home businesses. They often need customized software and can't afford to hire their own programming staff. You could make a decent living I think by developing vertical apps for these users and offering customization services. At least that's what I'm working on. This is a good market to write opensource software in whie still making a living.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
Ellision is saying that software is dead AS A GROWTH INDUSTRY! Personally, I think modest 5-10% growth rates don't spell the end of the world for software. Cheer up!
I've watched over the last two decades as quality software dies in the marketplace while scum rises to the top. I've considered the industry "dead" for a long, long time now. It will remain dead to me until consumers suddenly have an epiphany en masse that allows them to both recognize good architecture, and to desire it. Make that two simultaneous epiphany: they also must suddenly prefer publicly-published standards over the vendor-lockin du jour. Ok, make that three epiphany: they have to vote for these preferences with their money instead of admitting "yeah, MS sucks" but refusing to be part of the solution. I'm not holding my breath.
The "cue the foo posts in 3, 2, 1..." posts will commence with no subsequent foo posts in 3, 2, 1...
We've all heard the quote, "Everything that can be invented has been invented." by Charles H. Duell in 1899, insisting that his office be closed (he was the top guy at the Patent office in the U.S.). And a lot has happened in the last 100 years. Anyone who thinks that is true for software should get his head out of the sand.
God damnit, I get so sick of these "_____ is dead" articles. NO THE SOFTWARE INDUSTRY IS NOT DEAD, IT MAKES BILLIONS OF DOLLARS A YEAR! I swear these headlines get more retarded by the day.
I hate sigs.
If you're in the industry and still have clients you don't want to disappoint by leaving the industry... just send them to me, I'll take care of them for you!
;-)
Since I am working on a BS in CS, i refuse to read this article.
I am already depressed that I have to take up to Calc 4 and then some other math classes, which I still dont get why they dont tell me I have to do up to Calc 8 since all the other math classes I have to take are Calc related.
Bahhhh.... 3 years of College left.
Damnit, it is dead, I agree.
All I hear now adays is "A Masters degree would be more than enough, you're overqualified!", and then continues with "We're looking for people with a Bachelors degree at most, in reality we prefer take those who have just 80p (2 years); you guys costs way too much!"
It sucks to have 240p in math and computer science, and can't get a job in the industry, because I "cost too much".
If the software insdustry is dead, this would be quite odd. Perhaps certain portions of the industry are getting saturated, but there apparently still are some developing markets. Now if developing market out there is looking for a summer geek, I have a resume waiting for them...
To say the industry is dead is to imply there's nothing new under the sun. Wrong. Software is not a commodity; it's driven by innovation, and the next killer app is always on the way. I am assuming, of course, that open source folks won't be the only ones writing killer apps.
Last friday I was sitting in a meeting. A guy giving a presentation was trying to input about 900 records of data into a new system when he discovered the data was in the wrong format. A dozen contractors twiddling thumbs on company time because of a litte hosed data.
I took me about five minutes to wrote a little routine to parse the data into the correct format. Within the hour we were back on schedule.
So the answer to the question is "no".
This is the age of information. The more information we have, the more need there will be to manipulate that infroamtion.
"God fights on the side with the best artillery." - Napoleon, Marshal of France - speaking truth to power
Software today is pretty basic - most bespoke software tends to be database-driven input/ouput storage and reporting systems. Software isn't smart, and it needs to be.
What I'm waiting for is heuristic software that learns; mediaplayers that talk to file-sharing progs and download other MP3s based on what I listen to, without me having to even lift a finger. That kind of thing would be cool.
I want different OS structures. Why the hell do I have to save everything manually? The whole file saving thing was a result of low storage space, so why not develop a whole new way of filing that stores everything and enables versioning and undo functions?
Games are software too - games are nowhere near dead and have a lot of mileage in themselves yet.
So there's a lot of thing yet that haven't been done. We're stuck in a rut because companies that can fund smart software seem more concerned with releasing version 9... 10... whatever of a product to compete with someone elses. Sure competition is good, but it also stagnates the wider market as a whole.
degree in a field that generally needs applied applications (I cannot think of a philosopy program to save my life). I have degrees in MIS and Finance and always find a new job when necessary/desired (in Oklahoma no less, which has a piss poor market for software developers). Being a CS grad you'd probably get more bang for your buck by getting an MBA (you're exactly who the MBA program was designed for).
Like McNealy, he's always saying outrageous stuff to get attention. Surprise, it's always calculated in some way to draw attention to his products or company. I see no reason to believe that this isn't a publicity ploy rather than an oh-so-sincere belief from his heart.
And no I didn't read the article, he blabs stuff all the time and I don't listen anymore. Furthermore, he can burn in hell for eternity for exposing me to his monstrosity of a development tool, Oracle Reports Builder 6i.
I have to say that software industry is growing. I would think that the 'low end' is quite healthy nowadays, considering how many individuals and 'independents' are setting there own companies to produce software for PDAs and mobile phones. Want to play MP3's on your phone? Somebody's bound to have done it (or it's an idea for one of you coders reading this).
It's the high end that is having the problems. And even then not all of them - e.g. I agree with the article that MS is still growing: they keep on diversifying. People have realised that over the years some of the 'high-end' systems they've been getting are a rip-off, and that there are cheaper options (you can guess for yourselves) which can replace them.
I can say even in an economic downturn, that if there is a piece of software that has proven worth, and will genuinely help a customer, then it will be purchased. It's just that nobody is delivering what people want (or could want).
The article said nothing about the software industry being dead. This is the quote from Ellison:
... The industry's maturing. The Valley will never be what it was," Ellison said.
"It's (Silicon Valley) not coming back
I see nothing that mentions the software industry as dead. He only says the days of super growth are over, which I happen to agree with.
There was another article in the WSJ last week talking about how the lifecycle of hardware has extended to 5 years. Other than games (and what business finds that a valid reason), there just isn't any software worth upgrading for. The vast majority of people (non-Slashdotters) continue to use their business machines for the same applications they were using them for 10 years ago: word-processing, spreadsheets, databases, and email.
The web has changed things somewhat by adding streaming media, but the future of "broadband" will be owned by those who own the content.
A year ago, I came to the same conclusion Larry Ellison did. General application software is dead. Software investment in the future will be in specialized applications. Look for companies that are developing software that addresses industry-specific problems: e.g. farm-managment, education, and of course biotechnology. Once I came to this conclusion, I quit my job in Silicon Valley and applied to PhD programs in Biology. Problems in genetics and biophysics are some of the most interesting out there (who wants to work on farm-management software?)
...is not the industry that most programmers work in.
If you're getting a degree in software development, there's about a 98% chance that if you write code, it will be for a custom business system that will never be used outside of the company you work for.
Programmers rarely work in software product companies, and in those companies the programmers find themselves to be the minority (both in number and in pay) -- overshadowed by marketers, admins, and lawyers. Their jobs are to produce the product, worked 18 hours a day, paid what amounts to minimum wage, and maybe one day it might result in a royalty check.
See, the software product industry doesn't really exist. The billions of dollars made by Microsoft are in truth a bizarre anomoly that most companies have not been able to recreate. That is not to say that other companies don't sell software profitably too, but in those cases the software is sold as simply a service offering vessel. Microsoft is one of the few that can sell a shrinkwrap product to millions of people and walk away from them until it's time to sell them the next release.
Other cases where software is sold as a product usually has nothing to do with the rest of the software industry. The box is an end user consumable like entertainment content or some kind of shovelware gimmick.
It is the software product industries Ellison is talking about when he says the software industry is on the decline. He probably even sees it in his own company. No one buys Oracle for the sake of having Oracle software, they buy Oracle so they have Oracle's support infrastructure behind it.
So while the software product industry may be on its way out, it doesn't mean you should switch majors just yet.
The software systems and services industries are poised for a boom. Businesses are starting to collect more information, expanding into more markets, becoming (finally) a little more computer literate. It is in these fields we can seek to sell ourselves, and it is also in these fields we can best sell Linux and open source.
And I don't mean to troll, but Ellison is a known blowhard.
Luck favors the prepared, darling.
True, you'll never experience the joy of being a dot-com paper millionaire. And, with most raw programming work being sent to India, Russia, and other developing (and exploitable) economies, you will likely work for less than those who came before you. However, consulting or contract work isn't such a bad alternative to a pure software house. In fact, I think it's better since you get a wider exposure to the entire software lifecycle.
Another avenue to explore is "shareware". No, seriously. If you come up with a truly useful product (i.e. not a screensaver), even a niche product will do well. I know this goes against the free and open source movements, but I see nothing wrong with it as a source of individual primary or additional income. In fact, I wish I would have bit the bullet and started out by selling my own software -- which is already pulling in about what my first "real" job paid. But now I'm spoiled and to afraid to leave the protective blanket of "working for the man" (benefits, pension, company car, etc.).
"It's square now... the growth just isn't there anymore, the big bumps of the three sided wheel are gone and the good days of people being interested in wheel development are over."
Really the industry probably hasn't seen its best days. How much crappy software is there out there? How far are we from getting it right? Right now we have square wheels, we haven't figured it all out yet. The industry (open and proprietary) is changing, which is good. We are at a point when software is about to become really exciting. There is so much that can be done and bright minds will do it. Besides its better that investors aren't throwing money at anything with DOT and a COM, it will mean sounder companies, sounder projects, and more interest in open/free software solutions (as true believers will make the project anyways, regardless of monetary gain).
"The large print giveth, and the small print taketh away" -Tom Waits
Being a Marketing Major, I am forced to learn this type of thing... New Industries go though several stages. 1. Growth - growing demand with high profit margins. 2. Mature - high competition low profit margin... and in this stage jobs tend to leave for cheaper labor centers which I beleave is India in this industry. 3. Decline... market saturation... kinda self explanitory. The software industry, is a little odd and follows a slightly different path but it still seems we are in the second stage. There will be fewer jobs availible, but there should always be jobs for the most talented programers...
Business News and Resources: www.usasource.net
It's the natural result of trying to turn software into something on which you can't profit.
There's an economic term for unloading products below the cost of production: dumping.
Haven't you heard, we are all about to stop using computers, phones and all those other high-tech gadgets and go back to a simple existence tilling the land.
The software industry isn't dead. Hell, the software industry hasn't even gotten out of infancy yet. Consider that there are already tens of millions of computers in the world, and out of that number there are thousands of types of computers that AREN'T PC type computers running windows. There are millions of embedded, specialty machines that will need software.
Consider that every cellular phone is a computer, every car on the road has a computer in it, and hell, even your microwave has a computer.
And as computers become more ubiqitious and get built into every device, and it requires that these devices become more and more "intelligent", they are going to require more sophisticated software to run them.
You think your microwave that'll accept voice commands is going to happen by magic? We're still 10 or 20 years away from having a computer like "HAL" (in 2001), i.e. a computer smart enough to write it's own software, so, I'd say that there's still plenty of time for you to make some money.
And even then, when computers are doing the programming, there will always be those who are better at it than the machines. Of course, the machines might conspire to bump off those folks, but that's fodder for my next novel...
TTYL!
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
I also am a recent grad (been out 2 years) and every place that I have noticed doesn't truly care about what your degree is in just as long as you have a degree. I work in the banking industry and we have archieologist majors that work here. So your degree will always get you somewhere. As far as software developing being dead, its far from it. Software is just ready for the next generation of what software can do and evolve to something even more great. Someone once said a long time ago that everything that could ever been invented has already been invented. That was before computers were even thought of.
Yes, it is. Here in Europe nearly everybody unemployed got a training for system adminstration or web design in the past _five_ years.
;-PP
Can you imagine how many still unemployed computer guys are there out on the street now ?
So if you are not an expert, and a very bright one indeed you better go somewhere else. If you do not plan to be one of the best just do not waste more money or energy in this field.
Hint: I you leave there will be more work for me at better rates left anyway
I think it is on a (healty) diet. What I expect to see is more revenue through services. I dont sell software, I give it away(gpl), then I (try to)get my revenue through expertise consulting(I tend to know the software I designed myself), unless the client want some specialized solution(they dictate what the want, I supply ), I think it is a good idea to gpl it. The way I see it, software is part of the infrastructure in an modern society, charging for every pice of sw is not an option, we all know gnu software. I would go so far as to say, the infrastructure (ie *generic* software) is (should be) a human right.
Yourdon made a similarsimilar prediction in 1993 and he was way off....
We are in the middle of the information revolution and information processing will be big business.
What the software industry needs is a professional designation like lawyers, doctors, etc...
You will have to pry my proprietary software $$$ from my cold dead hands!
As technology progresses and hardware and software applications morph to meet the demands of the future, newer and better tools will still be needed. There may be a lull in software production currently (in some markets); but that is wholly a byproduct of our ailing economy. As long as we have the need for computer assistance we will have the need for software apps to accompany that hardware. There will always be someone standing on top of a soap box shouting 'nay the end is near', but I don't buy that crap. If Larry says software production is grinding to a halt, it's because he wants people to think that. Likely to serve some money hungry all ulterior motive that we are not aware of.
"Reality is a crutch for people who can't handle drugs" - George Bernard Shaw (1856 - 1950)
... and of course not.
First of all, there will definitely, incontrovertibly, be a contraction in the industry (already well underway) and reduction in salaries. The NYT coverage of this same interview didn't focus on the software industry dying, but more on the power shifting towards customers -- no longer can you wave around technology words and expect people to snap up your product. You have to deliver rock-solid software that works, at an affordable price (of course, the definition of "affordable" is flexible; lots of people buy SAP).
It was kind of inevitable, really. Getting a CS degree was the thing to do to ensure yourself a job after college, at least when I was there, and I think for a time after I left. It seems like there's a glut of people who are "in IT." Maybe they're not all GOOD, but they are plentiful. And add to that, outsourcing to India. Lots of people complain about how remote Indian coders aren't up to snuff, but that won't last; as the firms over there mature and improve their training, they'll only get better.
As for the argument "you'll always need software," well that's true. But you also always need electricity and telephones, and no one really considers those to be premium fields to go into. That said, you can make a lot of money over the course of your life as a bonded electrician. And I think this is the way that IT is headed: it's going to become a commodified, buyer's market.
Which is why I also think it would be a good idea to get some sort of unionization or guild system up and running now, before there's a total glut and everyone's layed off and miserable. The days of high-flying super coders demanding 100K a year plus options, are over. We've come down to earth, some a lot harder than others, and I think we need to deal with the reality of a computer industry that's a lot less glamorous (come on, we all started out as nerds anyway) and less in-demand than we got used to.
The effort it takes to create a copy of a piece of software is so small, unless artificial restrictions (copy protection add-ons, laws) are imposed. And frankly, if you need to spend the larger part of your development time to create "prevention mechanisms", something is wrong with that business model (we are not there yet, but I think it is likely). After all, the productive part of your development work is the real value you create.
So in my opinion the software business in the foreseeable future may not survive as a "production" industry, but rather as a service business. I imagine it like this: the product - the piece of software the developer creates - becomes secondary to the know-how required to actually be able to write a piece of software, or to extend it. A coder then would offer this knowledge as a service.
A business model for this type of enterprise probably already exists among those companies creating open source (GPLed) software. One example springs into my mind - the guy who wrote snort. IIRC he makes money by selling his security knowledge - the tool he created is just that - a tool, or a platform for his services, but not a product.
Recessions always have people fearing the worst. Would it be fair to say that accounting, management, and financial/business analysis are dead? No! Are all college degrees worthless? No! But why are people having a hard time finding jobs? The (world ?) economy has been suffering through a tough job situation due to a recession and decreased business spending in part caused by the open buffet style business practices of the 90's. When spending recovers, jobs should to. You might not get $150/hr to be a COBOL coder. But as long as software is a valuable tool to businesses and individuals, there will be a profitable market. OOPS, forgot, this is /. , ... All technical careers are doomed. There's a conspiracy against all geeks, and all our jobs will be shipped off the third world workers.
Amazing! I submitted this story almost 3 weeks ago.
The bottom line is that the software industry will grow, but no where near the pace of the late 1990s. Expect software business to switch focus from developing new products to maintanence. Ask yourself this? How many new features will included in MS-Office 2005?
The last new area of software development will be automation, to simplify the IT industry, and for manufacturing. IT will get easier as MS and other large software companies incorporate functionality to automate installations and maintanence of OS's and applications. That is what customers are demanding. After that we will declines in software development for "Office productivity software (Word, Excel). Software will continue to grow in manufacturing and engineering tools but is highly unlikely to continue at the volume of the past. Development of manufacturing and engineering tools will be dominated by the small and mid size companies
thats the best comment i have read so far.
I like the analogy he draws between car & computer science. Both the needs are not fundamental (as in food, water and clothing),
workers in both the industry have come under the effect finding cheaper alternatives being developed elsewhere across the world & both can be safely described as mature at the moment.
All that never spelt death for car, neither will it for software.
Siggy Say, Siggy Do
Wake up! It's time that programmers wake up and smell the coffe. Our job is not to program original and intelligent code. Our job will be to make use of the existing code and stich it up and make it play. Kind of like lego. The times when you had to code your template language is hopefully over. Some lucky people will program the infrastructure and the rest will just make use of it. The rest of us/them are without job now. So the old days will never come back. It doesn't make economic sense that all companies make their own infrastructure. It's like making your own office suite because the one you use isn't quite right.
This commentary from eWeek nicely dissects Ellison's troll...
Stop by my site where I write about ERP systems & more
If software development as an industry unto itselft dies, so what? What, you think computers are going to go away entirely? Been reading too much Dune lately?
I don't think you have anything to worry about... you're degree will still be relevant. If software development dies as an industry, then it will be because companies take more of their programming in-house. Computers will still be as important as they would have been otherwise, and those computers will still need software. It doesn't write itself, you know.
I take drugs seriously.
Desktops are starting to be much less critical than they once were, especially at home. The move is to portable devices--fancy PDAs, web-browsing cell phones. Desktop PCs are still important and useful, but stop and think and realize that 90% of desktop use is for a handful of applications: word processing, spreadsheets, email, web browsing, photo and video editing, etc. Quite frankly there isn't much need for more applications in these areas at the moment. Someone buys a PC, they get Word or Photoshop, and they're done with software. Games are a lot more disposable, but consoles rule the day there. The embedded computer market is growing like crazy, of course.
yeah, just like that unix-esque OS... now what's its name?
"The large print giveth, and the small print taketh away" -Tom Waits
For years people have tried to convince me Cobol is dead. Why do I keep seeing Cobol-programmers busy with (what I think is) coding?
Now there's someone (I don't mind he's called Ellison) that's trying to tell me software engineering is dead? Gimme a break
/(bb|[^b]{2})/
I used to work for a major telco that has outsourced 3-5 thousand IT jobs once done near Tampa, FL to India. Now a friend who works for another telco told me this past week that over a 1000 of their IT jobs are going to India by the end of 2004. And that's just in their division (Atlanta). 1000's more will migrate soon and when the major groups groups (billing, financials, HR software, etc) are outsourced and gone, then the smaller supporting groups will leave too. It'll be REAL quiet on Peachtree Street. All over it's like this and now guess who's bitching loudest that H1B visas will soon be scaled back to the levels prior to the big dot-com bubble?
it's spelled 'bulbs'. jesus, aren't you from holland or something?
:)
I think there is an attitude adjustment occuring in the software industry, where anything-goes shitty software is more often being seen for what it is. This may be another reason why JavaScript-coder-kiddies are having trouble finding work.
Unfortunately, we still have a very long way to go, but things are moving forward. I think a lot of credit goes to Open Source and Free software, because most corporate software had become a lost cause. Apple and Sun deserve some credit, too, for OS X and OpenOffice.org, respectively. Slowly but surely, the cult of the "one people, one country, one leader" philosophy of Microsoft.
Healthcare article at Kuro5hin
...not software.
The fact is, The Ellisons, Gates, even Jobs's of the world are a dying breed if the Stallmans, Torvalds and other Open Source guys have their way. open Source has provided much of the real innovations in software over the last decade (how's that BSD TCP stack running these days, Bill?) and has now moved into the arena of whole systems. Why pay $300/annually for a piece of software when a free equivilant that runs better is readliy downloadable?
That said, you can see why Larry is worried. He hears the pounding of the hooves of the horsemen of his economic apocylypse. I, as a ride on one of the thundering heard am enjoying every inch of the ride.
Larry is not exactly the seer he thinks he is. I remember him claiming the PC would be gone before the year 2000.
I think in the next few years we are going to see the market polarize. Big software houses will provide Big Software to Big Companies and Small companies will really begin to adopt Small (Free) Software. Please note I don't mean small as a bad thing.
Most large companies will continue to use the large software because of one HUGE reason. Accountibility. If their datacenter blows up right before Christmas they can go out and SUE Microsoft for the damages. Who do you hold accountable for a failure in Apache? If you didn't pay for it you certainly can't blame the ASF. From experience let me tell you who gets hammered when free software fails.....the system admins. So does that make a person who has been sitting in a cushy server job for 20 years REALLY want to adopt Linux or Apache.
Don't get me wrong. I think this is a crappy way of doing things. But it's how it works today.
While the Microsofts, Corels, and Adobes grab all the headlines most of the work in software is not done in those areas but in what is called vertical markets.
There are a vast amount of industries in the US and around the world that benifit from the use of tailored software for accounting, data processing , and machine control. Medical, Tool & Die, Kitchen Equipment, and the list goes on. Even Beer distributors can benifit has many states have arcane reporting requirement that lend themselves to computerization.
Now many these have gone through their first wave of computers but are now ripe for a new generation. For example in my area I am working with a guy selling beer distributor programs. Our competition is still using software based around a DOS version of Clipper. I am not sure why he hasn't upgraded but it has given me and my partner an opportunity to compete and make some money.
However the caveat is that you need to know the industry and their needs. Because each industry needs is unique it is not easy to transfer specific information from one to another. However if you are able to get dealing with a vertical market it can provide a nice stable income for a long time whether you are working for a company or for yourself.
I work for a company that makes metal cutting machines (http://www.plasma-automation.com) . It been to nearly state of the union and it is unbelieveable the diversity of stuff people make and do. This is all from cutting patterns out of flat metal. I can't imagine what it would be going into the tool & die industry which we don't touch.
Software isn't dead. It has many areas still waiting to be updated with the latest or new areas that could use computerization. Many solutions exist only on windows and not on linux and so on.
How can someone say the "software industry" is dead?! After all, what the hell am I running on my computer? Is this the last version of every program I use?
Is it slowing down? Sure... but I liken it to the field of Physics. A few years ago, you threw a stone and studied gravity. Nowadays, you need supercolliders to study quantum gravity. Amateur physics has slowed down. A lot.
And apparently, so has amateur programming. We all see it every day. Some project starts up in SF that does one thing alright, but it never gets developed into a PRODUCT. A library and a command-line interface is just plain not enough. Not when you are competing against a billion-dollar company with hundreds of great programmers.
But then again, it is definetly not dead. There are still people trying to decipher nature using "non-professional" means. Astronomy is one such field. And software, professional and otherwise, will always continue. After all, the small projects could be considered practice. But most important, they are at the very least a hobby, at the most a passion. And those never die.
I believe the software market will always be needed, as long as we still use computers. That being said, that doesn't mean the software market will continue to pay top dollar.
Right now, you have workers demanding huge salaries for programmer positions. Companies see workers salaries as "cost", so they see how they can outsource the work for more than half the salary. Of course they are going to seriously consider sending jobs overseas.
You can't send "all" the programmer jobs overseas, though. Companies retain programmers because they know how the system works, and can provide inhouse support as well as programming. They provide a comfort level of knowing the person doing the job, and in some cases, knowing they have the proper security clearances.
The software industry is anything but dead. Even if certain software giants fall, there will always be a need for programmers. What people need to understand is that they are going to have to expect a more down to earth salary if they want to compete in the market. It's called supply and demand. Between the globe getting smaller, and colleges churning out programmers, the supply is getting large enough for employers to be choosy.
A slip of the foot you may soon recover, but a slip of the tongue you may never get over. -Benjamin Franklin
No degree is worthless man - you could have a degree in just about anything and if it is from a reputable accredited college it is worth something - it means you chose a goal and stuck with it. And the fact that it is computer science seems even moreso. Even if programming as a job is dead (which is debatable for sure) then there will be SOMETHING computer related in which it will be highly applicable to have a degree for.
They are just talking about private industry in that article. I wouldn't worry about it though. There will always be a need for updating, debugging, and creating new software. Also, think about the government using software developers. Either contractors or government employees are highly needed in software development. People shouldn't be solely focused on private industry for software development. :)
Add on top of that a massive wave of outsourcing and open source/free software and the five-year outlook for North American software firms is challenging. Actually it is impressive that the industry has held on for so long - probably due to low immigration barriers for tech workers that at least for a time made it easier for workers to come here than for work to go there.
"What once was old, now is new, it all depends on your point of view..." This game quote holds more truth than you realize. Yes, as a programmer veteran or old-school gamer, the current series of games or business technology seems like the same old stuff you've been playing with your entire adult life. But, what about those that have just begun their journey? Those people will find the 'old and inferior' to be 'new and improved'. -Chris
SHINY..will go a long way toward getting you employed.
We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold. - HST
ever wanted to know what ...
1 Cool idea
2 ??
3 Profit!!!
actually was?
after years of intensive research I can say it goes like this.
1 Cool idea
2 >>> WORK !!!
3 Profit!!!
The industry is not dead, but the pipe-dream is.
I think people are finally starting to realise that 'killer-app', that mythological fairy in the sky that'll bring you your wildest dreams and riches in an instant, doesn't actually exist.
If you think the industry is dead, you are searching for the wrong thing,
it's a pipe dream, get over it.
The wildest riches beyond your imagination for little to no work pipe dream is dead,
the industry is not.
Did anyone else notice Ellison didn't say software was dead? He said: -- Ellison, known for his outspoken views, was downcast in January as he told Barrons weekly newspaper that high-tech's mind-boggling growth spurt is over -- never to return again. "It's (Silicon Valley) not coming back ... The industry's maturing. The Valley will never be what it was," Ellison said.
--
Essentially, it sounds to me like he's saying we're not going to get another bubble like we had in the 90s. Which seems kind of the prevailing opinion, at least I've not heard anyone said that we're ever goign to return to the growth we had in the 90s.
No.
Just ask Larry.
Larry said "Silicon Valley" isn't coming back. That may be, since Silicon Valley has to pay their staff enough to cover California housing. The software industry is nearly unique in the degree to which is has decoupled 'product' and 'stuff'. Software can travel the world in seconds and can be anyone with some analytic aptitude and willingness to read the source and the manual. This can be done from almost anywhere. Only a fool would thing that the only engineers in the world that can write great code are found in Silicon Valley or Redmond, and Larry is no fool.
I suspect that the software industry will devide into 'tool makers' and 'scripters'. The scripters will use the tools to meet the needs of clients, while a tiny fraction (of the programmers in the world) will code the shared tools.
With open source, common code drops in price. Proprietary code can exist, but it must compete with open source that is at least 'good enough' for many users. This will limit what the 'tool makers' can charge. But custom scripters, that meet the need of a particular clients, are still needed. They produce a product that is complementary to the hardware and the 'tools', so microeconomics predicts that they (us) will have increased demand. Countering that is an increasing supply of programmers (from overseas competitors and from displaced 'tool makers'). I don't know how to quantify the supply and demand for scripter and I don't know how elastic the market is, but I think that these market forces will dominate the next decade.
Software 'giants' thought they could develop tools and sell them to every user in the world - they thought that the sky was the limit on their ability to profit. So, for these companies, the sky is indeed falling.
Think global, act loco
That doesn't mean you can't make money writing software, just that you can't do so in the form of a company that sells really really expensive data CD's.
What about the software that companies in other industries are writing for themselves, either with employees or contractors? I mean, it's not like Ford can go down to CompUSA and buy "Microsoft CarPlant" to run their assembly line. There are also service companies whose service requires software to operate - they may write vast amounts of code, but their product is a service, not the software that provides it.
Apple has written some of the best desktop software of the last few years (the iApps), but they're not a software company either. They try to use the Mac-exclusive software to get you to buy their hardware.
There's lots going on. Don't tear up that degree just yet.
-realinvalidname
Q: Is the software industry dead?
A: Yes, next?
Q: What is the fastest land animal?
A: The Cheeta, next?
Q: Should I fake my orgasms?
A: Yes, next?
With apologies to the writers of the movie Airplane.
Appended to the end of comments you post. 120 chars.
Older slashdot readers will remember the aerospace engineering bust of the 1970s ("will the last person leaving Seattle please turn out the lights"), and there was an EE bust then too - http://www.engtrends.com/InsideEE/Article06a/. Engineers in resource extraction (ie, oil) see boom-busts related to demand, as do those in construction.
For CS PhDs we've gone through a couple of minor boom-bust cycles already. Those graduating in the 1970s and early 80s had easy times finding a job - then, late 80s the market was tighter, fewer positions - then, late 90s, PhDs had lots of options so schools had a hard time recruiting - and in the past two years now it's becoming easier to recruit.
I'm tempted to think of these cycles like the predator-prey population cycles (you know, lots of bunnies, then lots of foxes, then fewer bunnies, then fewer foxes, then repeat). It's just part of the engineering field. The key is that if you love your engineering discipline, and are good at it, you will find a job. If the discipline becomes familiar with the cycle, then we can discourage weaker candidates during boom years and encourage strong candidates during the bust years. Schools can't buy too much into the current cycle.
Are there fundamental changes in the discipline that would make the boom-bust cycle different this time? Increasing consolidation of firms, more barrier to entry from patents, more CS/programmers trained overseas? Maybe. CS is, after all, all about automating tasks and if we get too good at it, we can impact a lot of jobs. But, remember, life is NP-complete - there will always be more to do.
Not that I beleive in the Nostradamus bullshit, but it's to make a point. These guys (Gates and company) always try to see in the future as if they had some sort of crystal ball. Turns out, they can't see in the future just cause they got money. Most of these statements are done to advance an idea or concept that they are trying to get a across:
- 64k is all we'll ever need
- The network computer is the future
- That stupid book bill gates wrote about the future
All failed attempts at predicting things.
Diplomas are Union Cards... or at least they are being treated as the modern day equivalent, these days.
Getting a CS, or *any* degree is not the same thing as going to a trade school, and it's time that people quit treating it that way.
If you went after your CS degree chasing the idea of money, then you are better off changing your major to something you enjoy doing, rather than something that you do for the money.
Let me ask: do you want a job? Or do you want a career? If you just want a job, being a trucker or an assembly line worker at GM generally pays more than being a software engineer.
In the hey-day of Silicon Valley, all you had to do is say you were a "2nd year CS student", and you would be hired by some desperate company, with more funding than good sense, to be a warm body to fill a cubicle, at some inflated salary... what a disaster for everyone: a bunch of partially trained computer scientists who think they are being paid a lot because of the value of what's inside their heads, rather than what's inside their pants (a butt for filling a chair). No more, and the industry is better for it.
The bottom line is that the people who chase a particular degree because "I think that's where the money is", rather than "I think I will enjoy doing this for the rest of my life" are losers. They always have been.
These are the same people who used to want to be doctors, and then used to want to be lawyers. Now they are the people who used to want to be computer scientists.
Creating a life for yourself is all about finding something you enjoy doing, and then finding someone to pay you to do it, not about finding something that someone will pay you to do, and suffering through it.
You will be much happier, and so will your future spouse and kids, when it turns out you don't beat them over being trapped in a job that's "work" for you, when it should be something you enjoy doing.
-- Terry
One of the most important facts I've learned about American economics is the Golden Rule... Those with the gold make the rules. If you've earned a degree in a geeky technical field like chemistry, computer science, engineering, etc... YOUR AMERICAN JOB CAN BE REPLACED BY A LOWER SALARIED FOREIGN PERSON OVER SEAS. This is happening everywhere in the US and abroad in an effort for businesses (those with the gold) to maximize profits (make the rules). It doesn't necessarily matter where one gets a degree, if a job is shipped over seas to lower a business's expenses (paying someone else instead of you), then perhaps you might want to consider a more economically resistent career, perhaps upper management, accounting, law, or medicine. Consider this: there will be a never ending supply of healthcare needs of the population, stupid people needing legal assitence, etc... American businesses cannot ship lawyers' jobs and physcians' jobs over seas.
So to answer your question, NO! You'll find a job, just don't expect it to be as exciting or glamerous, or high paying as you'd like.
e.g. tulip blubs sell well, but not like they used to.
Ah, gotta love Slashdot and all its spelling fulbs.
Accountability on the heads of the powerful.
Power in the hands of the accountable.
I would argue that the Mozilla project has actually innovated the browser platform somewhat, e.g. the 'TypeAhead Find' and 'Image blocking' features - I for one felt the excitement there.
zWhat would an EWOULDBLOCK block, if an EWOULDBLOCK could block would? -- me
I aint in the computer business, just a blue collar sort who loves computers, had one since it was a Sinclair Mail Order!!! The economy has been cleaned out by a bunch of scam artists who looted the economy. That is the heart of the problem. Since they chose the Tech Industry was a favorite hustle, it is hurting worse than most industries. I dont see how anyone could be pessimistic about the future of the Computer Industry unless they want to continue selling 20th century technology for top dollar. These seem to me the sort that are crying the loudest. If I was young and just out of college, I would be extremely optimistic, because alot of garbage in the industry had been hauled to the street, making room for me and my 21st century ideas. The potential for utilizing todays hardware is mostly unrealized, nevermind tomorrows computer networks. There has yet to be written a computer language that even begins to use the potential of the hardware, let alone the software that exploits the language. Get busy!!!
HenryJamesFeltus.com
Correction: the commercial developers use the universities to do their R&D!
zWhat would an EWOULDBLOCK block, if an EWOULDBLOCK could block would? -- me
...and that would be games, the one I work in. Of course when you tie in the low wages and shitty hours, clearly it isn't going to be many people's first choice. Which is OK, coz most of them couldn't do it anyway.
Open-source, free and shareware developers do make some good games, but its a bit like the movie industry at the moment - the big (and even fairly small) commercial studios are the ones living the high life off the profits. With the success of PS2 (and those other console thingies), its a good time to be a game developer...
Game dev and music blog
I read the article. Ellison doesn't say that software is a dead industry, but that its early growth spurt is over, never to return. I think he's right.
The software boom started with the microcomputer revolution, about 25 years ago. At that time, only governments and giant corporations had computers. When you start from virtually nothing, it's not difficult to have 100% growth year after year--for a while. Now there are computers on almost every corporate desktop, and in the majority of American homes.
There are still some growth markets out there--China, for example--but we aren't going to see the market double many more times. This was absolutely predictable, and no one should be surprised.
There's still an opportunity for individual companies to revolutionize our computer use with some truly innovative new applications. (If I had any examples to offer, I would be far too busy striking it rich to tell you about them.)
Will that shiney new degree be worthless?
If you got your degree solely so you could kick back and watch the money role in, then, yes, your degree is worthless.
When all you have is an axe, everything looks like a grindstone.
If you took a good computer programmer of 50 years from now, gave him a modern network, a PERL intrepreter ( or whatever language), and let their program EVAL strings and EVAL those strings, etc etc, he/she would probably blow our minds all the artificial intelligence that we already fail to exploit... Like I said, yall youngsters should get busy...
HenryJamesFeltus.com
Write a legal open source dvd player. .doc files.
Write a word processor than perfectly open up
and fill in the other hundreds of holes in the open system, then charge people for the bandwidth to download it all!
We're just at the edge of a transformations from closed and proprietary software to open and good software with new business models, etc. It's only the old-business-model-companies who are dying.
If you managed to make it through twelve years of primary education and four years of college without learning how to spell 'shiny', just how valuable do you think you're going to be to anyone, degree or not?
Being in the VLSI industry this is a topic that's been discussed quite a bit. It used to be that hardware needed to catch up with software demands. Think back to Windows 3.1-- it took a while to build a 20MHz 386 which made Win3.1 run decently.
You might remember Bill Gates, there's no money to be made in software, comment during those days.
Now, from a consumers point of view, only the gamming industry puts any real stress on the hardware. Your word processor and internet browser will run fine on a 200+MHz PII.
So software still has a lot of potential before it hits limitations. But it will need very advanced programmers to make use of it-- they need to know how to play around with stuff in the AI realm.
The only real fear I have is a 3 year hardware invention brick wall. Silicon is getting much harder to work with, and all the quantum and biological alternatives are still pie in the sky. The recession has brought funding in those technologies to its knees. So I wouldn't be too surprised to see a small stall in Moore's law. If you want to get picky, I think we already are not meeting the 18 month frame of Moore's law. It's more like 24 months now.
Me, I'm going to the dark side. Where power really exists. Come with me to the dark side! We will rule the business world together. Come! Get your MBA!! Go into Management! I am your father!
There is no spoon or sig.
There is other software. Your cellphone and your microwave and your laser printer all have processors in them, and somebody has to write code for them. That business (embedded systems) is also in healthy shape. Not growing by leaps and bounds, not vacuuming up every last resume or recent grad, but not about to fall over and disappear either.
There are lots of businesses and business niches that involve software development. There are even still some businesses paying people to develop websites. And for all the sufferings of unemployed sysadmins, there are still people being paid for sysadmin work out there.
Everybody got burned by the dot-bomb. For a couple of years, businesses were so hungry that they'd hire anybody who could write three lines of Perl and give them a corner office and big stock options. That was an unstable situation and there has been a backlash.
If you ask, "is the industry dying?", there will always be an authoritative idiot saying yes. The more important long-term question is, "could this kind of work hold your interest for three or four decades?", so think about that and plan accordingly.
WWJD for a Klondike Bar?
sort of. Should it be? probably.
One of the biggest lies the corporations ever sold us was that everything useful a person can do is an industry. Is music an industry? no, it is entertainment. Is information an industry? no, it is knowledge. Is entertainment an industry? no, it is a diversion. Is there an industry based in every one of these? yes. Should there be? not necessarily.
They may be nice to have and convenient at that, but they are in no way vital to have them as money-driven gargantuan machines.
Examples of true industry: textiles. metal. machinery. transportation. food.
Examples of false industry: information. music, movies, and other media.
While software has proven itself to be like unto machinery, the fact that there are so many people doing it for free and giving the fruits of their labors away proves that anything infinitely dispersable without loss to the original provider cannot be a true industry without having to actually produce the object being sold. Linus Torvalds created the Linux kernel, but if I copy it and give it to a friend, Linus has lost nothing. If I have a wooden box and I copy it and give it away, I have lost the cost of the wood. That is the difference. I know there are holes in my arguement, but thats where semantics come in and I generally ignore semantics when they are placed on an idealistic level anyhow. Until a serious discussion on the subject takes place, there isn't any point in bothering with them.
In SOVIET RUSSIA... erm...NSA AMERICA, the Internet logs onto YOU!
I think I read this in a Stephenson book, but I forsee a re-classification of developers. Kind of the same as car mechanics. When cars first came out, a mechanic was very expensive, well paid, highly trained individual, and they're weren't that many. Then everyone saw what a great busniess it was to be in, and jumped on the band wagon, and now they are on every street corner, and while they get paid pertty good, the boom-time is long past.
Where I read this, developer's were termed "BitSwappers" and weren't very well respected.
M@
Krispy Cream is people
An interesting comment coming from a guy who is involved with designing and implementing DATABASES for a living -- I can't think of a less far-sighted software occupation.
Maybe he's forecasting the death of bloated, simple, instrumental technologies like those he creates?
That's like saying the auto industry is a dead industry.
Sure, the auto group doesn't have the 500% a year growth that it had in the early 1900's, but it is far from a dead industry.
It would be more acurate to say that the software business is not a GROWTH industry. Most of the software "capacity" has been filled. Now software is a "replacement" business. No new capacity, just expansion of existing capacity.
-ted
Reading this article, I'm greeted with a huge ad for... Microsoft.
Which pretty well leads to the point I was going to make - Microsoft dominated the softawre industry.
And so does their eternal gobbling up/elimination of companies that actually have innovative products - or product that people actually LIKE.
* Bungie, is the first company that springs to mind.
Netscape died at the hands of IE.
* Apple and the Mac OS has a knife on the throat thanks to Windows.
* BeOS - MS is said to have a finger in the play of Be's funeral tune.
* AMD has had numerous plroblems with Windows in teh past.
* DRDOS and OS/2 was blatantly sabotaged by Windows software.
* QuickTime was sabotaged since Win95b and onwards.
* Linux is under judicial threat in teh USm thanks to Microsoft.
And so on.
Who would want to develop innovative commercial products when you're at risk being run over by a steam locomotive, if you get too successful?
Hardly anybody (myself included) forget that the software industry was also in a slump in mid-80's. Tech was not hot at the time, lots of programmers were laid off. And it was only re-invigorated by the success of the P.C. Perhaps we just have to wait for the next revolution (post-internet)
Besides, there are people who specialize in business. Except that if they're not flexible, their shiny degree aint worth much either. (Heard an interview with an unemployed "Vice President of Brand Awareness." Can't understand why he's a year plus on the breadlines.) Which brings me to my main point: everybody needs to be flexible.
Too many techies are overspecialized. Their only educational priority is to prepare for some job that happens to be Very Hot when they start school. Even if the dot.com boom had lasted for 100 years, people like that would be in big trouble eventually. Technology changes, and you need the mental flexibility to keep up with those changes. You won't get that with a narrow education.
My biggest complaint about the cost of living in the US is that the "standard of living" is a moving target here. If you have an old, well running car or if you have an old house, somehow you are supposed to make an extra effort in earning more so that you can move to a "nicer place" with a "nicer car".
The real estate prices too are in a way, silly. The cost of land is not much, the houses are getting bigger and bigger, and no one can find a place that is good but small enough to be affordable. Just like the dream of owing new SUVs, a lot of the cost of living is in the minds.
S
to sustained success in the IT world is not being a capable programmer, but being flexible enough to use the tools that the enterprise uses -AND- being able to learn the business domain. Trust me, as an engineer, it is FAR easier to train someone in manufacturing how to program than it is to teach a coder how to be a manufacturing engineer.
Exactly correct. Read Eric S. Raymond's The Cathedral and the Bazaar for a thorough explanation of why the factory model of software companies is flawed. Software development works best as a service, such as in business IT departments and consulting firms. Corporations who currently make money primarily by selling software (as opposed to services) will eventually die, but will barely harm developers, if at all.
Developers: We can use your help.
yes, as evidenced by VA's stock price
If someone were to write a good enough implementation of everything, everyone would eventually own a copy. Because software lasts forever, there would be no need to buy any more.
i'm not dead yet
WHACK
you are now
My problem? I was perfectly gruntled, until some numbnuts came by and dissed me.
In ten years, we'll be filing his quote in with Ken Olson's quote that there's a market for maybe a dozen computers worldwide, or the comment from the patent office clerk a century or so ago that said everything that can be invented already has been.
Of course, it's technically possible that Ellison is right. I wouldn't wager on it, myself, humankind has a history of doing things that can't be done-- walking on the moon, breaking the sound barrier...
And you can expect companies to screw their employees by going to cheaper and cheaper labour. After all, the effect in the short term is hardly noticeable even though over time it will completely shift the ecconomic base from the richest countries to the poorer countries.
It take more faith to believe in evolution than it takes to believe in God
Software does have a future. As an industry, not as a career. As software has become a business commodity the programmer has become the intellectual version of the grunt laborer. Once Big business realized this, outsourcing was inevitable. And of course, being that this is America, big business also used their money bribe our legislators into letting them have slaves in the form of H-1B.
As a veteran of IT I was there when you had to have real skill to get involved. Also, being around during the boom I saw that attitude change and companies take on inexperienced employees because it was sooo hard to find employees in general. I worked on Bank of America's network security team and it was pretty much a training camp for unqualified employees. By the time they had some skills they realized that they could make more $ elsewhere so it was a never ending cycle. If your parents and their friend thought you were a computer guru and you went to a MCSE boot camp you could get a senior level IT job. Now all the while there was REAL growth in IT but we all know that there was a TON of FALSE growth due to the IPO scam that America fell into. Now I am having a hard time finding a job even though I DO have senior level skills because the market is flooded with all these Wannabes that had their ego built up by the over demand. These people need to go take their real jobs at Burger King and Home Depot so that the REAL IT people can get an interview.
It seems only fair that the most experienced / qualified people stay in the industry that they have those skills in and the least qualified get out of the industry. Anyone still in school taking Computer Science with lofty dreams of making it to the top is fooling themselves and they will find themselves working in a low paying / thankless job. Sorry guys you missed the boom and it is now a buyer's (employer's) market so chances with no experience you are out of luck.
My advice for would be Computer Science majors would be to switch majors to one that compliments a market where there is a demand for workers. I have investigated what that is, but may be forced to very soon. With that said there are a bunch of people that are going into Computer Science because it is their passion and not as a career path. For those I say fine just don't take enthusiasm for a false sense of job security because it does not exist.
There ya go...
lol
Nick Powers
My Resume
Encryption: I may not agree with what you say, but I will defend your right to encrypt it...
So you went to college and majored in a computer related field thinking you were going to be the next Bill Gates? Or maybe you thought you'd work for Bill Gates and get a tiny slice of the pie?
You're not alone but you are probably in for a big surprise if you haven't already figured this out...
Think about musicians. There are a whole lot of them out there and almost all of them dream of making it big. Most of those that make money as a musician are doing so in obscurity and without the *BIG* money. Most musicians know this.
Think about how many companies sell software. Think about how many employees they have.
Think about how many people are out there that can work in the software industry.
The fact is that most people making money in the computer industry are not doing it by working for a company that sells software.
So, is the software industry dead? Not really but it was never "alive" the way you thought it was. It's smaller than it has been in the past but your chances weren't that great to being with--greater than being the next top 20 artist but not as great as you probably thought.
What should you do? Do what we all do...go get a job writing software for company that has every intent of using it rather than selling it.
My father in-law is a potatoe grower and he knows when a recession is ending and starting. Like alcohol it is inverse and indicates more in-home entertainment.
"You can't make a race horse of a pig"
"No," said Samuel, "but you can make very fast pig"
Nowadays, just about everyone graduating has some kind of computer programming experience. The ability has become a commodity, programmers are a dime a dozen, especially in foreign labor pools.
So no, its not dead, its just not going to pay like it used to.
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
I think the main reason there's this feeling of, well, stagnation in the industry, is because of the inability of people to see the "Next Big Thing" that will drive development.
Spreadsheets, GUIs, relational DBMS's (Oracle), and the internet were all new technologies that added impulses (in the engineering sense) to the computer industry pendulum, keeping it swinging higher. People right now are unsure where that next kick is coming from.
What is coming down the pike that people absolutely must have? Bioinformatics? Small wireless devices? If you knew what's coming next, you could be the next Larry Ellison. Unfortunately, Larry wants to be the next Larry Ellison, too, and he's got more money to spend on research.
In the end, you should find something that is well defined (fuzzy plans make flops), that interests you, that doesn't put you in direct competition with a multi-billion dollar firm, and that there's at least some market for. If you're good at it, you'll do fine.
Or join the multi-billion dollar firm, and save your weekends for fun.
Well, almost...
-Is the software industry dead?
-I think it's safe to say that it's not dead...
THEN WTF IS THIS EVEN ON THE FRONT PAGE!?!??!?!?!?! I guess this fact isn't obvious enough. I mean really... Anybody with have a brain can see the industry isn't ead by ANY stretch of the imagination! And if it's so obvious as to warrent that last reply WHY MUST YOU KEEP REPRINTING THIS DAMN STORY!??!
Sorry, I had to vent.. This topic is SO stale...
You need a FREE iPod Nano
"I feel sorry for you youngsters - the golden age of the industry is behind us. I was so fortunate to have been there. Too bad we're just leaving the husks for you newcomers."
This was also the gist of a speech by a recent lifetime achievement award winner at one of the premier networking conferences. The recipient could as easily have said that a lot of great work has been done but the best part, of scaling the Internet to handle billions of active devices is still to come.
Old guys were probably saying the same stuff back in the 70s or 80s when the mainframe and minicomputer industries went through consolidation. "The days of the great mainframe sort utilities are behind us!"
His business model (buying Gray Davis the CA governor) got discovered and the legislature canceled his huge software deal that *everyone* except Ellis and a certain Davis appointed state official said was simply uneccesary.
Now he has to go scare up business, but he can't push the National ID card on the government because we don't need that either.
His business of selling overpriced, unecessary database software to governments facing huge deficits is what's dead.
really?
You mean I can sue Microsoft over a bug?
Would $500 per instance be too greedy?
Where is that attorney from the earlier post..
The truth about Led Zep should never be told on
His "Terminater" series:
His "Left Behind" series (I found these VERY helpful in surviving the Y2K cyber-apocalypse, did YOU survive?!!)
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
I don't know if the quote from Larry is taken from
a larger set, but as it stands the article misrepresents the statement rather wildly. I mean what he says is that the boom days are over and will probably never return. He do NOT say that growth will never return, just that it will no return in general with mega growth rates like the three digit growth rates that for a while seemed to be the norm.
I mean if the software industry manages to get back to an average of 5%-8% annual growth that is still growth, but it is not enough to make Sillicon Valley 'what it once was' to use Larry's words.
Before I say anything about the industry, let me start out by saying that you never, ever waste your time when you study computer science. Even if you never use it professionally (increasingly likely these days) you'll still find the ability to completely control a computer (as opposed to "using" a computer like most people) very valuable. Just think; by the time you're done with your degree program, you'll be able to understand and work with any computer you're plunked down next to. Not only that; you'll be able to make the thing do your bidding. That's a pearl of great price, don't think of it in career terms.
Having said that, yes, unfortunately the software industry is dead, at least from the perspective of the individual programmer. There are a lot of reasons for this, including:
1. Most corporations and private companies are outsourcing almost *everything*, usually either overseas (India, mostly) or to local companies that use overseas talent. You can't beat them on price, ok? Their cost of living is a fraction of yours, and they'll undercut you until you starve. It doesn't matter that your skills are superior, or that you're a great programmer; some guy in Bangalore can work for 1/5 what you cost, and to a pointy-haired boss, that's all that matters. This is a terrible, terrible thing, and corporations deserve no loyalty or mercy from us -- when their customer base can no longer afford their products thanks to rampant layoffs, they'll die off like the vermin they are. But there's nothing we (or anyone) can do about it, so we might as well accept it.
2. Even if a private company isn't going to go into full-blown outsourcing, they ARE going to rely mostly on contractors. What THIS means is, most of the work will go to inexpensive foreign talent ANYWAY (because now, the contracting companies will do the outsourcing) and those Americans who DO get contracting gigs will have to settle for chump change or lose the bid. IF, that is, you can get them to pay you at all -- there are lots, and I mean lots, of stories about people getting stiffed by companies. Corporate IT is a really dicey business for a programmer or admin these days.
3. Software companies aren't going to provide many jobs. Applications software is deader than hell. It's been slaughtered by the Open Source community, who can produce solid software that not only costs nothing, but which can be copied infinitely, and has no hidden gotchas like the equivalent proprietary software. You simply cannot compete with that; you can't beat them on quality, or on price, or even on style (most open source software these days even LOOKS good). It's a dead industry, ok? Not that this is a bad thing, necessarily, but it does mean you won't be able to count on a salary from this sector.
But it's not all doom and gloom. There are still a couple of places where you can make some money.
First of all, public sector jobs may not pay as much as the private sector USED to, but they sure pay a hell of a lot more NOW. Federal, State, and Local jobs are all unionized, so you're protected, and you get great benefits. So this is a great place to hunker down during the recession. One warning: they can be annoying places to work. But it's worth a little aggravation to have a steady job.
Second of all, if you're good at graphics, game companies are going to keep growing. They're making money hand over fist. But concentrate on console games. People are sick of having to upgrade their PCs every couple of years, and they're switching over to consoles at a breakneck pace.
Third, and this is pretty dicey, you might be able to make some bread writing Java and J2EE libraries and tools that corporations might want to buy. Get the money up front, though. Don't get stiffed. And, buy some kind of dongle or other copy-protection scheme, or corporations WILL pirate your code like mad. Think I'm kidding? Companies like to ask you for a "demo" and then, use that to do whatever project they had in mind. Then you don't get paid. Get the don
Farewell! It's been a fine buncha years!
Robotics and Automation is the future, I think the internet is going to become a commodity and just an assumed medium just like computers eventually.
Robotics / Automation in everything from food prep to pumping your gas is where the future really is.
We've never built the 1950's eutopia that was assumed to be possible by now.
Competition and capitalism are helping to drive this but at the same time crush it as slow development cycles are good for business.
..at least the BSD software industry. ;-)
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
Do a degree in Biology and make shit loads of money in the Pharma industry as a bioinformatician.
With all the genetic information now available now which we know very little about yet, there is a very high need for people with knowledge in CS and Biology to analyse this data -- incidentally, students most likely to take CS have historically looked down on the natural sciences and natural science students have historically been afraid of the quantitative sciences including CS.
I know a few physicists and mathematicians who have learned a bit of biology and scored big in Bioinformatics, the reverse is also true but fewer biologists have learned CS to become bioinformaticians.
"Fighting terrorists with millitary might is like killing a mosquitor on your Dad's forehead with a rifle."
I think the exact opposite is true. The hardware these days is amazingly fast. Once software matures to use the new hardware to the fullest potential I will be a much happier gamer.
I think software has a long way to go in other fields besides gaming. Windows 2003 is not a giant leap forward and users of Windows still want more features/reliability/speed. Increasing hardware speed only helps so much if the software isn't developed.
I concur. In 1980, a typical machine ran at 1 MHz. Today, 4 GHz machines are not uncommon. Modern processors can dispatch several instructions per second (for optimized code). Thus, compuational power has increased by a factor of roughly 10,000 over the last 25 years.
The software industry will continue to grow. The rate at which computational power is increasing may slow after this decade, but people entering the software industry today will still see another factor of 10,000 (if not much more). This is truly revolutionary.
I usually assume that the problem space addressible by computers goes as the log of the computational power. I expect the software industry to focus on these new applications. Today's big software programs, such as word processors, spreadsheets, and even operating systems will become increasingly dominated by open source efforts as the software industry views these at 'too simple' to gain significant differentiation and added value. The market for tools to develop these complex new applications may become increasingly important (and even more difficult than today).
Given one hour to live, the student replied: "I'd spend it with professor FP who can make an hour seem like a lifetime."
For another pessimistic point of view, check out May's Harvard Business Review, "IT Doesn't Matter," summary here. (I suggest reading it at a good magazine store with tables and coffee because buying the damn thing is not a sound value proposition.)
The article essentially argues that an in-house IT department is no longer strategic for most companies--that IT has become a commodity. Although I think this is completely absurd at this point, chances are they have a point. In any case, it's interesting reading.
Milo
Becuase " Gene Simmons never had a personal computer when he was a kid ".
Damn whippersnappers!
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
the software industry is dead. do not get a degree in software. there are no jobs in software.
(phew, if he believes it then *my* job is a smidge safer)
OTOH, the software industry is going through, and will continue to go through, large changes. There will be fewer opportunities for three people in a garage to become billionaires. In many cases, large development organizations dedicated to a single product (the equivalent of factories in manufacturing industries) will be moved out of the United States in pursuit of lower labor costs. There will still be lots of small jobs that are done locally, but in many of those cases an understanding of the business or process into which the software fits will be as important as development skills. Research jobs will still exist for the talented few who can do that well. But overall, I expect it to be a very different environment than it has been for the past 20 years.
you should know better than to ask a bunch of software people if their industry is dead. especially this group! slashdotters are notoriously nose-in-the-air about what they do and what they like.
clue in man! you never as the king if he's doing a good job if you want the real answer.
Slashdot ate my linkie! That's my story and I'm sticking to it!
I am also graduating in a few weeks and am looking for a programming job. I majored in mathematics, and have always seen computer science as field of mathematics. A degree in Mathematics or Electrical Engineering will prepare you for a job as a code monkey almost as well as a Comp Sci degree, and it will prepare you for a job an many other fields as well. In fact most of your comp sci professors probably majored in math or EE.
The markets are always changing. If you only want to write code, I don't know what to tell you. I do feel confident that businesses will always need geeks. If you are flexable you can always find a fun job.
The effect will not be to shift the money accross geographic boundaries, but rather, class boundaries. The money will continue to shift upward. The jobs will shift overseas, only because they can be paid less there. That will drive down wages here, and then when the wages in that country start to rise, production will be moved yet again to an even cheaper market.
Ultimately though the people who will benefit the most from this are those who control capital and the means of production. They will be able to drive down costs, and thus drive up profits. More money will flow up to the top because of this. This will be a global phenomenon.
This sig has been temporarily disconnected or is no longer in service
Wow, all the small players without any marketing clout are being beaten into submission by large companies with substantial resources? That's so unlike every other media industry out there :)
This sig has been temporarily disconnected or is no longer in service
90% of programmers make a software which will never be sold on the shelf.
Look at Nokia for example: they have thousands of programmers and they aren't selling any software for the end users.
Cell phones, cell phone networks, banks and many others require tons of software. Unlikely ordinary desktop software, this software must be bug-free and very optimized.
From having observed a number of different threads on slashdot that are on topics related to this one, I have come to the conclusion that people here equate the usefulness of a degree (and a computer science degree in particular) based on the amount of $$$ that a company is willing to pay someone because they have said degree.
Right now some of you may be saying, 'Well, duh!!'
The fact is, there are a million and one reasons why someone could have gone to university to get a degree in a particular field. If the original author of this thread simply got a computer science degree because he saw a cushy job with a large salary and good benefits at the end of his time in university, then, unfortunately, yes, his degree is worthless. Now, on the other hand, if he had gone to university with larger goals in mind, then his degree might be worth a lot more.
What are these larger goals? Well, the author has to ask himself, why did he originally choose to pursue a degree in computer science? Was it because in highschool he enjoyed mathematics and tinkering with computers? If so, then he has just spent four years studying and learning about a topic for which he has a genuine interest. Gaining knowledge simply for the sake of gaining knowledge is most definitely NOT a worthless endeavour.
Again, I hear the naysayers: "That's all well and good in your socialist dreamworld, but we live in a capitalist economy and one needs to make a living."
There *are* still software development jobs out there. And I bet you any money, a company would be much more willing to hire a university grad who has a genuine interest in being a developer, someone who is fascinated by the world of computers, than someone who views programming as a chore and only chose the comp.sci. route because he felt he could make a lot of money in that field.
The same goes for any profession. You're going to be spending at a minimum 40 hours a week doing your job (and in some cases, that's a gross underestimate). Even if you have a job that pays six figures, you have to *enjoy* what you're doing, otherwise you'll be miserable and you'll consider you're training and career to be worthless. If you don't believe me, check out some surveys of job satisfaction among BIGLAW lawyers (these are corporate lawyers who have 120+k salaries out of university). If you do enjoy what you're doing, then you'll be more likely to consider the time invested in a degree, and your current career, worthwhile, even if you're not making huge money.
Science and industry are full of these "best days are past" type of quotes. It really doesn't matter how influential or knowledgeable the individual is, they are most often wrong. My favorite of these pronouncements was that of Francis Crick of Watson-Crick-Wilkins fame. Fifteen years after receiving the Nobel prize for the structure of DNA, he stopped do genetics research and proclaimed that all the great discoveries had been made in genetics. He told his friends that the next "hot" area of biology was going to be neurobiochemistry. He left Cambridge and went to the Salk Institute to do research in this field. Within a year of his career change, using restriction endonucleases, labs around the world began cutting and splicing DNA. The "dead" study of genetics was once again resurrected.
I love Mexican food, but have no GPS - what place are you talking about? I've been living off of Anna's Taqueria for months now in order to get my fix.
So given his perspective, he's probably right. I don't think that there's going to be the kind of market (there's that word again) for software that there has been in the past.
As a consumer of software -- be it operating systems (Linux), Web servers (Apache), or programming languages (Perl, Python, gcc) -- I'm much better served by software that is not driven by a profit motive.
The software industry is dead -- long live the software!
On the other hand, this may not be a Bad Thing [tm] for software as a whole. We've all seen the corrupting influence of money on software. Those of us who have been in the business know that every decision in the software industry gets made on one basis, and one basis only -- can the company make money from the work that is being proposed.
Has always been a blow hard. If you have followed any of his wisdom you'd find hes generally ALWAYS wrong. The guy has always thought he's larger than life but in reality he's a pimp trying to sell whatever new fandagled device he comes up with. This isnt new, but larry always has this way of saying things so absurd that people actually listen. The software industry isnt dead, but it may be getting over crowded with people that go to school for computers but have no passion for it. Someone along the way told them, "so what if you build cardboard boxes allday, anyone can learn to program!". Yes people can be trained but its the truly skilled and passionate people that will get the jobs and get them w/o a problem. Passion means spending much of your own time learning. The amount gained on your own surpasses anything you will be taught in school. And that my friends is what seperates the "paper" kids from the "die hards". Programming has nothing to do with physical labor, its brain power.
In a long-ago land, large companies ran Big Iron and green screens and it was pretty damn easy to buy software packages and get them into production. The biggest worry was the amount of customization needed to make the stuff 'fit' your specific business processes, etc.
Nowadays.... We have *nix, Windows, MVS, etc. running on all manner of hardware. We have middleware out the wazoo. So when we go to the street to buy a software package, it's a decent bet that the vendor may drive you to a new platform in your shop. Complexity, cost, etc. increases - and that's even before you have to deal with customization, integration into security infrastructre, etc.
All in all... the software industry gave us many of these platforms, so now they are dealing with it. Pushing industry standards for 'stuff' is the only way the industry will ever find its legs again, and I'm not very confident that this will industry will come back to good health any time soon. In the meantime, let's talk about a new licensing plan, shall we?
CrazyLegs
"Pork!!" said the Fish, and we all laughed.
Yes, it's dead. Until the next round of ill-advised venture capital. But it's been dead most of the time anyways; the management culture that your boss doesn't need to understand software because that's what they all teach in business school killed most companies a long time ago. Notice nobody talks about the "engineering industry"? That's where software is headed - a moderately well-paid underrespected job where the few of us who aren't Dilbert will wish we were. Even new startups (like mine) are getting this way; our VP of engineering is good but every other executive is a B-school wanker who doesn't think of software people as anything other than machinists on the assembly line.
Maybe if we all pronounce it dead, the weak and idotic that joined the fray during the boom will go find other careers and let the real engineers do some work.
People on slashdot generally favor less restricting laws, lower taxations, and fewer restrictions on intellectualism.
Yet, inevitablhy, you can find posts like this that on the site that whine about labor going over seas, and how unless people here "wake up" things won't change.
It's not about the people in the US. It's about the corporations that OWN the money, and in that way there are remarkably FEW. There are probably approximately 15 companies that basically own the markets in every commodity you can think of, and NO amount of persuasion or frustration is going to force these people to change their strategy of build it cheap and sell it expensive.
Look at BIC, and tell me how many different companies they own, here in the US. Dozens.
So, in the end, the ONLY way to force labor to stay here is what the Japanese have down (disasterously so far). Lock your markets, tariff things coming in exhorbitantly, artifically inflate your land value and your currency value, then subsidize your largest companies will the imaginary value you just generated.
All that takes laws - a huge amount of legislation and enforcement, and an ARTIFICIAL barrier on labor and goods.
Sorry, but that's hackneyed and naive... I wish I had a nickel for every posting like this.
Things are pretty tough all over and you may not be saved just because you have talent and passion.
e.g. tulip blubs sell well, but not like they used to.
I'm sure I'm reiterating what a few dozen other posts have already pointed out, but Holland's economic debacle was primarily due to the fact that the value of a tulip is almost entirely based on end-user utility. Information science, on the other hand, deals with the refinement of information. Much of this ability to process information is directed at the acquisition of additional wealth. That is, information science has far higher objective economic value because it directly results in the ability to harvest more wealth.
Stop-Prism.org: Opt Out of Surveillance
My employer, a city government, just spent a *year* trying to fill the position of city engineer, and found almost no candidates qualified, except for those who only really met 1970's standards. Go for the Civil Engineering degree, the world has come round full circle and they are back in demand. Having a CS degree will be great since the current crop of CE's in the job market are so old, they have no real modern computer skills.
It isn't dead. It is shifting to India and Indians. First through H1 visas and now through direct overseas outsourcing.
He can't tell the difference between "seems" and "seams" either. God help us if this is what they're allowing out the door with a sheepskin these days. No wonder he's apprehensive about the job market. Better try Wal-Mart, they're always looking for security guards, erm, I mean "door greeters".
If a company can find a way to profitably add true value, the business will likely continue in some form.
If the company generates fluff (without profit) it won't exist and likely shouldn't.
There are many people gainfully employed creating valuable products, and profit for their companies. The industry doesn't matter.
It amazes me how people can miss the obvious when they are faced with a recession. Sure, everything looks gloomy in a recession, but that doesn't mean whole industries are "dying". Software has a LOT of room to grow. The dream of having computers integrated into every aspect of our lives is not going to happen without software. Right now computers mostly live in one room by themselves, and only talk to themselves. But one day we will have refrigerators ordering milk for us when we run out, portable devices will expand to be as common as a wrist watch, every car will have its own computer with GPS, computers will be used to make supply and demand much more effective, and of course, then there is the whole dream of robotics. Computers have a HUGE area into which they can expand. All these devices will need software, and all those devices, including the current ones, will continue to need to have their software refined and added to. This hardly sounds like death to me.
You have a quality degree and you seem like a smart, accomplished person, but I think you're mistaken that all of the dot-bomb era newbies were incompetent slobs. It could very well be that some of them are sharp people that found their calling (or, at least, a reasonable one) through dumb luck.
Try picturing (for example) a chemical engineer from A&M working for an oil company in Louisiana and hating life. Maybe he saw all the dot-commers, remembered his success in Fortran 101 (or whatever) and took the plunge. Maybe he did very well and decided to make a career change. What think? Could this have happened?
MS(c). in Computing, BA in Economics, fluent Japanese, German, French, Java, C# (.NET), Sales and marketing experience.
But no job.
It's not just for CS only majors things have gotten bad. It's bad for everyone.
"Shiney"? What is this, the second grade?
...then you should know how to spell "shiny".
What the hell is a tulip blub?
Let it be sufficient to say that certain people are prone to pirate software and save that money they might have spent for the less readily available hardware. When physical matter becomes transferable via the internet, who knows what will happen. I know I will wait in line to buy an HP 3D molecule reassembler(tm), which would essentially be the last thing you would ever have to buy. any thoughts?
-Silmarildur
Saying 'software is dead' is like saying Oracle is dead. Wait, he may have a point then... Anyway, that company needs to just ditch that guy. You will start seeing their p/e value go up real fast.
Manipulate the moderator system! Mod someone as "overrated" today.
Computer Industry: I'm not dead yet! I don't want to go on the cart!
When I was in school my senior year I got involved in a battle between the Engineering school and the Computer Science school. The CS school had made very publice statements to the press that Engineering was a dead field and there was no need for Engineers anymore. They wanted the school to be dismantled and eliminated. Of course all the money could then be funnelled into the CS school. Needless to say in the end the accusations were found to be baseless and some people in the CS school got in big trouble for falsifying some important documents and releasing some private information.
Software and Hardware engineering and design are not suddenly going to stop because some industry people see a downturn in demand. These skills will ALWAYS be needed as our civilization grows and evolves. Narrow focussed people will assume the worst because in the software industry we are seeing a shift in marketing, development, and distribution models(in many ways thanks to the latest open source movement).
The world is not coming to an end, its just changing. Adapt or die.
Mike
The dirty secret in the ERP market is that the differences between PeopleSoft, SAP, and Oracle are relatively trivial. Certainly database access can get half a second faster, run over a tablet instead of a PC, or run on cheaper hardware. But the dramatic gains happened in the nineties when all the information got into the databases in the first place.
Database-centric software is about to become like cars. We have the basic 4-wheel, 3-box, internal combustion model. Some makers squeeze 10% more fuel efficiency out. But the real competition is all hype and price.
Monte argues, and I believe, that growth in software has to come from intelligence. Analytics, engines, and rules need to encode process and real world knowledge. That is where the next opportunity for software is.
"All that is required for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing." - Edmund Burke
Hah. Of course not! Why, there are so many areas in which to get a degree these days. It's apparently only worthless if it's for computer science. But, I mean, what are the chances of that?
"The wars of the future will not be fought on the battlefield or at sea. They will be fought in space, or possibly on top of a very tall mountain. In either case, most of the actual fighting will be done by small robots. And as you go forth today remember always your duty is clear: To build and maintain those robots."
-- Military school Commandant's graduation address, "The Secret War of Lisa Simpson"
there's no need to learn computers, they'll just program themselves in 5 years.
Where was the outcry when manufacturing and textiles took a flying leap into ASIA?
Whenever I hear about outsourcing to other countries, I have to retrospect that this has been happening for at least 20 years in one industry or another.
Whenever there is a labour force to do simple training to do the same job you do at half the price, I would be stupid not to say yes. STUPID.
Of course that is where the laws of tarrifs, etc try to balance the deficits of greedy companies.
In My Biased Opinion, I believe that many social woes from America come from a society of consumers constantly wanting more. This makes them greedy, greedier than other countries anyways.
Bye!
Two things to remember:
1) The Silicon Valley is not The Software Industry
2) The fortunes of a handful of companies do not define an entire industry
Software is a lovely new tool, without much history (as compared to things like structural engineering, agriculture, political science). As such, there will be widely-differing approaches to using this accretion of abstract thought that makes machines do things in the real world. Once unleashed, a technology is almost never removed from the world, for good or ill.
Remember how the automobile industry looked before WWII - there were literally hundreds of varieties of automobile you could purchase, from companies largeish and small. Though the number of companies making them has decreased, the industry as a whole is quite active (and has a large hand in controlling most aspects of how we live, at least in most places).
Software, and the related technologies that keep evolving, is an important asset to our species. What would remove it from our considerations would likely also remove us from this rock.
Whitworth what? Are you from England? The Whitworth thread hasn't been used since WW II
Here is how it got wiped out. The US saves the world, again.
Free cell phone tracking
Software development is not going to go away. So you have to look at the skills that will be needed in the future as automation increases and more coding is sent offshore.
At the heart of software development is defining the problem and examining the alternative solutions that could be implemented. These are not skills that will likely be automated and based on my experience with offshore development not likely to be outsourced anytime soon.
There is a lot more to software than knowing a few languages and coding elegantly.
that zero (0) american programmers will SURVIVE .
.
silicon war, of course
our initial assessment, is that india and china will rise but fall- quickly (as the US).
US dogs (productivity is 0.5 ) will all become real estate agents
M. Al-Sahaf
NO. The SOftware Industry is NOT DEAD. Over time, what we have come to realise is that sofwtare systems are only as interested as the SUBSTRATE they run on. Consider nanotechnology. In a few years, nanotech will be ready to move into the mass-market realm. Such systems will require all kinds of new software in order to be able to program those little critters. Or, consider quantum computing. There isa goign to be a huge resurgence in the importance of soft ware once those quantum computers leave the labs!!! And, lastly, let's not discount biotech. It seems likely to me that at some point, the ability to program genes, biochemical production systems, etc will all be done programmatically. Sofwtare, to date, has been limited by lame computers. For these reasons, programmers should be on the front lines of rooting for these burgeoning new technologies!!!
I think it's really typical of egomaniac Larry Ellison to confuse the future of his company with the future of the industry as a whole. Database technology is now a commodity, but this is not true of all software. Oracle's attempts to branch out into higher-value software (financials, ERP...) have not fared spectacularly well, but this will not be true of all companies.
Nuf said.
Didn't matter to me though.
For about 6 years I was a full time musician, which was a great way to spend my twenties.
About halfway through that, I started programming part time.
When I hit 30, it was time to settle down to a full time job. It was programming PC's for small business, and I dug it.
Looking back on it, my job didn't even exist when I was in college. My freshman CPS 120 class was done on punch cards for Christ sake!
Everything changes. Figure out what you dig, and find out where there is a need.
If you got a $100 bill, put your hands up...
"Fick dich" heißt das du rasseunreiner Volksschädling. Aber du jüdischer Drecksbastard kommst auch noch ins Gas wie die anderen. Verlaß dich drauf!
As someone who works on the cutting edge of the software field (and no, I don't mean .Net), I can assure you that the field is far from tapped. Many of the applications of the applications of the 80's (word processors, spreadsheets, databases) are nearly feature complete, and so the companies which make those things are very soon going to either wither or adapt. There are, though, literally thousands of new applications that haven't yet been explored (and many that haven't even yet been thought of). Larry Ellison is just too dumb to see those possibilities, which is why he won't be there when the next software boom happens (and believe me, it won't have anything to do with the World Wide Web).
"If English was good enough for Jesus, it's good enough for everyone else."
Since I've been developing or selling software for most of my adult life, I'd like to share a little of what I've learned:
* The industry is not dead. It's evolving. Enterprise apps like Oracle SAP and Siebel have tapped their markets. Typically, this happens every 4-6 years. When the next big technology change occurs (PCs, LANs, 32 Bit GUI Apps, Web, etc), the big guys will get another chance. Right now their trying to add functionality to their products and cross-sell into their account base.
* Small and midsize companies are buying, but they are cheapskates in comparison to large enterprises.
* To compete in the software marketplace you need to have the ability to develop custom software.
* Right now, there is tremendous demand for integration. Portals, EAI (Enterprise Application Integration) and so on are all doing ok. The problem is that this is not sexy work or big $$ work. This is also great space for open source.
I think Larry's off his rocker except for one thing: the days of companies buying everything from Oracle are probably numbered.
-- $G
US dogs (productivity is 0.5) can code for oil
in Iraq.
the fertile crescent is already regarded as next silicon valley, and oil will sponsor free projects (like kazaa and edonkey).
code for oil, oil for code
M. Al-Sahaf
There are 19 or so processors in todays cars. The last module we built sold 1.2 million units. Alot of the comments to this thread revolve around the application world. If it interests you take a look at the embedded world. The worst that can happen is that you will be more diverse and worth more money.
(in Homer voice)
Stupid wiener Larry Ellison
Learn that abbreviation. Return of Investment.
Basically, the computer industry has failed to deliver on time, on budget forever. Only, it's not getting (much) better.
We need real economists to create real business cases for our customers. Then we need to deliver. There are lots of big software projects that fail, either partially or totally.
It's unglorious and hard. But it needs to be done.
Stop the brainwash
the question being asked is quite relevant. I think the answer is, the way that software companies did business in the Nineties is essentially dead, except for Microsoft's model of "upgrade and reap"...or is that "upgrade and rape"? But the fact is, enterprises can probably get along with the infrastructure that they have now, and not change much over the next few years.
So this is potentially gloomy for the likes of Oracle, but what it means for the rest of the business is less clear. What is clear is that open source has been the cause of some of the reduction in revenue for proprietary vendors over the past couple of years. Why invest a hefty chunk of change in software when the return on your investment is potentially not that great, when you can get a comparable open source package for essentially nothing or a very low cost? In addition, open source projects deliver on new versions and bug fixes in a time span that's generally shorter than proprietary vendors.
For those of us who are developers, it may mean that the tide continues to be low for a little while, until there is a technology compelling enough to be adopted that will move innovation forward. For the time being, we may well be in a period where projects are focused on maintaining or upgrading current applications, instead of building something truly new.
Always look on the briight side of life! (whistle, whistle)
That's not a bug, that's a feature.
Free markets seek equilibrium. That's a good thing. It means that, over time, we get lower prices on *everything* as people figure out how to wring more goods out of less raw material, and how to make more useful goods, and how to provide better services to their customers.
It's the reason that we can hack on CPUs running in gigahertz range, on machines sporting multiple gig of RAM and hard drives that dwarf anything available commercially even 10 years ago ... the competition has made people innovate.
Of course, it sucks royally to be on the receiving end of a cost cutting measure. I know, I've been there. One can bitch and moan about how unfair society is to the poor laboring class, and bemoan one's lot in life. Or, one can take advantage of the same laws of economics that just cost one his job, and COMPETE! Learn something new. Try something new. Change your focus. Respond to the market.
When your entire monitary and social structure is based on greed you can only expect things to get more expensive with time.
I beg to differ. It appears that those societies that recognize that greed is part of human nature, and find ways to cope with it (like using markets to communicate value information) have done alright over time, and even found ways to decrease prices. Those societies that tried to wish greed away or pretend it didn't exist (the Soviets, for example) haven't lasted long.
Compete!
You are so smart!
You'll get the economy going in no time!
Right???
If I don't like the rates or his parole officer won't allow travel over a state line, I can always hire one of those cut-rate offshore CEOs for pennies on the dollar...
I'm still in college, and I have no problems finding summer work as a software developer. The jobs are fewer and further between, but there are still good companies out there willing to hire talented individuals. The market is flooded with fools that know almost nothing about REAL software development, or just have a degree in CompSci or something. Computer Science teaches you barely anything about being a programmer, and being a talented programmer is equally or more important than having some abstract knowledge about computer science, or going through a few assembly language courses and a basic course on algorithms in JAVA. If you go into a company, and demonstrate that you have a passion for programming and are going to do great things for the company, you can get a job. I don't ever want to fall back on my education to try to land a job ... my education isn't what makes me valuable ... it's my drive to be creative, to innovate, and to be a great asset to a good company.
Just my thoughts.
The missing idea in this thread that no one wants to talk about is the question "IS NEW SOFTWARE NEEDED?" There will always be a need for specialized apps etc, but commerical software is gaining less every year. We have been through how many revisions of MS word and what has been gained since Word 5? Is it really that much better? At some point, software will die in a way because nothing new is being produced outside of version numbers. Ask yourself this, what can you do this year that you could not two years ago? Five?.... -Iowa
"He who laughs last, didn't get the joke."-Cap
Not peer reviewed?!?
:)
Lists of errors and amendments can be downloaded as plain TeX files or read from DVI files or PostScript files cited on the relevant web pages. You are entitled to a reward of at least $2.56 if you are the first person to report a bona-fide error not on those lists. Each page tells you how to report an error for the book in question.
I don't know of anyone wha has cashed on of those checks yet
The real estate prices too are in a way, silly. The cost of land is not much, the houses are getting bigger and bigger, and no one can find a place that is good but small enough to be affordable. Just like the dream of owing new SUVs, a lot of the cost of living is in the minds.
because you are looking to live in the areas clustered with idiots.
I bought 10 acres lakefront with a 1500 sq foot house that is on a sports lake where I can fish, powerboat, sail. whatever for 1/2 the price of the same house in the city in a OK neighborhood on a postage stamp lot. I commute farther because of it, but time in the car is 100% identical to my shorter commute... 1 hour drive either way.
rule #1 if you see a subdivision and rich boy houses everywhere... you do NOT want to live there.. the neighbors will be jerks and you will horribly overpay for what you get. look for rural land that is in commute time the same as what you have now. you will be happier, have neighbors that are dang friendly and nice and you get the side effect of leaving your keys in your car and the house unlocksed and NOT WORRY ABOUT IT.
suburbia is for the stupid, and the $200,000.00+ homes are for the massively idiotic.
you are looking at the wrong places and hanging with the wrong people. be yourself and be sure your home is your paradise not you the slave to your home, mortgage and car payments..
BTW, if you live smart, it pisses off the "gotta be better" crowd... as you will always have money to spend on vacations , $4000.00 camcorders, home theatre systems that make thiirs look stupid, etc... it's the fact you dont feel crunched like they do that is the ultimate satisfaction...
nothing is more satisfying than... "Nice new BMW dave... when you getting a boat? oh too bad, well you can borrow one of mine anytime... come out and sail on my lake.. I gotta go It's time for brakes on my Pontiac..."
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
I think the idea that there is no future for software development is utterly wrong. And software is not tulips or spices (how has the tulip evolved over the past 200 years?).
:-)
We have not even scratched the surface of what software can do for us, and becuase of some self-proclaimed "entrepreneurs" who pissed away VC money on corporate yachts, we are now depressed, we're ready to discard software business alltogether.
I predict that software will come back as business, and much sooner than we think. And no offshore programming or GNU is going to be a factor in it - there is going to be thriving market for people capable of developing solutions for businesses, and it's going to be primarily in the US and Europe (and not in India or China).
Stop wining please!
grisha.org
The reason software development is dying out is coming from the popular development tools. Developers chained to Microsoft tools can only build apps for Microsoft, and worse, usually end up using broken Microsoft Components (like Internet Explorer).
Innovation is being killed off by capitalism in the US. Small, innovative companies with new ideas are rapidly bought out by big business, while big business is so concerned about their bottom line, they can't really be innovative.
But there is another group of developers - the Open Source developers. This group is not worried about status quo, or quarterly profits, only good software. This group is working hard, and is coming up with many exciting innovations, but sadly, there's a trade-off: There's no guarentee that software app A will work with software app B. No promises that there will be user-friendly or up-to-date documentation, and no certainty that the software in question will even work on the next generation of hardware.
Innovation is risky. Most businesses do every thing they can to avoid risks.
"The large print giveth, and the small print taketh away" -- "Step Right Up", Tom Waits
soon , US dogs will code for oil.
can you code 2.5Mn barrels a day?
Look, we're only trying to help you , dogs.
M.Al-Sahaf
The centralization of net assets that has occurred and the drop in jobs is not fairly characterized by using the peak of the bubble as the level of expectation of the typical "disgruntled" information technologist from the US.
Far, far from it.
Seastead this.
Actually, 60s Triumph Motorcycles use Whitworth fasteners... 60s BSA bikes used CEI/BSC fasteners (like Whitworth fasteners, only with a 60-degree thread pitch, instead of 55). Actually, the BSA bikes also used BSW fasteners in certain places, like cylinder head studs. And there were the BA fasteners, 47.5 degree thread pitch, used for the really little screws.
But of course, all the new ones use metric fasteners. Only Hardley Ablesons still use fasteners with UNC or UNF threads.
It is still possible to buy BSW and BSF fasteners and such; but Lord help the company that uses them on anything new.
Actually, now that I think about it, I'm surprised Compaq didn't use BSF fasteners on their old cases. Torx wasn't nearly annoying enough.
Do daemons dream of electric sleep()?
Siebel made his upbeat remarks in a strange setting -- a conference call reviewing quarterly software sales that dropped to half what they were a year earlier. Despite the fall in sales, he declared: "This is a growth story."
Gee. Growth from negative growth is not that hard. Just be say -10% instead of -20% the next year.
Table-ized A.I.
After reading this thread, I am under the impression that our friend here made his choice of secondary degree after viewing Roadhouse.
Philosophy is an interesting and rewarding field, but thinking it will differentiate you from other job hunters is a grievious error. Nobody wants to pay good money to a person who has demonstrated the ability to sit around, read, think, and write documents expressing beliefs and opinions.
Employers want people who demonstrate an ability to get things done, and that takes applied skills of some sort. Physics, math, hell even graphic design. Philosophy, in the work place (in my experience) is like knowledge of BASIC - you just can't expect to be taken seriously after you admit to actually spending time and money on formally learning it.
Most people I know have an interest in philosophy, sure, and many have read more on the subject than most Phil curricula require - but their degrees are in things that are obviously useful. Not that Philosophy is useless, but the drones in HR don't see its value, and middle managers don't like dealing with people whose resumes make them seem all sorts of "edumacated".
Philosophy credentials are a liability, IMO.
The REAL jabber has the user id: 13196
What you do today will cost you a day of your life
Not Open Source, but free.
The phrase "free software", especially when used on Slashdot in the context of "free software community" or "free software subculture" as in sinergy's comment, typically refers to any program licensed to the public under terms that meet these four criteria, some of which require access to the program's source code. The set of programs covered under this definition almost completely mutually overlaps the set of programs covered by the Open Source Definition, which is descended from the Debian Free Software Guidelines.
In general, when somebody points out a fallacy to me (such as your "no true Scotsman" fallacy of definition), I go back and debug the argument. Let me express in more precise terms what I feel sinergy meant:
Given: Let a "free software license" be defined by the Free Software Definition published by the Free Software Foundation. Let a "free" program be a program published under a "free software license", and let a "proprietary" program be any other program. Let a "clone" of program A be another program B that closely reimplements the functionality of A. Problem: Find a "free" program in wide use that was not designed as a "clone" of an existing "proprietary" program.
Will I retire or break 10K?
If I had a dime for each person I know that has predicted the downfall of software development, I could retire.
Jamey Kirby
Software industry is dead? That's interesting - since the hardware manufacturers now think that the software industry is the only place there's money to be made in networking and IT.
Sounds to me more like Larry is trying to make it harder on his competition by cutting off the supply of new talent by misdirecting college kids to other fields.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
If you want to go into software development, do it because you like it, NOT because you think it pays well. It may not pay well in the future. Factory work used to pay better than it does now (adjusted for inflation), but shrank over time. This is because of stiff foriegn competition and much cheaper overseas labor. I expect the same thing to happen to software more or less.
If you want money, go into retail management or marketing. That is safer from cheap foreign labor rates because it is "closer" to consumer preferences (local culture). Pick technology if and only if you like technology, not because of expectations of a fatter paycheck. And, have a second career as a backup, because tech is highly cyclical and unpredictable.
Table-ized A.I.
The industry needs another VisiCalc or Mosaic before it really starts moving again, I think...
My dad is an Electrical Engineer. For the last 25 years he has worked for a ASIC design/manufacturing plant writing software. No one has ever bought the software he has written.
OMG Someone is actually being paid to work on software that isn't sold?!?
The same is true for programmers working for banks, car manufacturers, Boeing, the government, insurance companies, universities, walmart and other retailers like amazon.
Oh, i forgot about programmers working on embedded and telecom stuff.
Oh and programmers working for the oli and mining industries.
Oh and programmers working for the military
Oh and programmers working for NASA.
Oh and programmers working for the FBI and other lawenforcement agancies.
Etc, ad naseum.
The software industry isn't dead, it's just turned into a _normal_ industry. That means that a hard working & well qualified graduate working for somebody else can reasonably aspire to home-ownership (after years of saving), a car & the occasional foreign trip. If you're smart & frugal you might even achieve all this without being a slave to your credit-card bill for the rest of your working life. If you make it up the career ladder or start your own company that suceeds, you could end up significantly richer than most people, just like Ben & Jerry of the famous ice-cream or senior management at General Motors. Note that neither of these companies was built without a good idea, careful financial management and years of effort by the founders. What is no longer likely to happen is that you will dream up some piece of sketchily thought-out vapour-ware or online store that may help people save 3% on their dog-food purchases (based in naive & flakey financial projections) and immediately be offered $200 million in venture capital and a huge-well equipped office all paid for in pre-IPO company stock. Those days are _long_ gone, and they're never coming back to the web industry. If the latter is what you expected to greet you on graduation, and you won't be satisfied if it takes you any longer to become a bazillionaire, then think about writing a movie or becoming a rock-star. It happens. Occasionally. Try and stay off the crack whilst waiting tables in LA though. Failing that, the same kind of bubble will probably occur in some kind of tech field in the next 25 years or so. Perhaps nanotech, perhaps something we haven't heard of yet. Take your pick and take your chances..
I'm also a senior at the University of Oklahoma preparing to graduating with a degree in MIS. While the situation is very bleak here too (bad economy, plus, few high-tech jobs exist in Oklahoma), I think it would be a misnomer to declare the software industry dead. The driving force behind new application development, growth, will return someday. In the meantime, there is still a market for software engineers to maintain and incrementally upgrade existing applications.
;P
It really sucks to graduate into this kind of market. However, you may look around at government jobs. At least here, this state can't keep technology workers here, so state IT jobs command some of the highest merit system pay grades for entry-level jobs. Also, a number of military installations (AFB's in Texas and Oklahoma I'm aware of at least) have their Vietname-era programmers reaching retirement age and leaving in droves. Maybe a government job isn't very stylish, but it's something in an economy that won't throw me a friggin' bone here.
Be very, very careful what you put into that head, because you will never, ever get it out. -Thomas Cardinal Wolsey
Yep, but I keep thinking about what Neal Stephenson wrote in "Snow Crash," something about Adam Smith's invisible hand spreading everything out to a depth that a Pakistani brick-layer would consider to be prosperity. It might not be fair that we have more than most other people in the world, but it certainly is nice.
Wow, thanks for the sweeping generalizations. I'm sure glad you have it all figured out when so many of us are such idiots.
this post (and most of the replies to it) have badly missed the real cause here. The outsourcing to other countries in most industries is caused by the 'strong dollar' policies and was made worse by the bubble (lots of money was invested here, driving up the dollar vs. forigen currencies) A strong dollar makes it more expencive to pay you in dollars, so companies are switching to yen, euro, etc.
The good news is that the dollar is now in the decline bigtime. if the dollar drops another %30 (a real possibility) the outsourcing will stop.
nothing is more satisfying than... "Nice new BMW dave... when you getting a boat? oh too bad, well you can borrow one of mine anytime... come out and sail on my lake.. I gotta go It's time for brakes on my Pontiac..."
All you're saying here is that you have different consumer vices than some people. I don't much care about what kind of car I drive either, but I also don't want to own a boat. So should I say you're idiotic for having one because I don't share you're interest?
... Unless you *don't* want to live in India! It's not just software that's being outsourced, it's everything especially manufacturing. Like other have mentioned before, soon there will only be two classes of people in the US. The rich(er) and the poor(er). Guess which one the majority will be in ...
There's one thing that will surely "set you apart from the masses"; it's called talent.
I am sad to say that this is not true. Most interviewers these days ask things like, "tell me about a situation where there was a conflict and how you handled it". Tech questions are maybe about 25% of the interview on average, and the tech questions are usually odd or dumb. (I personally don't believe you can assertain somebody's tech ability in 40 minutes.)
What employeers really want is somebody who knows computers, but with a salesperson's social and diplomacy ability/personality. I doubt such are very common, but the PHB's of the world bust their butts looking for that Magical Tech Worker with both.
Trust me, I have been to a lot of IT interviews.....too many. Often they are just looking for a personality match more than tech ability. Even the tech questions are often probing HOW you think, not just whether you can solve problems (output). This is because people are more comfortable with those who think like they do. It is easier to communicate that way (or so they think). Studies trying to figure out why minorities are not moving into higher management have come to similar conclusions. It is not because the minorities are "no good", but because their background and culture are different from those interviewing.
Life is a big social game. Tech won't let you hide from that fact, unfortunately.
Table-ized A.I.
A person's opinion on whether or not an industry is dead depends on that person's capacity for innovative thinking, vision and imagination.
An innovative person will see new things that have yet to be made and conclude that there is life left.
A person without imagination will not see these things and will conclude that the industry is dead.
Add an obligatory plug to Eric Raymond's economic analysis of the software biz in The Magic Cauldron.
Very few companies can take any software product and configure it into the Right Answer without having to pay some Software Guy to do it. When companies fund Software Guys to morph an open source solution into Their Solution, the funded Software Guys get the money to pay off their mortgage or remodel their kitchen.
Shrink-wrapped software may be moribund.
Companies pay Mr. Ellison for His Software Guys at a significant mark-up. This business model requires some kinda lock-in on Mr. Ellison's part, or an ignorant consumer who doesn't know where to shop for Software Guys.
smiles and cheers,
steve poling
grand rapids, mi
Most of the commercial software niches that exist today are filled. You have your word processors, pixel-pushers, 3d modelers, databases, calendars, web browsers, etc. These are all well-known components, and the solutions to implement them are pretty standard. Most commercial software today uses many such components; they are put together like legos. The process of making new combinations of these components is becoming increasingly automated.
Some people mentioned that open-source projects are thriving, in contrast to the monotonic world of our corporate masters. This may be nominally true; however, most open-source projects today merely play catch-up to the coroporate versions of the same software. Open Office (MS Office), xmms (Winamp), Gaim (AIM/ICQ), XFree86 (DirectX/MacOS)... these are just some of the big ones. The open source industry is not dead, but it's spinning its wheels. Actually, it's not even an industry in the conventional sense.
Of course, software innovation will always be needed to some extent. However, it is becoming increasingly scarce outside of the academic environment. The software industry is becoming similar to the automotive industry, where most of the work is done by robots, and innovation amounts to adding in a new kind of spoiler.
>|<*:=
In some companies, it's cut and dry on how business works and often times consultants can be brought in to combine a few groupware software packages with a backend and off you go with just minimal tweaking over time. In my company, however, that would only handle about 50% of our business. The other 50% of our business requires highly specialized applications written by coders who know some sophisticated business rules, and these rules change about every 4 months to keep up with new customer requirements and new USA gov laws.
So I think there will always be a need for new software. Software is not dead. In fact, even the groupware that runs 50% of our business could stand to be improved.
I'll tell you what is really wrong. It's 3 pronged:
1) During the period up to Y2K, we brought in a bunch of H1Bs who flooded our tech market. When that ended, they moved into other tech jobs and many still remain here, giving us an even greater impression that the market is down.
2) Dot-com bubble. Man, were we gullible or what?
3) Terrorism's impact on the world economy, and thus IT spending as well.
And how do we fix it? We ride the trickle of water (not quite a wave) out to the previous spending levels before the Y2K bubble of work occurred. This will require tougher immigration laws to improve the USA economy, thus get us working and spending again. This will also require us to be tougher in scrutinizing companies, as you can see we are doing as we fire shots at Enron, etc. And last, we need to continue our military presence in making America safer against the threat of terrorism.
But the liberal media won't tell you that. Meanwhile, Larry "Chicken Little" Ellison, a flaming liberal, a man who is known to be way off in his predictions, a man who is cranky right now because IT spending is down, is buying into the liberal agenda. That agenda is to make it look like Pres. Bush isn't doing enough.
Don't believe the hype.
But concentrate on console games.
Most console programming jobs require several years of experience. How does one learn how to program for a console that hasn't been dead for ten years, to escape the vicious cycle of lack of experience?
Get the dongle. It may not deter hackers, but suits are not hackers.
True, but suits are one Google search away from contact with the crackers.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Almost since the beginning of software history, there has been the mythical "everything" product -- something so smart, so powerful, that it could make programmers obsolete. People would just type in their questions, and BAMMO! instant answers! I believe this "office of the future" was supposed to be paperless too.
Modern tools have given great power to the non-technical end user, but as a total percentage of all the things a modern computer can do, the non-technical end-user is still only doing a tiny fraction of what a geek can do. The space that exists above what a power user can do and below what a geek can do is where the entire IT industry lives. That space is a little overpopulated at the moment, but survivable for those who can outlive the challenges of outsourcing, H1B, etc.
then can you imagine everyone not needing software?
Oh sure, the usage of software will go up. However, less and less of it will be made in the "post-industrial" nations. (Perhaps we will now call our nations Post-Tech?)
More people drive cars, more people have TV's, but those items are mostly made overseas where even PhD's earn $3/hr.
Table-ized A.I.
Otherwise, if your a code junkie, you probably won't have much trouble finding a job that you enjoy.
Really? Who the hell is hiring? I will go there immediately!!! Min. Wage even, just to keep my sanity until the glut blows over.
My pet peave is people not taking a chance on small java applications buyable in the store. They'll spend a little more on getting the app to run well, but they won't have to recompile it, the don't need to worry if'll be Mac or windows compatible.
If you're going into software that's a warming place, games are so far so good. But the honest truth is now is not a good place to do computer related technologies, traditional whit and blue colord jobs are (teaching, aronotics, government work etc).They pay prity good and you have fairly good chance of at least horizontl mobility (ie trash worker to reciling to city planner etc)
Maybe I'm just depressed or something, but I kinda agree that software is on the downfall, in the Western world anyway.
There are lots of shit hot programmers in India and other places full of cheap labour; software is starting to go the way of Nike trainers and consumer electronics goods - manufactured and assembled far away for a fraction of the costs of development in the Western world.
There also aren't a huge number of great new things to build - increasingly it is cheaper to buy off the shelf components and modify them; who in their right might would try to build a competitive database when there are already hundreds of mature engines out there ready to choose from.
Maybe as a software engineer the only roles will be in research and development, or specialist niche applications (embedded?) - certainly I recon it's gonna be shrinking over the next 10 years.
-- Mike
SOFTWARE WILL PREVAIL LONG AFTER LARRY ELLISON IS DEAD.
.
no programmers need to die- not even you.
"code for oil" program will be restarted...soon...
much sooner so my credibility
M. Al-Sahaf
I got a CS degree because I liked to code and play with computers. It had been my hobby since I was about 7 and my job since I was 15. When I was going through school nearly all of my fellow classmates were in it for the money. They knew next to nothing compared to me and had no real world experience. Now most of them are making more than I am by doing less because they're better at bullshit and became managers as soon as possible. Meanwhile my boss breaths down my neck every-other week saying things like "you are underachieving." Because he recognizes that I have more talent and ability than the average, I'm supposed to be working harder and doing more even though I'm tied for lowest paid programmer on staff. (Less pay because I'm new and fresh out of college--but there is no way the standard yearly raises will ever catch me up to anyone else.) I'm only 23 and I'm sick of it now.
The corporate attitudes have ruined most of my desire to code. When I get home I tend to avoid the computer now. I check my email, browse the web for a bit, and end up watching TV, reading, or *gasp* being social. The sad part is that I have been doing very little actual programming at work lately. It is just the amazing stupidity of the system. It wears me down. And when we do get around to actually writing code at work, the process itself is becoming painful as we change our "processes" and add more and more useless features, bloat the software, and destroy structures because marketing thinks that adding wiz-bang feature BLAH will sell more units. The depressing thing is that those sorts of things DO sell software because they look good during demos--not because they are useful.
The whole system is currently very self destructive. The industry isn't dead yet, but it needs an intervention.
Hexy - a strategy game for iPhone/iPod Touch
We are working on remodelling parts of the house as time and money permit, but we've had this thought in the back of our minds the whole time: "Someday, when we have children, we'll probably move to a bigger house." Recently, we have started questioning this logic. We plan on having three children, with about two years between each. Keeping this in mind, I consider all the points I made in the first paragraph and wonder what the hell is wrong with me. We want to update a few things, but there is no reason we can't raise three kids in the space we have. OMG, two children may have to share a room for a couple years?! I remember sharing a room with my brother. It's not exactly going to make or break your childrearing efforts. It may even (gasp!) teach your children that not everything they use is theirs alone and/or foster a close relationship between siblings.
On closer inspection, I found the urge to get a bigger house is nothing more than a manifestation of a desire for status symbols. I hate that I experienced such a desire, as I have traditionally considered myself above that kind of nonsense. We've decided to put our time and effort into making our modest house something we (and our children) will enjoy.
The first update will be a garage large enough for my new Cadillac Escalade.
Yes, I am kidding.
One of the reasons that I became a lawyer was to avoid ever having to hire one. -SPYvSPY
I am (building and maintianing those robots).
They still need software.
Nevermind the moronic idea that happiness is *only* acheived through buying a gigantic parcel of land miles from civilization. Sorry, I don't want to be trapped in my car 2 to 3 hours a day. And it wouldn't matter to me whether I was commuting in a BMW or an SUV pulling this guy's boat. I enjoy my bike ride or morning skateboard ride much more and therefore I have to live in suburbia. To each his own, right?
Considering the fact that the number of patent applications has increased every year since the Patent Office was formed (I'm 90% sure of that), it would seem unlikely that anyone at any point of time would have made a statement like that.
Also, it isn't whether new code can be created in the future, but what the utility of the new code will be and the efficacy of new business models which can profit from new software. For instance, can word processing software really improve much over what is already available and if not, why should people continue purchasing new versions of MS Office? (BTW, I don't feel that the software industry is dead, just trying to play devil's advocate)
M. AL-Sahaf informs YOU!!!
Thank you Al-Sahaf .
.
for giving you insight that SOFTWARE INDUSTRY WILL PREVAIL LONG AFTER ELLISON IS DEAD
of course my credibility will outlast the Software Industry, but that would be out of context- so I will not pollute the problem space.
M. Al-Sahaf
If you want a truly usable *nix desktop OS, are you going to go with OS X or some Linux distro? If you need a massive database, are you going to go with Oracle or MySQL?
While I'm sure that Free/Open Source software will eat into some of the profits of proprietary software companies, there will always be people willing to pay for a higher quality product. Up to now, while we have seen some really great products from the Free/Open Source community, there are many places where proprietary systems are still much nicer. OpenOffice, for example, is a great product but they are constantly trying to copy M$ Office, which as much as it pains me to say this, is a nice Office suite.
Another interesting angle is the companies who have learned to embrace open source software and use it to their advantage. Apple looked at the software community and saw a bunch of great open source kernels where their attempts at a next generation kernel had failed. So they took an open kernel and put their proprietary system on top of it for a wonderful system. They took KHTML, made it a lot nicer, and then used it as the foundation for Safari. I would argue that open source has helped Apple more than it has hurt them.
First of all, public sector jobs may not pay as much as the private sector USED to, but they sure pay a hell of a lot more NOW. Federal, State, and Local jobs are all unionized, so you're protected, and you get great benefits. So this is a great place to hunker down during the recession.
Government is cutting back too. Even teachers are getting laid off in my state. Plus, they often have a long submission-to-hire turnaround time. If you apply now, by the time something happens, the tech economy might be back to normal again. Further, I hear from insiders they are getting flooding with IT resumes/applications also. If you fill out one little spot of the forms wrong, you are in the round file without ever knowing your mistake. There is no escape. The downturn has F'd everything.
Table-ized A.I.
Applications software is deader than hell. It's been slaughtered by the Open Source community, who can produce solid software that not only costs nothing, but which can be copied infinitely, and has no hidden gotchas like the equivalent proprietary software.
I'd like to believe this is true, but it isn't. Commercial application software hasn't been slaughtered by open source software; very few people use Mozilla, or Open Office, or Evolution. The only space open source software dominates is web infrastructure, where it has always dominated, from BIND to Apache to Sendmail to....
Stagnation has killed the application software industry. In the past, the application industry has relied on the periodic introduction of the "killer app" to revitalize flagging sales. There has not been a killer app since the introduction of the web browser in the early '90s.
Part of the blame lies with Microsoft, which has dominated the application space over the last 8 years. As long as there is one single company in control of the application and desktop space, innovation is unlikely. Part of the blame lies with the fact that there are more computers out there these days, increasing the inertia to change. ("Backwards compatibility" is still a major warcry.)
Part of the blame lies with us. We have not been able to create anything truly unique, something that would encourage a new niche for computing.
In any case, Open Source has not contributed significantly to the demise of applications programming.
Microsoft is to software what Budweiser is to beer.
...are doing there best to destroy the software industry as well.
Up till the events of 9/11, I was the CEO of a $500K gross software company that specialized in PDA products. I've been doing computers and software for over 20 years and up till last year, I've never had a problem getting work. Now I'm cleaning carpets and fixing PS2's to try and keep food on the table. I've sold just about everything I have on eBay and there's still no hope of seeing the industry turn around. I've even tried to sell the rights to my PDA based software products. Guess what - no takers! I'm mad, frustrated, depressed, and tired. (My appologies to the /. crowd for my vent!)
At least I still have my music.
TheTiminator
go fuck yourself, troll
In SOVIET RUSSIA... erm...NSA AMERICA, the Internet logs onto YOU!
That depends. At my company (as in, the one I founded) we flag CS degrees as a sign that a potential hire will have underdeveloped critical thinking skills and little experience with real-world constraints on programs in operation.
We've done very well by instead choosing software engineers with degrees in other fields (EECS, physics, mathematics) that encourage discipline and rigor.
"Yes, things will come into balance eventually, but that will take decades."
:)
Take a look at NAFTA. In the early 90s, companies soared into Mexico and set up shop. They made everything, clothing, cars, etc. But then the quality of life began to increase, educational levels rose, and thus demands for pay raises came about.
By 2000, all these companies were hightailing it for the next great low-cost destination, China. Believe it or not, MEXICO was now TOO DAMNED EXPENSIVE to operate out of. Left behind were these halfway-developed dying manufacturing towns with standards of living no better than when they started.
The same thing will happen to the US. The effects are not so immediate because the US has some wealth that is hard to get cheaper or from alternate sources ( agriculural capacity, mining ), and the US economy is diversified. But in the last two decades we have seen entire domestic industries die ( textiles, steel to name a couple ), and we have chosen to ignore this and try to replace it with the budding electronics / software industry.
But our electronics and software will soon be made everywhere but the US as well. The rising trade deficit for the last decade has been an alarming warning sign. It's not going to balance out until the US is milked completely of it's buying power, because the huge multinational companies aren't going to stop producing cheap goods unless nobody wants to buy them.
And then, when the US market dies, somebody else will become the buyer of these trinkets, and the system will continue. The US as a nation is of no importance, they're just the current best customer.
And when the Chinese workers start to rise above 3rd-world status, the companies will all move to the next big low-priced contender. Who knows, after they're done fully milking the US and dragging us down, we'll be RIPE for the manufacturing explotation! Imagine, the US supplying cheap goods to a China with cash to blow!
Welcome to global capitalisim, folks. Profits rule, not nations. And there's not a damn thing you can do about it, pawn. Now, SMILE, and stop looking so depressed
Man is the animal that laughs.
And occasionally whores for Karma.
Where was the outcry when manufacturing and textiles took a flying leap into ASIA?
When they started offshoring manufacturing jobs, they told us to forget about dirty manufacturing jobs and get jobs in the information industry. Now, they are offshoring the IT jobs, so what is left?
Whenever there is a labour force to do simple training to do the same job you do at half the price, I would be stupid not to say yes. STUPID
They also have MBAs in other countries that would be willing to work for a tiny fraction of what American CEOs make. Why aren't those jobs being offshored? STUPID!
This is not the industry you are seeking. There is nothing to see here. Now please move along, move along.
Table-ized A.I.
Face it: if Ellison and his buddies hadn't bought congress to get the H-1b program, most of the folks reading this would be in a far better economic position. For that matter if McNealy's co-religionist Greenspan(McNealy and Greenspan are both Ayn Rand fans) were consistent in his policies, instead of playing games that centralize assets you'd be a lot better off.
There would be a slump right now even without H-1b, but instead of 500,000 unemployed engineers, we might be looking at 50,000 or so-it that.
There are still a lot of high leverage areas in software: embedded systems, bioinformatics, robotics. What isn't clear to me if dinosaurs like Oracle,Microsoft, Sun really should be playing any role in the new software business. I say that we just Open Source all the technology of these companies-starting with Oracle.
JBOSS is a decent application server that completed head to head with Oracle Application Server. Postgres can be made better than Oracle(big missing feature is replication which is coming along fast). The accounting packages Oracle sells can be replaced by stuff that evolves from stuff like SQL Ledger. All in all, I think Oracle will be dead before Microsoft. Good Riddance.
who used to promote thin clients with just enough to boot a barebones system and that would load everything else from the network, probably from a subscription based service ?
well, if it is, he was wrong then and is probably wrong now. my guess is that software industry still have a long road (10, maybe 15 years more) ahead before most of the IT industry moves to a service-centric model built around open-source code.
What ? Me, worry ?
The software industry is by no means dead, it's just changing in ways most people either didn't expect or are uncomfortable with.
Let's face it, there is a finite limit to how much can and should really be done with word processors, calculators, and IDEs. There are really few relevant (and actually innovative) functions to be added to many of these types of programs, and many revisions just contain extra bloat. (Office XP, anyone?)
I've seen it said on this thread that much of this programming remains to be done for the embedded markets. Indeed, this is certainly the case. I think, however, many software development projects will become commodity projects, for internal use by a corporation, or development on a website, or something similar.
Comments and criticisms are most certainly welcome.
Must Remember to dump continuously tanking Oracle Stock.
heh
Dolemite
________________
Save the World! Use a Quote!
I think the real problem is when all of you try to PRETEND that you don't want anything.
That would be your moral ideal wouldn't it?
Not to want anything.
The fact is that you guys DO want stuff. The problem is that you guys are all lieing to each other try to be a 'good' person. But we all know that won't work, you've tried it haven't you? Lieing about how 'good' a person you are.
Let me know how that works out for you guys.
But my main point is that since there is an ever increasing flood of information there will be a constant flow of software applications needed to meet the demand. A small fraction of these needs are repeatable, so a full-blown application will be needed.
Example: A 3D to 2D video decoder(TM). Once 3D video becomes mainstream there will be a need to view the information on legacy hardware and in a format that allows for quick selection/review. New information-> new need for parsing that information-> new application for meeting that need.
It is true that most of the easy and obvious software has already been written(word processing, calendar, spreadsheet, etc). The cycle of innovation is likely to start streatching out (barring some huge industy-shaking innovation).
"God fights on the side with the best artillery." - Napoleon, Marshal of France - speaking truth to power
First Microsoft made it clear that any new gotta-have horizontal application that appeared would rapidly be cloned and included with the Windows OS, which you had to buy even if all you wanted to buy was hardware.
No VC is going to fund a company with an idea for a new client-side horizontal killer app, no matter how good the idea is. They would just be funding MS R&D.
Then along comes Open Source with its "companies that want to be paid for apps deserve to be punished" ethos. Now, categories that are too small to be cloned by MS get cloned by open sourcers.
So MS will still get paid, but the smaller ISVs will be killed off by open source crusaders before they even get a chance to be killed off by MS.
By teaming up this way, MS & the FOSS community have pretty much destroyed this industry. There are other ways to make money in software dev, but there's no future in packaged software.
"Those who have never entered upon scientific pursuits know not a tithe of the poetry by which they are surrounded."
The software industry completely lacks any sort of innovation and direction. Everyone seems to be re-packaging 'the wheel' when it comes to the software industry. In this current economy, companies are afraid to invest money in new ventures for fear of the unknown. Not one company has taken the lead in this day and age to move this industry into the next millenium due to lack of a pair of big brass cohones.
Companies in this day and age are spending so much time bitching and in-figting for power on the 'Corprate Ladder', that no one is actually looking at the massive opportunities and innovations that are not being looked over again and again.
Perhaps Ellison (and other CEO's) should look within their companies to see how fucked up things really are within and get a first hand look at the REAL reasons why the Software industry may be becoming stagnant.
I agree with you completly TKoruna.
9 times out of 10, it's easier and cheaper to start from sractch, making use of good toolkits/API - "sractch" - now if you spoke Russian, this would sound to you like a funny Freudian slip :)
Anyway, I kind of agree on your 9 out of 10 note, but sometimes that 1 out of 10 is really a big working system that has a ton of logic incorporated inside that would take years to exract and rewrite. This is when you reuse big chunks of code.
You can't handle the truth.
You sound pretty cool, really.
Think: the boom was driven by fear. (pr0n is fnord) Big blue-chip businesses were afraid of losing market share to tiny startup companies with VC backing. The big boys employed the only guns they had in this duel: lots and lots of money. The game was on, spend smart vs. spend lots. In the end, only companies that could do both at the right time won out. The stock market prices were driven by the [greed]fear of missing out. People threw their savings into stocks on rumors, and they kept doing it to the point that it looked like the new capital was working. Au contraire! The boys in the boardroom were taking the money and playing the big game of poker I described above.
I believe that the technology boom was based on two things that are actually two manifestations of the same economic factor: pent up capacity segregated from pent up demand. Oh, and pent up Pr0n. Sex sells.
The capacity came from military technology developed in the Cold War that had saturated its military market. Cheap, reliable, peer-to-peer packet switching internetworking being the glaring example. The telephone companies are *still* tenaciously clinging to the consumer price models of inefficient and less reliable circut-switching networks, even though they get to take advantage of all the increased efficiency of packet switching (and cell switching) on their backends.
Everyone knows that if everyone got CAT-5 drops to our house and 10mb ethernet service, we would drop our telephone number in a heartbeat. Need I say more concerning pent up demand? (big discussion potential here)
The kicker for the spending only lit up the pent up telcom (oligopoly/monopoly) situation. Email was the killer app. Then, the WWW was the killer app. All those things did was offer up peer-to-peer network packet-switching efficiency as a distribution means for what we used to get by talking on the phone, writing letters, and reading catalogs, magazines (pr0n), and newspaper. It eats into our TV time, but TV (pr0n) still rules the drooling crowd.
If you want to recreate the factors that led up to the first boom, see what you have and what must be synthesized. Pent up demand? Untapped technology potential? VC backing? Greedy, irresponsible stock-market (pr0n) investors?
First time around it was easy to convince some millionaire idiot to give you a lot of money by spouting "web blah-(pr0n)blahbety-blah internet blahbety-blahbety blah (pr0n)." You're going to have to understand the difference between Yahoo and EBay: what they actually really had and the nameless hordes of web-shams designed to take ma-and-pa's retirement savings. You need to have a real matchup between untapped technology and real pent up (pr0n) demand.
Be sneaky. Get your (pr0n) ducks in a row legally, technically, financially, before you try to grab someone else's customers. The big guys are still afraid and licking their wounds from the last fight. Get on high ground while you're still operating on a (pr0n) shoestring.
If you build a better (pr0n) mousetrap... The exterminators guild is going to come after you. Leave them no option but to try and outspend your "agile" little startup, and the boom is on! Ride-em (pr0n) cowboy!
The economic benefit of the new technology was not able to account for the full amount of the bubble. The rest was (pr0n) greed driven by fear. People: the matches and tinder are still sitting on the woodpile, right next to the fireplace. One well-placed (pr0n) spark is all it will take. Just eke out a tiny but untouchable business, and *threaten* to expand without limits. (maniacal laughter)
--- Nothing clever here: move along now...
we all deserve a pat on the back :)
The applications of software are only limited by the creative imagination of the human mind and software may even be effectively applied to increase the productivity of creative thinking. Companies like CompXpress, Inc., www.compxpressinc.com have developed software to enhance creative thinking and problem solving, such as their software named Creator Studio that offers computer aided creative thinking for business. With software and the computer extending human capabilities, such as thinking more creativity, the foreseeable future of software and many other areas of innovation look very bright.
I also agree that the Lego model of programming is just not happening. (12 years in the industry, here) The majority of the reusable constructs are already written - the strings and lists, for example - in the standard template library.
The problem that the software industry is facing is that, the larger a functional piece is, the less likely it is to fit a specific purpose.
As a side note, I also tend to think that the "software industry" is dead, but that a large number of industries that rely on software are alive and kicking. Very few people will be creating software for the sake of software any more - it's just not practical. By the arguements stated above, general purpose chunks of software just don't fit specific purposes.
On the other hand, the networking and gaming and finanical and manufacturing (etc, etc) industries will continue to create specific purpose software as they can justify it. This, however, is not a job for the typical "armchair programmer". If your programming habits involve months of deep philosophy about the practicality of the latest technology, then there is probably no place for you in the industry any more.
Mythological Beast
Wake up - the future is arriving faster than you think.
Software applications are only limited by the creative imagination and software may even be effectively applied to increase the productivity of creative thinking. Companies like CompXpress, Inc., www.compxpressinc.com have developed software to enhance creative thinking and problem solving, such as their software named Creator Studio that offers computer aided creative thinking for business. With software and the computer extending human capabilities, such as thinking more creativity, the foreseeable future of software and many other areas of innovation look very bright.
Larry doesn't just pull these ideas out of thin air
yes, the place from which is pulls ideas is a much darker place than "thin air".
-pyrrho
This is a bad time to be running a MS or Oracle, and an impossible time to start another one.
However, there IS a market for smaller companies capable of delivering solutions for business problems that actually work.
Businesses want their costs cut and their hassles to go away. What they do NOT want are... software packages that are in themselves a new pain in the ass for them to deal with, and that's what the software industry has delivered.
Tech Public Policy stuff
Dumb terminals have two problems. Firstly, they may make an admin's life somewhat simpler, but they make a users life more complex. Users have to ask the BOFH not only to install software, but for permission to install it. If the BOFH is not empowered to say no... their life hasn't really gotten any better.
Two, with the advent of graphical interfaces, any "dumb" terminal has enough processing power (to display a GUI) to also be a general purpose computer, so it's limitation is artificial, and there is no fundamental reason for the user to give up processing power on their desktop when they can have both a terminal and PC functionality at the same time.
PS: I remember when the mainframe went down and no one could edit their documents. I remember when deadlines loomed for people and the machine was slowed to a halt because of all the people editing documents, and the number crunching apps that NEEDED the CPU couldn't get it.
Distributization of computers is a more powerful paradigm, it's up to us to make it easy.
-pyrrho
he realized that yesterday it was his turn and the dog fucked him.
thanks...you too.
In SOVIET RUSSIA... erm...NSA AMERICA, the Internet logs onto YOU!
Quit now and leave more money for the rest of us.
I seriously doubt that the software industry is dead. Lets just look at things in a logical manner. First of all, no one as ever been able to predict economics acurately. Economics is a guessing game and far from an exact science. If people knew how to read the economy, everyone would be much richer right now. Secondly, computers and software isn't going anywhere. Programmers and software companies will always be needed to produce the stuff that makes computers work. Computers are such a part of everyday life, that I can only see more windows opening for future types of software that doesn't exist now. Third, I am going to be a computer science major so I sure hope that they are wrong and I am right ;)
SIGFAULT
As what he is saying is nonsense, what does he get out of saying it?
Is he just being a media whore? or is there some _reason_ to make such claims?
Oracle may have a shakey future, but some of us are doing quite well out of the software industry, and WILL BE for the forseeable future.
http://jesus.everdense.com/
While I'm sure that Free/Open Source software will eat into some of the profits of proprietary
software companies, there will always be people willing to pay for a higher quality product.
They aren't paying for a "higher quality product", they are paying for the PERCEPTION that they are getting a "higher quality product". Once people realise the perception is wrong, the large and very visible software companies fall.
http://jesus.everdense.com/
... you saved me from having to reply.
-pyrrho
You don't need to worry. Basically, Larry Ellison is never right about anything.
You're a suburbanite.
I got my cs degree last December. I have mailed out over 400 resumes and gotten one job interview for an entry level position (tech support) that went to someone with over 5 years of experience. With lean times I have had to tighten up on spending so when I ran out of toilet paper last week I resorted to using my diploma to wipe my ass. I am really happy to have found a useful way to use my diploma and am happy to be able to recoup at least a little of the $40k it cost me to acquire the diploma (to speak of nothing of the work it required). I am now lieing on my resume about my education level, claiming that I have no college and am now actually getting some job interviews. I hope your job hunting goes better than mine. Fuck the degree.
You could take the flip side argument and say that the greedy consumers provide Adam Smith's "invisible hand" that will increase the wealth of third world nations by siphoning money to their labor force.
I tend to think the global 'leveling' is way overdue and is only hindered by tariffs, poor education standards and violence in certain nations. The free traders have the right idea - the only thing that is going to eliminate poverty is to permit everyone, from any nation, to participate in a global economy.
When I was a kid back in the 70s I had the same thought, but things looked a lot more bleak then. I am happy that there are some success stories: look at Taiwan, South Korea, even Malaysia. Over time, I have noted that standards of living have improved in these nations. So now the next wave of industry is looking further for better labor markets. If we let this continue, eventually there will be no better labor market to go to. Meanwhile, much of the force that motivated war, famine and poverty will be also eliminated.
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
Shortly after making his statement, Ellison's ego was tracked by NORAD as it passed over the Cheyenne area. Residents are encouraged to stay in their homes and turn off all electrical appliances.
In the days when IBM was suggesting there was a world market for 5 computers, every piece of software was vitally important and had to be perfect because the machines it was running on were rare and time was expensive.
Even in the 1970's this was still true.
Nowadays however, we have computers in almost every electronic device and PCs are a commodity. We live in the age of shovelware, where you can find software in cereal boxes instead of decoder rings or whistles that allow you to defeat the phone system.
In other words, we are drowning in software, and most of it is bad. Really bad. Cookie cutter stuff that often barely works (if at all), and is just as often difficult or impossible to use even if it does work.
We live in a world where the biggest, most successful software company has an abysmal track record of shoddy software and disinterest in customer satisfaction.
So, since the software industry is pumping out huge volumes of half-chewed cardboard, those of us who can produce filet mignon (or even a decent slice of bread) are finding ourselves less in demand. After all, why pay for a gourmet chef when all you really need is a burger flipper. After all, didn't we just leave an era where anyone who could read "Teach Yourself HTML in 21 Days" could write his own ticket?
That said, there will always be a need for serious software developers as long as we have computer, it's just that with the advent of more and more shovelware, crappy Web UIs, software work outsourced overseas and endless Microsoft service packs, the demand for these high-ticket employees will become smaller and smaller in proportion to the whole industry.
It's just like a startup... if your company has 4 people, they all have to be top-notch die-hard dedicated employees, but when it has 10000, it's inevitable that a large fraction will be dead-weight.
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
But only if you code for *BSD.
I'm not trying to troll.. I'm just telling a meandering little story..
I've always been good with computers. My dad has over 20 years in IT so I was always surrounded by technology.. it came naturally.
In high school, I was always being told by my teachers, family, and friends that I should get into tech. The Internet boom was in full effect, and that's where the money was. But I knew, just knew, that it was not what I wanted to do for a living.
While my passion for software and computers was strong, I watched my dad come home day after day, looking miserable. He was working in upper management in the IT department of the municipality, overseeing day to day IT operations of the entire city. He dealt, on a daily basis, with nothing but grief. Morons who wanted the impossible, end users who didn't know their ass from their floppy drive, and miles of red tape that is omnipresent in the beurocratic mess that is government operations. Yes, he made great money, but he was NEVER happy.
So, watching this, I ignored the advice of everyone and hopped right into trade. I'm in a field that's very rare, and the people who can do it are even rarer. I'm 23, no post-secondary education, and in a few years I'll be earning more than most IT professionals. My friends who went to school for tech degrees now have huge student loans to pay off, and not one is working in the tech industry. They now are cooks, factory workers, in retail sales, and one is even an assistant manager at a fast food joint.
I'm glad I dodged the tech bullet. I'm glad I didn't turn my beloved hobby into a hated profession. I've found a field where the work is hands on and satisfying, and when I come home.. I can sit down at my PC without cringing.
My point - if you're out of school with a degree that you're finding useless.. consider getting into a trade. You earn decent wages while you train, and the money only gets better. Due to everyone going into tech, new recruits in the trades are few and far between. As the boomers retire, skilled tradesmen are going to be in high demand, so wages could stand to increase even more. You get paid by the hour, so you don't have to work about crunching code 16 hours straight, and not seeing any gravy for the work due to your salary.
Just an idea.. and it beats the hell out of managing at McDonalds to pay off those loans.. =P
While I would like to be as optimistic as this post, I can't say there is a vedict yet. I think the fundimentals seem very clear. Almost every business depends on software to make it go, and that software needs to reflect each business business practices, making off-the-shelf software only a base element. It takes new software, or software modifications and/or integrations, to support changes in a business' practices. Thus, while right now there is a slump in the general economy, and a what I would say is a depression in the software industry, I do believe that things have to come back some soon as businesses can not afford not to innovate, and that will require supporting software.
.Net is slick and possibly the best of its class of tool, it is by no means the state of the art for software development. And even that state of the art that few get to use in "real life" leaves lots of room for innovation and improvement. The challenge, as I see it, is that entry into the field is getting quite expensive, both due to the complexity required of an inovative product and non-technical factors. This challenge was overcome in the past in many other fields and at some point it will be overcome in software (at which time all of us will end up having to learn yet another set of very new skills that will make object orientation, c++, Java/c#, and IDEs seem like the dark ages). It is not possible, though, to predict when this is likely to occur.
There is lots of room for improvement in how software is developed. It would seem that the state of the art would be a IDE, with Visual Studio the model that everyone is shooting for. But, while Visual Studio
I do not believe we will ever see the software industry return to the way it was before the current crisis. In fact, I suspect it will resurface with a new look. But, I just as strongly believe that there will be room for the solid software professional with a deep knowledge of software while being literate and articulate, thus able to communicate well with the business side of the operation.
"Free markets seek equilibrium. That's a good thing. It means that, over time, we get lower prices on *everything* as people figure out how to wring more goods out of less raw material, and how to make more useful goods, and how to provide better services to their customers."
If you study economics from more sources than just Republicans you'll also learn that free markets in a world with high unemployment means wages also necessarily seek equilibrium - meaning that wages MUST fall to subsistance, until the rest starve off, creating a bit of labor shortage. Only then can any wages rise, and then only to a bit above subsistance.
Is this REALLY such a good ideology to dedicate yourself to?
It's still alive.
However, it's in a state of flux.
The market for pieces of software that sell 50 million copies will decline, as it should. Anything that 50 million people have to depend upon should benefit from a competitive marketplace, with reductions in cost and increases in quality. Something that only comes from having more than one vendor.
So, given that Microsoft's business model is no longer a growth model, and that no one except MS can occupy its currently enviable position in terms of cost of revenue anyway, what is left, you ask?
First, specialty ware, something that sells to a specialty market (eg, butterfly collection organizing software).
Second, custom business software. BigCorp wants someone to figure out how to do new things to big databases, or someone to write VB macros to fill in spreadsheets.
Third, scientific applications. Someone wants to simulate protein folding for their new drugs.
Fourth, special purpose hardware needs special purpose application software. Software to run pacemakers, coffeemakers, routers, cell phones and integrated facial recognition cameras.
Fifth, maintenance. The unloved stepchild. A lot of software needs to be maintained and breaks from periodically. Some folks like the old creaky ware anyway, because it's built up 20 years of trust - the devil you know and all that. Unglamorous, to be sure, but a reality.
"Provided by the management for your protection."
Yes, the software industry is dead.
It's buried in the same graveyard as BSD and Stephen King.
Well that is a poor statement... The only way the software industry will die is if the hardware market stagnates and innvovation is completely crushed... Of couse I can't say anything like that would out makin a jab at MS so here it is... M$ would love this... That would mean a end to lawsuits and no-more company buy outs would be needed.. and then they could actually force everyone into Renting thier software for Huge $$. But once again if they started to do that... It would lead to a company trying to get around all software copyrights and patents that MS has and build a Compatible OS that would run all the win32 software and sell it for cheaper.. and once again spark some light into the software industry. This is a very poor statement... Hard to belive it comes from a ICON of the software industry.. unless he just wants public opinion to be that it is dead so there is less compitetion :)
Who needs WiFi when we can have Packet Over Sheep! http://datacomm.org/PoS-InternetDraft.txt
All of Larry Ellison's predictions have turned out to be wrong so far, so don't worry.
"It's (Silicon Valley) not coming back
Now, Ellison may think that just because Silicon Valley has tanked the world software industry or the US software industry has tanked. Still, there is a lot more to the Software Industry than what is going on in Silicon Valley. The leading OS Vendors Redhat and Microsoft aren't in Silicon Valley. Silicon Valley really isn't a terribly great place to live-rents are high, the male/female ration means single programmers can count on zero social life. When there is a tech turn around, it is perfectly logical that it will occur in places like Portland, Seattle, Colorado--places where an engineer might actually aspire to have a house and a family. Silicon Valley was dying 5 years ago. The dot-con boom and H-1b kept the party alive a little longer than things would have otherwise.
The real question here:where will the next major expansion of high tech that can use software talen be? Networking? Bioinformatics? I tend to agree-it won't be hacking Oracle or Sun Hardware in Silicon Valley.
No longer will a cpu sci degree be enough. It's sad how things have changed so badly in the last four years.....
Sorry Charlie, but if you expected a degree to entitle you to a job in your field, then you've just had a bitter taste of the real world.
Greed aside, things were BAD four years ago, not today. The industry was loaded with companies that had no real value, and they inflated both salaries and EXPECTATIONS beyond what should have been considered reasonable. IMHO, the industry has corrected itself to more reasonable levels... a Good Thing.
If you got suckered by the greedy expectations of an exaggerated boom (everyone at the time knew the bubble was going to burst sooner or later), then you're the only one to blame.
My interpretation from Ellison's comments in the article is about the enterprise software industry. We're talking about products, not internal projects or software developed out of service engagements. I don't think Ellison's comments would even include consumer level software.
The enterprise software industry imho is in a whole world of hurt. Who can tell the difference between all the acronyms these days? ERP/CRM/PSA/SFA... Same old crap, just slightly different smell.
This is especially true in the small/medium enterprise segment. I think the days are gone where some sales guy can walk in, ask for $50K licence plus an additional $50K in services to customize a content management system that could be built using freely available open source code (for less than half the price, I might add).
At my last company, we developed a Windows automation program that we thought we could sell for $15K plus services plus a PER SEAT license. Meanwhile, some companies were selling very similar "macro" software for $45/CPU. Mysteriously the powers that be didn't consider them competition. Not hard to figure out the rationale for Ellison's comments there, is it?
I think all other forms of software development don't really have much to fear from Ellison's comments. There are a lot of jobs that are safe outside of the scope of what I believe Ellison meant when he said "software industry".
There will be more people working in the maintenance and support rather than manufacturing and design.
BTW, if you live smart, it pisses off the "gotta be better" crowd... as you will always have money to spend on vacations , $4000.00 camcorders, home theatre systems that make thiirs look stupid, etc..
ummm... what? You call that living smart? You argue not to waste money on an expensive suburbian home, but then you waste your money on overpriced toys that will lose their value after a few years? Sounds like you are the "gotta be better crowd"...
--Drunk as in Beer
Just connect wires between Sotwire icons/controls to create a program! Is that the future? If so then surely the market for programmers will shrink drastically. Has anyone tried it? To me it looks like the future software is softwire, or something similar. http://www.softwiretechnology.com/prod_intro-4.htm l
One thing I have found that shocks me is that 90% of the individuals I have tested in order to verify their skill set for a web developer position flunked the test out right. The test was not really that difficult. It asked the person to demonstrate some fundamental skills involving MySQL, PHP, Java Script, Perl, and Object Oriented Design principles. The people that I tested had stated in a phone interview that they were very experienced in all of those technologies and by and large, they couldn't answer the questions and just left them blank. On the other hand, I ended up hiring developers who are either still in college or are just graduating, who passed the test without much trouble. The point is that I can hire sharp people straight from the university for much less than I can hire a mediocre developer with 3 to 5 years experience. As the marketplace becomes tighter, the mediocre developers will end up working at Blockbuster and the developers who know their stuff will always be able to find work, even if they have to take a pay cut. I have hired seasoned developers, but like I said, they had to take a pay cut of around 20 to 30K. I don't believe this will change for quite a while.
Automatics are for old men
YES I CAN SEE IT NOW! And in a blaze of glory you will burst strait into.. the unemployment line. If you're not already there of course. In that case keep on celebrating. Don't let go of the crack pipe, the homeless guy in front of you might snatch it up.
Well, because ma and pa and grandma have a harder time using most Distro's and having no probs with Windows and/or Mac, I would argue that Open Soruce isn't "reaching the masses" as of yet. Linux intimdates the heckers out of grandma... software names like Gnome and Gimp and Mozilla, companies called Trolltech and so on, isn't exactly "beckoning the masses", especially those who are deeply religious.
I'd say OSS may be hitting hard with the geeks and *some* companies, but so far, most of the average users I know and encounter still use Windows (by choice) and haven't taken a liking much to Linux. I've tried RedHat and wasn't too impressed but I'll get over it.
Of course, I also started programming on a Mac and then went to 'dows and, while I like the non-commercialization feel of Linux (meaning there's still room to create your own wheel, not every element of functionality is wrapped up into an endless entanglement of API's)...
Personally, I'm not terribly impressed with the look-and-feel of most OSS. I won't argue quality because I haven't really judged it or paid attention, WinXP/2k rarely ever crashes on me so it's not a selling point the Linux is more stable (and these are my dev boxes)...
. z Z
Thanks,
Shawn
The "standard of living" is a moving target in as much as the per capita GDP is a function. As has been noted, the problem is very much one of free trade. Until the cost of farming work out to India and Pakistan exceeds that of hiring local workers, companies will continue to shift production there. Software development is the hardest hit in terms of free trade as the product has virtually (ahem) no transport cost whatsoever. Until there are more jobs than qualified applicants for those positions that must remain local, local salaries will continue to drop until people simply refuse to provide skills for the market rate. Without reverting to isolationist economics and politics, the trend will not change.
My advice? Learn Russian or Hindi, start subcontracting and focus on sales and project management. Alternately, take advantage of these facts and move your own production (read: yourself) to, say, Africa, where $15/hour is a King's ransom and you can live accordingly.
Yay, WTO.
Computers are stupidly complex, clunky, and annoying. Why do we have to type on this stupid keyboard thing? Why is everything impossible to integrate or get working together without months or years of someone's effort?
I'm not even talking about crashing, but just the plain pathetic state of it all. You may have to step back a few feet from your monitor thing to see it, but we're basically still in the stone age on this one.
There is *so* much room for improvement I can't see how the industry can be "dead" or even close to it. It's hardly even been born yet.
Larry Ellison is obviously an idiot. Remember how he predicted a couple of years ago that we'd all now be using dumb terminals (connected to an oracle database, of course). Software is far from dead, it'll probably just be integrated into all industries in the future, as opposed to having it's own identity. He should do us all a favor and fly his MIG into a cliff.
I agree with you completely. To declare the death of the software industry dead is utter nonsense.
To me, it would be like Southern Pacific (or any other 19th century railroad) declaring the transportation industry dead in 1890's because the continent had been crossed and the best days of growth were behind them. Little could they imagine the growth and innovation in the transportation industry over the next century.
Perhaps Larry Ellison suffers from the same myopic vision that afflicted the railroad tycoons of the 19th century. As smart and rich as they were, they failed to understand that they were in the transportation business and not just the railroad business. I would be very surprised if the same scenario doesn't play out again with the software industry in the 21st century.
I hate to stretch the analogy too far, but I would be very surprised if somewhere there isn't the modern day equivalent of Wilbur and Orville tinkering away in their bicycle shop in 1903.
There will always be a new toy that requires software. You may not need it but you'll probably want it.
If I'm not automating my house...I'm programming my robot or my Tivo. Or my picture frame with a thousand pictures in it. Or my stereo, my kid's toys, my website, my car has a thousands programs running around in it as does my TV and the network that took it to me.
If I'm not doing that, I'm coding gui's to easily access data from a mySQL database to store my book or movie collection, easily accessible.
There are a thousand and one things that can be improved by a little software. And someone will find a way to market these little things in a pretty package to other people who can't bother with it.
Yes, open source is thinking for the long term, but there's always some new gadget that people must have and it must do X Y and Z.
The problem today is not greed.
The problem is the lack of greed, a lack caused by the lack of ambition.
The rich getting rich? Don't make me laugh. Look at what the rich are doing. They play with their money, risking it in one stock or another. In the meantime companies are rightsizing. Rich people just grab whatever business models appear to work and try to take as much market share as possible.
Riches don't come from this kind of marginal business improvement.
Whatever happened to risk? Real risk?
Recall the development of jet airliners, the invention of the telephone, the photocopier, etc. A lot of the people who worked on these inventions weren't rich. The Wright brothers weren't rich. Hewlett and Packard started in a garage.
This is an age where we should be developing nanotechnology, nay picotechnology. Genetic engineering, biotech, etc. all should be ready for breakthroughs from some ambitious, poor person.
Are people looking for something to do?
Bug the rich people - get them involved in developing something new. Not indirect involvement through stock purchases or venture capital but direct management.
There must be thousands of theories worth experimenting on in medicine and science but not pursued for lack of funding or awareness.
Get the rich people off the golf courses and into the board rooms.
Look around you in the American lifestyle. Nice cars everywhere. People going shopping. There's wealth but everyone is just getting through their comfortable habitual lives.
work eat watch tv sleep go on holiday
People with comfortable jobs go to the office to juggle information not necessarily with any computer knowledge, but orchestrating a fairly proven way of conducting business. Risk free money.
What if 10% of these comfortable people just tried to solve a challenging problem with substantial risk? What if they gave up some of their watching TV or going out and just tried to achieve something? Not just a hobby but a real effort?
Know your pads. One time pad: good for cryptography. Two timing pad: where to take your mistress.
I must disagree with this view. Software is still in its dawning state in so many areas. I have been working for a small software company for some time now and the future is looking bright. We are using Bayesian Networks to introduce intelligence into areas never before seen. The potential is big mostly because we're able to use this technology in almost all complex decision making. There are so many other areas that are still in its dawning stages. Future is bright and we all should join!
Regards
Esben Rasmussen
While I'm sure that Free/Open Source software will eat into some of the profits of proprietary software companies, there will always be people willing to pay for a higher quality product.
Except that proprietary software dosn't deliver you a higher quality product. Instead you are more likely to wind up paying for a bunch of marketing and/or lawyer types who will insist that if things don't go right then it's the fault of anything except their software.
If you want "quality" you'd be better off paying someone to configure and maintain open source to your standards.
Well, because ma and pa and grandma have a harder time using most Distro's and having no probs with Windows and/or Mac,
Thing is that in practice they can have just as many problems with these platforms.
Linux intimdates the heckers out of grandma... software names like Gnome and Gimp and Mozilla, companies called Trolltech and so on.
They'd never thing "Powerpoint? I've already plugged it in...", "Access what?" or "Excel how?".
Don't sweat what you can't change - some suggestions: >Learn how to solve business problems with technology -increasingly some of the interesting tech work is moving where it should have been years ago - fixing business problems. >If you have a passion about something - concentrate your work/projects in those areas - nothing like satisfaction with what you are doing. >Build your proffesional reputation with people you respect producing solid work - proven skill is worth far more in this line of endeavor than paper certs. (For those who disagree note please -> *people you respect*). >Worth repeating - seek out what you enjoy doing.
Apache allows programmers to ignore building a multi-user networking environment for each project. Tomcat allows programmers to write Java servlets with easy configuration. Other modules allow other languages. The base functionality in each platform allows more business logic to be written in less time and with fewer bugs.
The Pascal/VB type languages were easier to understand than the C/C++/Java languages, so they were used by more people. Now that Java provides a better foundation (automatic garbage collection, secure memory usage), the masses are switching.
The best platform today is Lotus Notes/Domino. It provides great security, networking, offline usage, no buffer overruns or other coding issues, and integration with email and all backends. Applications that require years on other platforms can be built "from scratch" and into production in weeks because so much functionality is inherent in the platform. (Insert my usual rant that LN appears weak because it was so easy to build enterprise applications that business people develop aplications rather than hiring programmers. While the business people are very productive, they do not have the background to build high-performance applications.) But unless you work for a large company, it is unlikely you will bother to learn anything about Lotus Notes.
As a consultant, I usually recommend Lotus Notes since it provides two critical functions that are barely available on other platforms:
1. Security: Centralized, robust, managable by business people, can handle any security model. No other system today comes close.
2. Offline work: LN uses a thin client that can maintain the business logic and all data relevant to a business user for use offline, and transfers the data (for ALL applications) back to the servers (either on a schedule or by clicking one button.)
Modern devleopers can be divided into these categories:
Platforms allow us to do more with much less work. Languages exist to allow us to program the tricky bits that are not inherent in the platform. Eventually we will have a platform that allows applications to be built by "knocking the blocks together." In the meantime, choose the best platform for an application, not your favorite language.
I spend my life entertaining my brain.
If you use thin clients, you do not need to worry about installing an application on thousands of PCs.
Getting users to give up their full function PCs is almost impossible. You also run the risk of losing all productivity when the central servers are unavailable.
Thin clients allow all functionality to be controlled by the servers. This makes changes to business logic and application design very easy to manage.
The two popular thin clients in use today are:
1. Browsers.
2. Lotus Notes.
Browsers allow all data and application design to remain on the servers. Their disadvantage is that when the servers are unavailable, so are the applications.
Lotus Notes allows all data and application design to remain on the servers. It also allows the application design and relevant data to be stored locally so it can be used when the server is unavailable (such as on a disconnected laptop during a sales trip.)
If you do not need disconnected use, then browsers are enough. If you need disconnected use, then use Lotus Notes. Or build a thick client and enter the maintenance nightmare.
---
Free software is honestly the ONLY place where innovation occurs.
I disagree. My company is attempting to make great changes in how business software is designed. We are not contributing it to the "Free software" world because we expect to make much money from our ideas. We provide the source to paying customers, because we believe there is too much potential for evil in closed source software, but it is not FREE for any use. And it allows our user community to review the code, make changes, and even submit them back to us. Since our product is still rather new, and upgrades are released often, this allows their desired changes to become part of the main tree, which eases their upgrade chores, while making a better product for all of our customers.
Our developers usually assist to the point of writing the entire change anyway. We hope this changes once more people are trained on our product. But... 1. we are not willing to go "free" just to get more people trained. 2. Anything that improves the product improves our business. One of the great advantages of buying from a young company is their willingness to adapt the products to match your business. So this is a selling point for us.
OTOH, we would like to give the software away because it will cause a revoluton in software design, but that is unlikely to happen until the company has other sources of revenue.
I spend my life entertaining my brain.
Well, lets see: Spreadsheet -- circa 1979-80; pc databases - 1978; word processors, groupware: 1968 (doug engelbart); GUIs: mid 1970s - 1980s; Lotus Notes: 1989; basic graphics packages: mid 1980s; powerpoint-like presentation packages: 1980s; Internet browsers: late 1980s, early 1990s....of course game DISPLAY has become more and more powerful, but the GAMES aren't that much better...oh, yes: we can now REDISTRIBUTE OTHER PEOPLE'S WORK PRODUCTS (..music, videos, etc.) to millions and millions of COPYCATS more easily than ever....And the "WEB" is of course a continuing font of content....But basic INNOVATION? I challenge anyone to name any important new software applications or web services in the last five years. Genuine innovation, it seems, has been squelched by the combined forces of the Internet bubble-burst, Microsoft's basic dominance of client applications, and the idiotic "software, unlike other economic activities, must be free" movement.
Yes. I am writing this on a yellow legal pad purchased from Staples. It is embedded with a microchip that can read the ink from PaperMate(r) pens, and requires neither software nor hardware for transmission.
Eat my shorts, BillG.
Doones
"A generation which ignores history has no past and no future." -- Robert Heinlein