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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.
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
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?"
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 will agree with you once the free software subculture actually comes out with something that is NOT A CLONE of a commercial product.
...
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.
I believe the 'thing that sets you apart' is called talent, why would a Pscyhology degree make any difference?
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!
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.
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
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).
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.
Which industry do you think pays for all the "free" software. I'd like to see people volounteer their time when they can't put food on the table. If I'm working at Lowe's, carrying lumber, I don't think I will be in the mood to write free software after I get back from work.
And I don't mean to troll, but Ellison is a known blowhard.
Luck favors the prepared, darling.
I will agree with you once the free software subculture actually comes out with something that is NOT A CLONE of a commercial product.
:-).
It indeed happens seldom to find a really original idea implemented as a software product. But that's happening both in the commercial and the free software world. Hey, what was the last M$ or IBM software product, not being a clone
But for the free software world, I do think that the first NCSA web server and the first web browser (running on good old NeXT) can be considered "not a clone" and were also free downloadable. So, there is your example....
Browsers shouldn't have a back button!! It's all about going forward...
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.).
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.
No offense, but if you studied computer science because you thought there was easy money to be made, you did it for all the wrong reasons.
There's one thing that will surely "set you apart from the masses"; it's called talent. Usually that goes hand in hand with actually having a passion for the subject - it doesn't sound like you have this. Think about it - you are competing with people who go to university to study computer science, then come home, and work on their computer some more.
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.
You do realise that the Software Industry is about a LOT more than Windows programming and games
Welcome to the embedded/telecom-industry - please bring your Open Source GPRS-signalling stack
it's in my head
... 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.
>They haven't even kept pace with free software,
Free software is helping to kill the Software Business. Dickie Stallman's utopian view of a technology industry entirely peopled by unpaid labor is coming true.
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)
Nonsense. The modern free software movement uses commercial developers to do it's R&D. So you have the free software people shouting "We're innovative!" on the one hand, but from the outside it all looks very me-too.
...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.
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.
Right. That's the answer, Mensa. Nevermind that I can't magically lower my cost of living to be in line with the cost of living in India. My student loans don't magically become worth less, just because I get paid less. Nor does my mortgage cost shrink, because my pay shrinks.
Anyway, you apparantly didn't read what I wrote. I said I have a job NOW. I've been fully employed at a healthy salary since 1993 (when I graduated). However, given current trends in the industry I fully expect to NOT be employed in software development in the future unless either (A) I'm lucky or (B) the cost of living gets really really low here in the US. We're talking 3rd-world nation low. Then again, that's where the suits are pushing us, so maybe we'll be a third world nation soon. Then perhaps we could compete.
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.
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
I've been developing professionally for coming on 7 years now. Frankly, there is little out there that's convincing me where heading towards "Lego" like software construction. (And if we are, it might be in some place like .Net, which I'm only on the outskirts of right now.)
See, the thing is, it's really hard to make a useful core engine that is reusable in a lot of different scenarios. 9 times out of 10, it's easier and cheaper to start from sractch, making use of good toolkits/API and directly solving the problem at hand, hopefully in a reasonably flexible way, than to wrangle some existing infrastructure into what the client wants.
Actually, that toolkit/API level software work IS a bit like using legos (few people should writ a Java hashmap function from scratch)...I think my Lego-like, you're thinking something more on the scale of...I dunno, Capsela.
But what can I do? I switched to Comp Sci in 1994 or so. I read Wired, but I had no idea something like the boom was coming. I added a Comp Sci major to my English because Comp Sci is what came naturally to me and felt personally rewarding... I'd be trying to do it even if there was no boom. I guess if the situation gets ugly enough, I'll rethink my life... though it's gonna be hard to a lateral switch that's likely to knock me so far down the payscale.
SO YOU'RE GOING TO DIE: The Comic for Dealing with Death
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.
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
Part of the problem with the industry is some of the current salaries represent a skill that at one time was harder to come by. As programming languages become simpler to code with and more people get into the market, the more salaries will need to come down.
On the plus side, with a good number of years experience you can always try and develop a specific skill across a wide number of platforms/languages and keep yourself gainfully employed.
Or do what the Auto companies did and form a union!
It take more faith to believe in evolution than it takes to believe in God
I think it would be a mistake to group all software development into the same market.
That would be like saying all manufacturing is the same market, so televisions and automobiles should be lumped together.
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!
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
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
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
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.
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.
"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!"
2) How many of these startups would it take to cover for the Lucents out there?
If Chaos Theory has taught us anything, it's that we must kill all the butterflies.
You left out another alternative: what if (C) the cost of living increases elsewhere ? What if the third world countries outgrow being third world countries ? The reason the cost of living is higher in the US is largely due to a currency differential. Basically, you can buy a lot of third world labor with your spare change. If the "third world" countries develop competitive economies, this differential will not be sustained -- either America's currency will drop, or the other currencies will grow, or both.
Two things I see coming out of this -- one is that a lot of people are going to get burned by transitions in major economies. Another is that being American does not in itself entitle you to buy hours and hours of someone else's time, if that someone else has comparable skills. In other words, the worst thing that's going to happen to your living standards is not that your labor is going to become cheap, it's that foreign labor is going to become more expensive.
The software industry _deserves_ to die. They haven't even kept pace with free software...
The software industry doesn't deserve death more than any other, say the auto industry, the oil industry, the drug industry, the political graft industry, or the [fill in random industry here].
The biggest difference between the software industry and others is that it has to compete with a cottage industry of experienced, competent developers motivated not by money but by reputation and perfection of technical skills, whose capital costs are virtually nonexistent. As a result, for perhaps the first time in industrial history, a cottage industry has gotten as strong as the corporate segment with which it competes. In what way does this mean that the corporate segment deserves to die?
It doesn't. On the contrary, note the rapidly developing symioses between the corporate and the - let's call it "free" - side. This doesn't mean that free software development is going corporate, rather it means that free software development is gaining even more strength. This is the ideal result.
One of the ways the free software segment continues to grow is through corporate sponsorship, most typically, where the best free developers are provided with salaried or contract positions, which are not just slave labor, but in which they can devote the majority of their time to doing what they were already doing, i.e., putting more and better software into the public domain. In return for which the corporation gains prestige, competent advice, some influence on project design directions, and the occasional emergency hack. Without such corporate sponsorship, the free software segment would still grow, but not nearly as quickly.
Rather than imminent extinction of the profit-making software industry, what's really happening is a species die-off, coupled with the rise of a new species of software company that understands the new lay of the land. To profit in the next decade, the old monopoly tricks won't work any more. Any monopolies that have so far survived just serve to attract the attention of more free developers: the bigger the monopoly, the bigger the attraction. So monopolized market segments tend to be pushed into niches, and when these niches are finally the biggest targets left, they in turn attract attention, and so it goes. A smart company can profit by *staying* in front of the advance, where free developers are pushing into the remaining niches, but aren't quite there yet. This is where a salaried team working according to preset guidelines can perform best, to deliver products that are good for the customer not because there is no other choice, but because they are easier to learn, slicker or more functional than what the customer can get for free.
This requires understanding the synergies, reading the new directions accurately, and above all, noticing what the free software developers - being free - sense and react to so much more efficiently than traditional corporate structures. In other words, ride the train, don't stand in front of it.
Have you got your LWN subscription yet?
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!
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.
Sun is hurting, clearly. But Oracle?
Oracle's long term prospects are very good. Perhaps their pure packaged software business is not going to be the revenue pig that it has been, but their enterprise services business (support and consulting) has a bright future. I think Larry is making this pitch about software being dead because he sees that he needs to move his business even more to the services side, like IBM has done.
I think he's reacting to the open source phenomonon. He's declared that Linux will wipe MS out of the datacenter. He knows it will be a while before OS databases compete with Oracle and DB2 there, but he can't be so naive to think that this cannot happen. He's looking out in his industry and saying "where is the revenue going to come from?". He sees IBM making money in services.
And this ultimately is why the original poster need not fret. He probably won't work for a software pure-play. Instead he'll work in an IT department or a consulting company. Unfortunately, this industry will be highly cyclical because it will track the economy as a whole.
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
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.
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.
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?
"Dickie Stallman's utopian view of a technology industry entirely peopled by unpaid labor is coming true."
That is not RMS's view. In fact, RMS _wants_ people to charge for both software and software services. In fact, that is the way the FSF was initially funded.
The software business in its current model deserves to die because the _last_ thing it does is service the customer, instead of the first thing. It is a testament to computing power that people have benefitted at all over the past several years - the software industry seems to be trying to dig it's own grave.
Free Software gives the power back to the users. It doesn't mean that people will stop getting paid, it means that the ones doing the paying will actually be in control. In the current model, the end-users pay heavily but have no control. That is changing dramatically.
Engineering and the Ultimate
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!
Oracle is now more expensive than the Sun hardware that it needs to run on. Support costs for Oracle are tied to initial licensing costs and if you botch it, Oracle will leave you to hang out to dry. Unless you're a really large customer, Oracle will treat you as if you are irrelevant.
All of this has to wear down their mindshare (if not their marketshare) sooner or later.
Actually, Oracle's long term prospects look grim. They tend/need to bleed too much money out of their customers in order to make their business model work. Their product is based on a open standard that already has suitable commercial replacements and will eventually have suitable copylefted replacements.
Sooner or later someone is going to come along to rescue companies from Oracle licensing and support costs.
Also, the LAST people you want doing Oracle support for you is Oracle consulting.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Your degree isn't dull, but was never a guarantee of employment in any time. No degree is, for very long if at all.
You are employable because of what you can do, and a degree is just one way to illustrate an aspect of your abilities. You can fill up your resume with acronym after acronym, but bear in mind that those are fads that people less aware (being kind) than most in the geek sector cling to for understanding. Any recruiter who depends entirely on seeing ERP/BAM-BAM/R++ on a resume will be needing another kind of job when that acronym set falls out of favor.
The best programmers I know have English degrees, and the best network folks learned it outside formal instruction channels.
A degree is a nice place to indulge your desire to focus on a given area, and to pick up the context within which you hope to work one day, but is no more or less than you make it by your talent, creativity, and ability to communicate.
Best of luck! Regardless of this doom-saying article, the industry has legs. Hunting is more difficult (realistic) now, but can always be fruitful if you put the passion into hunting that you did while in school.
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 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.
Messaging systems (you could produce one of these that is as good as anyone else's at a fraction of the cost). Streaming media tools. There's plenty of opportunities for someone with initiative to swoop in and clean up where the big vendors have left.
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.
You are exactly right. For example, you can do most of what most Cisco products can do with free software, but when something goes wong, you won't have Cisco's Special Circumstances agents to back you up. You can do most of what a Sun can do with x86 hardware, but (apart from maybe IBM) there's no-one in the x86 space that can give you the kind of backup that Sun can, if you need it.
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.
The problems these days - and these were always the interesting ones - are not so much "what can we do", which is what the packaged software industry answered but "what should we do, and how do we do it" which is where bespoke software, developed and iterated quickly by people who know both tech and business come in. The future's bright for those that understand that IT is about solving problems in the real world, and can identify and understand those problems.
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...
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..
It's not quite that simple. We have customers; OS has users. When OS comes up with a truly innovative UI or design or program, people celebrate.
How does this differ from what I said? Microsoft owns the market, and would rather keep disruptions to a minimum, rather than point their masses in new directions that they may not control as well. It would be possible for a company with billions of dollars to provide both a stable UI and new innovative features, were they so motivated.
Is pre-emptive Windows with a flat 32-bit address space an innovation? Is a language environment built on a VM and less-complete libraries an innovation? Only when seen as a tool for keeping a grasp on power. COM is/was a horrible thing, as was their non-preemptive segmented programming model, setting back state of the art by many years, but all of these things, before Microsoft was forced to have an alternative, were strongly opposed and argued against by Microsoft until it reached the point that they had to do something different from the monstrously-bad ideas that dominated within Microsoft for so many years.
Microsoft is certainly not the only company to behave this way. It is a common pattern, although as Microsoft takes all established domains away from the original innovators, Microsoft becomes the centralized anti-innovation counterweight. If anything, this is more evident in Microsoft Office and other non-OS products. Their "innovations" were part of competitors products as much as 10 years ago, because these ideas are proven and safe now and the innovating companies mostly defunct.
When MS comes up with something new, people don't upgrade. We have millions of customers that have never heard of Linux (insert your own joke), millions that don't read Slashdot, millions that want about as much uncertainty in their software as they want in their televisions. Actually, less, if possible. No matter how good the new UI is, it's new, and therefore inferior. There's a resistance to change that might not be evident among the alpha geek herd.
It is more the market dominance than the details of the UI that make people choose Microsoft, which was evident when Apple or others had the better established UIs, and former DOS users chose Windows and even many Apple users have been forced into Windows because they learn to use whatever is there, however flawed. Millions of users had to relearn to use Microsoft replacements over the original UIs, and still look back with fond memories to products that served their needs better.
Which is no excuse for why new, innovative UIs aren't coming out of the OS community (although there's plenty of non-UI innovation). The only thing holding OSers back is that they, too, know users won't switch if they have to learn something new, so they're trying to create an environment as identical to Windows as possible.
My wife and kids, none of them tech experts, use Linux because it is there, and although they complain when they have to use a Windows machine that lacks some UI and other features, they use whatever is there very effectively. It is all about market control. There is not that much relearning involved, however much Microsoft would like to have people locked in to what they learned. They also use Mac OSX without too many major adjustments. UIs which were made to be used are not that difficult to use. It is a lame excuse that people will not learn to use a better UI or even just different UIs when that is what they find on the desktop. And the UI is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to innovation.
All very sad, if you ask me. If the change doesn't start with the alpha-geeks, we're going to be using the same window model for some 30 years.
Just like we would all still be programming in C++ had it been left up to Microsoft, not that they do not have people able to produce something like Java, as was demonstrated after Java took lots of mindshare.
The biggest threat to innovation in the present environment is Microsoft's ability to put anyone out of business that threatens their established model through innovation.
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
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.
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.
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