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235,000 Fewer Programmers by 2015
RonMcMahon writes "According to a CNN Money article, Forrester Research is predicting that there will be 235,396 fewer Computer Programmers and Software Engineers employed in 2015 than there are today in America. This is a 25% reduction in the number of positions from today's depressed numbers. This sucks. I know that many companies are moving work off-shore, but wow, that's half the population of Wyoming!"
I think I will start looking now or perhaps move to India.
its called survival of the fittest... if you aren't good enough to keep your current job, you better start looking elseware....or go into management
Or maybe I should go and get my MBA in the next few years
...235,395 fewer!
I wonder how many carpenters there are in the US? Most programmers are little more than carpenters who don't have to provide their own tools... "You buy me that shiny 64-bit hammer and I'll *pound* nails with it, Baby!"
Next time get a union.
They don't even have to be run by mobsters or be unreasonable or powerful. Look at SPEEA.
Worst case scenerio is you gain a little bit of appreciation for the uncertanty that faces a lot of factory workers.
Damn, I wish I could mod myself down for trolling..
I think that more important than the number of employed programmers and engineers is the number of people that program in their free time. A lot of programming employment opportunities are just soul draining code lackey positions. A lot of the really interesting, creative work comes from peoples' hobby projects.
However, i've actually got something useful to thunk. This is obviously just another sign of the US economy in a state on non-bull market. Not a falling market, just not one that is going up, like it seems to be. Notice that a ton of these jobs are those of basic secretaries? No, nerds, not BASIC secretaries. Anyways, I dont really have a thought, just wanted to add my 6.1 cents.
The Braying and Neighing of Barnyard Animals Follows.
I'm not American, but from an outsiders's POV, one of America's defining aspects has always been its national pride. Whatever happened to that "Made in America" pride?
Why would anyone listen to these same clowns who predicted 10 trillion dollars of e-commerce in 1999? I can also pull numbers out of my ass. I believe programming jobs will increase by 20% in ten years from current levels.
And here I am paying coders like a sucker.
The numbers won't mean much unless you can define who they are? I know some web page designers who are classed as "programmers".
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
> This sucks. I know that many companies ...
> are moving work off-shore
Why do you think an American deserves a job more than some hard-working, enterprising person in Bangalore [or wherever]? (PS: I'm american.)
1 - DMCA (nuff said)
2 - ***A (FTAA, NAFTA, IndiA , RIAA (for paying 25 million to a scheme that can be defeated with the shift key)
3 - Welcome to the Global World, it's about time America gets their ass pounded by it too...
how long until
Think about it, the Baby Boomers will retire and fewer kids will go into computer science due to the lack of programming jobs.
Hopefully that will reduce the supply of programmers enough so that the good ones will still be able to find jobs.
Will they be:
Professional hover-board racers?
Anti-gravity technicians?
Time-travel holiday sales people?
Omnis amans amens
Alice got downsized today :-(((
;-)
This REALY sucks
Of course, it is notup to date on the stock market, but I suspect that that may be a shell game anyhow, at least on some level.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
Well, for the last two years, I had the feeling that this is exactly the way things are going to work out. This is why after completing my Computer Science BSc. I decided to learn Mathematics properly instead. So now, I'm 6 months away from completing my MSc. in Pure Mathematics and I know that I have learnt things that mostly have not changed for the last 100 years and are not going to change for the next 100 years all that much and so I don't need to worry about what the _next_ big thing will be, because mathematics will always be relevant. It will never be BIG in the same sense as aviation industry was once big and in the same sense as the dot com rush, but it will always be OK.
Of course this does not stop me from getting employed as a programmer if I wanted to.
I thought there were "hundreds of thousands of unfilled jobs in IT"? I'm gonna sue these bastards and get my money back!
When I started doing work with computers, and my computer degree, I did it because I enjoyed the work and appeared to have a natural talent. This was the case for most people on my degree course.
A couple of years ago I worked for a UK university and I was so disapointed at the number of people who had no interest in the subject but doing it awayway. It seems that people think you can get a high paying job in IT, so will get the degree in hopes of getting a job despite not having any enthusiasm or talent or skill.
Maybe this will be a good thing, we might see less people going into IT just because they think it will pay well.
If you ever drop your keys into a river of molten lava, let'em go, because, man, they're gone.
Remember what Dell just did recently? Most big business's were complaining that Dell's over seas tech support was a farce and demanded english speaking tech support reps that new the nomenclature of IT. There was such an up roar, Dell did move their Big Business tech support back to the US.
I think after awhile with enough uproar from consumers, their slumping tech support award will cause them to follow suit for the average joe as well.
I think we can extrapolate this to all of the other area of IT, especially programming. You still need a high level of written and oral communication to perform your job effectively. That is whyI think this big push for over seas IT jobs will eventually backfire in the face of big business.
Note I am in Australia which has some of these problems but nothing it would appear in comparison to America.
;)
:)
As much as it does suck I honestly see the only real way forward for software engineers and programmers is to either move into or start a research and development company and develop highly specialized software or to move into a new area of IT.
Honestly I would prefer if you didnt move into the system administration area, that would be mine,
The only way to keep your job secure is to work in face to face/onsite support or IT management although I am sure some clever CEO/CTO will figure out how to move those overseas as well.
One of the funniest things I read this year was a guarntee from our American management that they would not be moving the software development section from Australia to America from Australia, it was originally an Australian company so we didn't steal any American jobs
The real thing I want to know is where will the jobs be that are not outsourced to other countries and why will they be the ones to stay in comparison to those that are sent overseas.
37 - what does it stand for really...
Wait, Damn, I'll probably be changing careers too...
To me it looks like they just take the trend of the past 2 years, extrapolate it to 2015, think of a few pages worth of `reasoning' why the numbers go so much down/up, and, hey presto, a new raport available!
Given disparaties in education between the first world and less developed countries, it is only natural that employment requiring less education will gravitate to where there isn't a high cost of education contributing to average compensation.
Conversely, the higher-level jobs will remain in societies where the labor pool is qualified enough.
To go out on a limb, there is something about this which reminds me of back when this country (Egypt) was under british colonial rule; the cotton was grown here, sold cheaply to European manufacturers, made into textiles, clothes, etc. there, and sold back to Egypt.
No judgment passed, it's a simple case of value-added and relative ability to contribute this value.
Blearf. Blearf, I say.
You obviously aren't seeing what others are seeing. Everyone I talk to who has seen offshoring agrees that basically the company axes entire projects at a time. So, even if the numbers look like 10% of the software developers in your company are laid off...they common criteria for layoffs is not how good you are...but what project you are on.
I hate to beat a dead horse, but let's face it: We're probably legislating a lot of programmers out of business with software patents. How much incentive to program will you have when anything you write could potentially get you sued? Unless you work in a firm with the paralegal-lawyer-power to cover your butt, you might as well be testing grenades by pulling the pins and waiting to see if it does anything.
It's not survival of the fittest. That little token of darwinism doesn't apply to people caught in our social networks, unless you describe fittest as best networked.
Indian programers aren't better, and there is a good chance they're not cheaper, when the accounting is finished. What is true, is the guy who sells their services plays golf with the guy who signs the paychecks for programmers. And that guy's primary responsability is to allocate resources to solve problems he most likely doesn't understand in any meaningful fashion.
When that guy signs a pink slip, it's as much with the intent of pleasing his friend as it is helping his compnay through a process he doesn't understand, and through a proxy who also likely doesn't understand his business or the ones he takes on as customers.
They aren't rich and powerful because of what they know, but WHO they know. Rest assured when the morons are done exporting all the unskilled and skilled labor overseas, for essentially no reason, the next question they'll ask themselves is why all their managers are over here?
At which point the US becomes a gated community for the rich, with livin service industries.
I know I'm brushing up on my car detailing.
A good U.S. programmer == 10 mediocre Indian programmers
Suppose the mediocre programmers in India make $10,000 a year. A good U.S. programmer should therefore be able to make $100,000. Now before you call me racist, a good Indian programmer also == 10 mediocre Indian programmers. However, you can bet that they will get their ass to America to make a decent wage.
In conclusion, if you are good, you don't have anything to worry about. Also, I hope that most of the mediocre U.S. programmers find a different profession because I'm sick of having to work with them and clean up their mess.
I should of known it would never last...
If you can read this sig - the bitch fell off.
I seem to remember that not more than 10 or 15 years ago, people were predicting that by the end of this decade there would be such a demand for programmers, due to every little thing in your house having a computer of some sort in it, as to cause a shortage of supply. Well, that just didn't quite happen the way we thought it would. One might say it's due to the .com bust, one might not. The twists along the way don't really matter much. Any way you look at it, the predictions were and continue to be unfulfilled. I wouldn't bet my future on this "new" one coming to pass either. I would presume that these predictions rely heavily on current or near-recent trends (especially when programming could be concerned). Who knows what the next couple of years might bring, let alone the next decade.
It goes from God, to Jerry, to me.
Because he likely lives in the United States. Given the choice between having a job available to one of my countrymen, and available to some 2nd world citizen, I would choose my own. If anything, to help strengthen the economy I depend on.
Blar.
Computer programmers just need to start using the goto keyword and global variables more and do less code documentation and object-oriented programming.
I have never understood the verulent resistance to unionization amongst the IT folks I know. During the "heyday" of the dot-com era, no one wanted to think about such issues, as you could seemingly skip from one job to another with a seemingly endless step up in salary each time. However, the realities of a capitalist system are inevitable, and the market dried up.
Think of how much better off in terms of job security, benefits, and salary the IT industry in the US could be today had they unionized early enough. Protection could have also been built in to protect the proletariate from the export of jobs overseas. It's truly a shame.
Stop corporate
This is the same turmoil that hardware engineers went through for numerous years. When I completed my EE I realized that hardware (while very fulfilling) didn't pay as well as software. Western software engineering has become over inflated and expensive in the world market and we are going to see some pain.
Looking at history though, the cleaning of house will be OK in the long run. Some people will have to find new careers, but the pipeline of new people should also shrink somewhat. Look around you. How many of your co workers got into programming soley due to the money, or really don't have a love of it but of the paycheck. I think you will see the part of the 25% that won't come from reduced entries of new programmers.
Nash was right... nuff said.
I see this as a "what I want" syndrome that is going to bite people in the ass in the long run.
First off you have the american side of it. The CEOs will ship the jobs off shore, americans will lose jobs and have to go on pogey. So yeah, the CEO makes a short-term profit but pays for it in taxation in the end.
Second you have the foreign side of it. They're willing to sell their time for a heck of a lot less than the americans [leading to the questionable quality issue which is another debate alltogether]. However, in the long run thy're just poising themselves to earn the least amount of money possible. [e.g. no long-term profit].
So really outsourcing is a nearsighted "fix".
However, there are several real concerns. Often software developers are paid way too much for what they produce. $70k/yr to produce buggy programs [re: name the last 10 windows games...] is excessive. Also this is partly americans own fault. Everyone and their brother is now a "computer scientist" [having finished their 3wk course at Devry or what not]. Now the CEOs are just pushing this farther by grabing rice farmers and what not and calling them computer scientists.
So in reality y'all are gonna taste your own medicine in the end!!!!
MUAHAHAHAA
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
Perhaps it's just me, but I think it's GREAT there'll be less programmers. I can't see the amount of programming work dropping significantly by 2015, so it means more work for less people, and perhaps our rates of pay will become more on a par with plumbers, builders, and carpenters once again.. instead of being at Wal*Mart levels.
This is a great market readjustment.
mogorific carpentry experiments
Seriously. There's two things we can do.
1) Scale back the H1-B program to 1980s levels. If they don't make us train our replacements here in the USA, then there will be more USA jobs.
2) Impose reasonable import taxes on services. If they can tax me for the pay for the roads that Joe CEO drives in his Lexus to work, then they can tax offshore software development.
"America and it's corporations will be less relevant to the rest of the world, IT-wise, in 2015."
So Microsoft's End-of-Life is 2015?
cpghost at Cordula's Web.
I think a prediction like this is very hard to make. Surely you can write better and better software and eventually, you have a tool which can do some job perfectly. But then new things become important and new tools develope. Only few programs survive for years, or decades, and there is always something new comming. You may think, PC's become like a 'type-writer' in the end, something rocksolid and unchanging. But: type-writers changed a lot as well and presently computers with 'Word' are not just the newest kind of 'type-writer'. As far as jobs go, I think there is -always- a need for mind workers. Even if we could build smart AIs, they would be more of an extension of our brains, not a replacement. Why? Simple answer: if could down the branch your sitting on, you will fall down the tree! If the society doesn't provide jobs anymore, then either everyone owns a one-man-factory which does everything for free, or one owns all but cannot sell anything.
There will be fewer people vying for those jobs, according to
this.
So, the jobs that will probably be lost are the ones that suck anyway, the ones that require just painful coding line after line of repetive garbage.
The jobs that will be left will be the high-paid positions of QA-- the ones to go through all that garbage written by the lowest bidder and fix it. O the joy we will have.
I demand a million helicopters and a DOLLAR!
With so many people doing IT, what do you expect? This is no surprise at all.
Perhaps out-sourceing is revenge for the .com fiasco. Out-sourcing has been available for many years. Why is it becomming popular now? I wonder, in part, if the suits blame geeks for the .com crash conveniently forgetting the ridiculous business models.
History is so yesterday!
All your programmers are belong to us!
"It's too bad that stupidity isn't painful." - Anton LaVey
Outsourcing is a model that has proved to be wrong, I write it in capitals WRONG, meaning that it has not provided the expected benefits in term of savings and it has caused a degradation in terms of quality of service. Managers follow fashons, showing the savings of offshoring is easy on a balance... especially if you never done any outsourcing before!! (so due to ignorance) there is an increase of managment costs that is not always easy to spot plus there are other hidden costs arising, when you have your development team on the other side of the planet. And even assuming savings are actually there, what are the lossess due to lost of the business knowledge of your IT department? When there will be an economy upturn, and that could be very well on its way, the name of the game will be again "time to market" rather than cost savings and what are the companies you want to bet on at that point? those one having their in-house departments or those one that have their IT departments in India, Vietnam or wherever? As far as analysts are concerned, all they do is to put two points on a board and draw a line, anybody remember Nasdaq 10000?
Why would you need software developers by 2015 microsoft will issue you software if and when you need software. Why would you ever need to write your own. -:)
Are you working in the private sector? Then take it from me: you won't be in the lucky half.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
It is simply bad public policy for U.S. government agencies to out source these jobs to foreign workers. Until Americans regain a sense of nationalism, this will continue to happen. The Chinese and Indians are laughing at us.
Is it just me or is every second taxi driver you meet doing a part time course in programming or network admin? People still think they can do a 2 year part time course, get some cisco certificate, and walk into a high paying job. They are wrong now, and if this report is true, they will be even more wrong in the future. It seems these training companies are just cashing in on their ignorance.
Read reviews of shopping cart software
The children of the baby boomers will be a bigger demographic bulge than the boomers. True, some baby boomers will retire soon. Others are a good 30 years away from it. 2015 is about when Social Security goes bankrupt too, so many won't ever be able to retire.
reinvention of the wheel becomes less and less of a business opportunity. So we get more of a market for reselling instead of reinventing the wheel.
Expect more jobs for telemarketers and less for engineers. That's progress.
I predict that by 2015, we'll have 235,00 more error dialogs that say "Some program fail, please you now restart".
... I'm sure there will be a commensurate increase in other professions to balance this.
Politicians and lawyers look to be good choices.
As high as the failure rate is for projects that are outsourced overseas, it is lower than the failure rate for IT projects in general.
I'm not American, but from an outsiders's POV, one of America's defining aspects has always been its national pride. Whatever happened to that "Made in America" pride?
... before the media changed the definition to "get lots of money at whatever cost" sometime during the Reagan and Bush Senior administrations (and reiterated the mantra to death during the Clinton administration).
... go figure.
Are you joking? I am an American, and let me tell you, ever since Dubya was appointed by the Republican-appointed justices of the Supreme Court to the presidency, it has been downright humiliating to be American. At least, it is if you are anywhere to the left of Gengis Khan, or get your news from a source other than Rupert Murdoch's propogandists.
Our defining aspect at one time was our high regard for personal freedom, even when it might be less practical than other alternatives (remember when Japan was on the top of the heap and pundits were commenting on how America had "too much individualism" to compete?). This of course was back when "the American Dream" was a dream of freedom and liberty, and the opportunity to achieve one's potential
American pride you ask? At one time we deserved it, but ever since the 1980s when we sold out our most basic principles of freedom and democracy for a little short term economic prosperity, a War on Drugs, a War on Political Incorrectness, a War on Terrorism, and now, lately, a War on Thought, we don't have a hell of a lot left to be proud of at all, Saddam's capture notwithstanding.
Certainly not enough national pride to keep our firms from moving their IT operations offshore and entrusting their sensitive corporate secrets to foreign contractors
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
That's why I almost went into medicine fifteen years ago. But I rebelled and went into CompSci and couldn't be happier.
Not everyone has as much back bone. I know one person who finished medical school and disliked being a doctor so much (you have sick people telling you their problems all day and often you can't anything to help them) that he quit within a year and started his own business.
I just skimmed through the article. They base their assumption upon the fact, that many IT-jobs are clerical and that they will move offshore.
I guess they might be right about that with the current situation. Still, 2015 is still 11 years ahead. I don't know ANY serious predictions in IT which go for 2+ years. IT is still changing fast and is changing faster every year. Who knows what kind of computer engineers will be needed for the new tools in 2+ years? And who knows how the outsourcing country economies will develop in 11 years?
I'd recommend to remain calm for now. Stay ahead with new technologies and don't panic.
Predicting an economy in the year 2015? That is the dumbest thing I have ever heard. I don't even know what kind of software, video games, or equipment I will be using in 2010. Why would they assume to know how many programmers we will need here or around the world in 2015. I refuse to RTFA with an intro like that :)
I'm about a year shy of my Computer/Info Science degree. Am I headed in the wrong direction?
CNN and others can predict all they want. Reality will only be revealed in time. More than likely CNN will be wrong.
Assuming that these forecasts are accurate -- a big assumption with this sort of hard-to-predict thing but let's stipulate it is for purposes of argument...
It's not clear to me that the shrinkage is necessarily because of outsourcing overseas as everyone seems to be assuming. Sure that might be (doubtless will be) part of it but it doesn't seem that would be the only trend. In addition, in spite of the increase in the number of computers and things automated, there's also an increase in use of packaged software and tools that greatly increase productivity. A lot more can be accomplished with a lot fewer porogrammers than 10 or 20 years ago.
You can certainly find lots of examples in other industries where far fewer people are employed in spite of higher overall domestic output because of productivity increases.
I have reciently ran in to folks thinking about computers cause they are so "cool". I have been telling them to think of programming as a hobby.
Get a Medical degree.
Come the revolution, the Bourgeois, Capitalistic, "A PARKING STICKER HOLDERS", will be first against the wall!
Let's tax imported goods too so we can save MY manufacturing job.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
All the news reports I've read appear to be in consensus that the average project outsourced overseas saves in the neighborhood of twenty to thirty percent after all is said and done.
I prefer to be called "codifier of electronic beasts and gadgets"
From excellent karma to terible karma with a single +5 funny post...
That's just a guess; for a lot of others, yeah, I guess people just stopped caring about "Made in America."
Funny, though: in Canada (when I lived there) it's a lot more common, I think, to have people actively looking out to buy Canadian-made or to deal with Canadian corporations. I lived there till I was 24, and that's my perception, anyway.
philcrissman.com.
"I think there is a world market for maybe five computers."...IBM Chairman Thomas Watson, 1943
"Computers in the future may weigh no more than 1.5 tons."...Popular Mechanics, 1949
"There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home."...Digital Equipment Corporation Chairman Ken Olson, 1977
"By the turn of this century, we will live in a paperless society."...General Motors Chairman Roger Smith, 1986
Just another day in Paradise
How many people are going to call up Dell and complain about Indian programmers in Bangalore using == to compare Strings in java or not commenting their code? I think everyone on /. starts off with the assumption that there is NOTHING americans do better and ALL jobs will eventually go to India or China or wherever.
There seem to be a few poor fools who think(?) that 'survival of the fittest' is somehow involved! Fittness has little to do with what's going on. We ought to be supporting progressive values about jobs and open source standards.
We also need to strongly encourage much higher standards of software quality. I notice that the shabby overall quality software is due to a combination of managers without a clue and the type of developers who mistakenly think they are fit.
A useful place to start is at this useful site: http://www.cyberlodge.org/
I kept on being labeled an elitist when I was at the university advising most people to drop cs and go straight to marketing courses, cause they clearly didn't have the spirit for CS work.
Now, most of these IT Experts are unemployed. One of them followed my advice and became a succesful real-estate agent.
If you don't enjoy doing something DON'T BASE YOUR EVERYDAY LIFE ON IT.
common sense 101
If don't specialize in non-commutative geometry, gauge and QF theory or homology of perverse sheaves now, then you will be sooo fucked in some years. I mean every jerk can do FEM, non-smooth optimization, commutative or Riemannian geometry these days. Have I mentioned that Hilbert spaces are trivial ? And universities everywhere are outsourcing their researches on Frenet spaces to Columbia already !
Owner of a Mensa membership card.
Unionize - and take over the company.
Unionize and then every worker must buy voting stock shares...
Employee Owned companies at least answer to themselves!
Most tradesmen have many more rights than the typical office worker...
Too bad all that Education didn't include 'How to Organize 101"
Whoa whoa whoa, where did you read that? There will be less programmers in America.
With the way the US Dollar is going, I'm not so sure.
Indian workers were being seen as 40% cheaper in surveys done 6 months/a year ago (at least, that was the number being thrown around by the media). Now consider that the US Dollar has crashed in value by 12% against the UK pound (and more, by the Euro) in the LAST THREE MONTHS. With the deficits the US is running, and with the Euro presenting itself as a viable reserve currency, I think we could see the US dollar slumping further. This means American workers become more affordable, as Indian workers will seem to be demanding 30-40% more pay (or more, as the Indian economy improves).
The US-Rupee exchange rate has remained reasonably stable for the last few years, but with the giant swings against the Pound and the Euro (both belonging to major trade partners of India) it would not be unreasonable to expect this to change.
mogorific carpentry experiments
It doesn't extrapolate.
To CxOs, there's a big difference between allowing direct verbal communication with customers, and a bunch of guys talking among themselves about how to get some job done.
At a high-level, business doesn't care whether a custom coded solution - or the maintenance -comes from India or Mars, along as it performs to spec. Specs are a matter of contract, and requirements gathering and functional spec'ing will continue to be done locally or in-house.
I won't hazard a guess as to the accuracy of the Forrester article. They seem pretty hit-or-miss on their predictions, which is probably why they keep shrinking as a company.
;-)
That said, it doesn't seem unreasonable that there will be a sigificant drop in software engineers over the next ten years. Why? Because there is so much research going into technologies to transform business workflow more quickly into customized (but not custom) applications for managing business processes. There are an enormous number of developers employed doing precisely that in one way or another, whether its a VB program for managing customer contacts, or a staff of Java developers building internally developed applications on data warehousing applications. All of that stuff is going to become much easier to transform from business requirements to final application. Not drag and drop, but a staff of ten may drop to a staff of five or six.
There will be a lot of jobs for senior level engineers, far less than now for entry-level positions. For those of you who are thinking you may be in one of those positions in ten years, well thats probably good or bad. Bad thing is, there'll be fewer positions to fill, but the upside is that it will probably turn the tide of people away from thinking CS is a quick and easy road to a high paying job -- and it'll be easier to progress up the ladder to senior and principal positions. I know a lot of guys now who get stuck with a virtual glass ceiling because the ratio of engineers to senior or principal engineers is so out of whack, companies just don't have that many positions for them.
I suspect a lot of software development positions will become more business-specific, as well. It'll be expected that anyone over a certain level has an ability to understand and work with the business side of a particular corporate structure. Foul smelling unkempt hacker types may have a harder time finding jobs in that kind of a market. But from a reformed foul smelling hacker type, its a lot easier to get laid if you clean up your style a bit.
there are all allowed to join the open source, nobody will fire them from that.
I have not been following the pre-presidential election hoopla much yet. Is there a candidate for the US presidency out there that has mentioned this offshoring trend and (more importantly) has promised to do anything about it?
Non US-ers, is this similar trend going on in other coutries (besides India, who is reportedly offshoring US work to China)?
How sleepless is the egg, knowing that which throws the stone forsees the bone.
sounds a bit like this Elvis joke:
In 1977 there were 150 Elvis impersonators. By 1999 there were 35,000. If this rate of growth continues, by the year 2019, more than one third of the world's population will be Elvis impersonators.
If an experiment works, something has gone wrong.
Sorry, if your job can't be done efficiently the only thing a Union will do is sink the ENTIRE company or industry.
Unions can help protect the safety and working conditions, they aren't an answer when the workers just aren't competative.
What would make you think the collective stupidity in the US is any worse than the collective stupidity in China or India?
Those numbers reported (employed today - 905,370) don't seem to be correct...
Can anyone find a better resource like labor department statistics ?
Ok, this kind of ineptitude always pisses me off. Some jerk gets his hands on a pile of numbers and suddenly thinks he is Miss Cleo.
2015 is roughly 11 years from now. 11 years ago at this time (circa 1992), people were predicting that the world was going to END in the year 2000. We had everything from the second coming to the Millenium Bug being tossed at us.
The fact is, no one has even the faintest idea what the market for programmers is going to be like in 2015. What we have here is an attempt at statistical trend analysis. Analyzing trends is a good and useful occupation for SHORT TERM VENTURES ONLY.
Example: Janet has been exercising and eating well in an attempt to lose weight. She began this program at a body weight of 200 lbs. For the last three weeks straight she has lost body fat at a consistent rate of 5 pounds/week. it is fair to assume that she will probably lose something close to 5 pounds during the next week "if this trend continues".
But does it make ANY sense at all to say that janet is losing weight at a rate of 260 pounds per year? or that, "if this trend continues", she will weigh -60 pounds in a year?
The facts reported in this article speak for themselves. There IS a trend towards off shore development. This is IMPORTANT. I just think it's sad that the Forester Research's John McCarthy felt the need to delve into his own cavernous anus and pull out numbers like "235,000 in 2015!!!!!!"
*grimace and spit, fork the sign of the evil eye
** Chigusaaa!!! You're the coolest girl in the WORLD!!! **
585,000 computer programmers
697,000 software engineers
And that doesn't include the 887,000 systems analysts, computer scientists, and database administrators, some of which are almost certainly working in programming positions.
However, given that these numbers (1,282,000 computer programmers and software engineers) are from the year two thousand, before the massive layoffs of the past few years really started happening, the 941,584 number doesn't seem all that out of the ballpark.
I don't mind; I don't live in Wyoming.
Chelloveck
I give up on debugging. From now on, SIGSEGV is a feature.
Here in Denmark we notice the same trend: To some extend, programmers will get out of job over some (5?) years. This is partly due to the fact that low-level or predefined systemdevelopment will be done in Easteurope, India etc. We see this happen already.
Instead, Denmark will become a place for project managers, systemarchitects, consultants and other people, who focus on the business and the client itself, not on the actual production.
Eih bennek, eih blavek
When the average American would rather buy made in China at Walmart, Made in America doesn't cut it.
When your 'Japanese' Car is made in Alabama, and your Chevy in Korea (the rebadged Dawoos), or Levis doesn't have a single US plant, the American brands kinda lose their appeal.
Does anyone actually believe that? I watch CNBC all day and these guys seem to believe that these one-time earnings gains are going to continue. These gains are mostly from off-shoring work...not from "top-line" growth.
The economy is still very much in recession. I don't care what the Bush spinsters say. Employment is the number one indicator of economic health, and our economy is terribly sick. Sure the official number might be around 6%, but that does not account for under-employment. How many software guys do you know that are working either contract positions, or not working in IT at all?
I predict a slow Christmas retail season, a corporate earnings drop-off next year, and higher unemployment numbers after the full impact of off-shoring jobs really takes its toll. Companies will soon realize that off-shoring jobs is a one-time gainer strategy, and not one that will provide long-term growth.
-ted
Since when?
Five years ago they did a straight-line extrapolation to predict federal budget surpluses as far as the eye can see. I don't see them anymore, do you?
Nobody can foresee the future. There are 10% as many telephone operators now as there were 40 years ago, handling ten times as many calls. Is that a bad thing?
Over that past 40 years I have seen engineers in high demand and engineers stocking grocery shelves. If it's bad now, give it five years and it will be good. If it's good now, give it five years and it will be bad.
That's the way it goes. Everything is not good all the time.
If you blow your brains out during the bad times, you miss the good times that are just around the corner.
We must be alert to the danger that public policy could become captive to a scientific-technological elite. - Eisenhower
I've been doing Consulting for the last 10 years. I've worked with (am still working with) lots of customers over that time and I think that the prediction is accurate. I just don't see anyone with big expansion plans for IT right now. And I don't see anything on the horizon that will change that. Most customers are happy enough with their current IT that they don't want to spend big any more. The ERP is in place. The online presence is in place. The board room question that's being asked is "WTF is IT doing now?"
The fundamental fact is that there are too many people in IT for the total budget available for IT spend. That means it's going to be tough for many. There will be little time to work out who is the best person for the job. In this climate, being good at your job is no guarantee of employment or a reasonable salary.
Overseas outsourcing will become less attractive because employers can get away with paying jack shit for local employees by relying on the over-supply of people who don't want to believe that the CS degree isn't worth anything to anyone any more.
Send this to the pointy-haired guy and the evil DHR cat
Let's face it jumping on to the band wagon often yields short term benefits. Probably cause you're not the only one joining the action. I'm not saying its gonna happen overnight but gradually the costs will creep up and before we know it, surprise surprise, the local markets will be more attractive because of a lack of demand and an abundance of supply. Just keep repeating this cycle in an infinite loop...
It is the thing we need most of all - decreasing number of silly programmers which write silly programs. Especially monster ones, which are not written, but rather drawn in different visual environments.
It means that industry moves from baby state into mature state. Century ago aviation was in such state as IT now - everyone who can buy a plane was a pilot. No qualification testing, no regulation.
Now they teach to fly and make you pass an exam to allow you to fly a plane. Not mention to take a job of commercial pilot, who flies other people.
But every arrogant fool can come and take job of programmer, who write business critical software.
And when each plane needs a pilot, not each computer needs a programmer. One good programmer (say Donald Knuth) can create a program which millions of people would use.
I think a programmer should be more like fiction writer. No editor publish job advertinsment like "we need ten qualified writers with 5-years experience in SF and fantasy". They hunt a particular person, who have already made a name,
or just review texts send by numerous anonymous newbies in hope to discover new name.
Abbe Mowshowitz, in his essay "Virtual Feudalism," in ACM's Beyond Calculation: The Next Fifty Years of Computing, predicts a system of political authority centered in private, virtual organizations and based on the management of abstract forms of wealth (rather than land ownership). The potential loss of jobs cited above is a possible consequence of Mowshowitz' virtual feudalism marked by diminished living standards, social disorder, and conflict between old and new regimes. A hopeful upside of such social changes is that individuals too can learn to exploit virtual organization.
...start to learn how to pick up bin bags off the street and chuck em into a lorry
In hexadecimal, that's only 39784.
yeah...but at least my coworkers read 25% and say "quarter" not "half". I'll risk that quality of life improvement...I can always have your job after the private sector "dies".
Off-shore support works...
And "640K should be enough for anybody"
-t
http://unmoldable.com W:"No one of consequence" I:"I must know" W:"Get used to disappointment"
Look, pre-dotcom, the number of people entering the computer science fields was DECLINING, and demand was going up. Beyond qualitative measurements like caliber of programmers (people that love computers vs. learn in school without the passion to excel), this results in the salaries moving up and fewer people employed than if more people entered the field.
Is there any reason to be shocked that when salaries go up because there aren't enough people in the field that more people will enter the market? It just so happens that the people entering the market aren't in America?
Most college grads make $20k-$25k in entry level jobs. Entry level engineering jobs were traditionally in the $45k-$50k range (adjusted for inflation, I'm looking at the last few years). Entry level programmers were making $60k-$75k out of college.
That is a market out of whack. That pulls more people into the field and they happen to be overseas.
The problem isn't just salaries and cost-of-living, our exploding taxes/regulations (particularly payroll) tax is problematic. While rates haven't been rising (except in 93), the costs are relatively higher. For high-wage jobs, the comparison is no longer Western Europe (where the lower US cost structure provided a competitive advantage) but non-Japan Asia, where the US cost structure is higher.
Remember, to "outsource" you have to hire people on your end that can oversea outsourcing (MUCH more skill involved than being a lead developer, you have to speak geek to people in a different time zone, so you can't walk over to their cube, the spec needs to actually make sense or you lose a day or two turn-around with info requests), pay for the management on that end, and pay for the counter-parts overseas that speak English and understand the requests from the client.
It is really expensive to outsource. People talk about the salaries being 10%-20% of the US, but somehow the cost savings are in the 20% range on company financials. Want an easy way to fix that?
Drop the "employer-side" of the payroll tax (there is 14% cost savings), and reduce employee taxes by 6% (and cut salaries accordingly) and all of a sudden, there is no cost savings to oursourcing.
To keep the jobs high-paying in the US, you simply have to get the costs of doing work in the US down.
For every dollar that the company spends on you (forget overhead), you are lucky if 55 cents makes it into your bank account.
The good thing, is that when these companies overseas get more demand, salaries will go up. This will eat away at the cost savings. In addition, the non-oursource members of society will start to decry the "rich" over there, and adopt a punative tax structure like ours, and the advantage will go away.
After NAFTA, certain manufacturing companies that were going under in the states anyway set up plants in Mexico for labor-intensive and capital-light production. Within a few years, wages/costs went up in Mexcio, and those plants shut down and the work was outsourced to Asia. But in the mean time, Mexico has joined the global economy.
Labor-intensive proceses will always move to cheaper locations. It puts more profits in US companies that use it, and salaries move up. A rising tide lifts all boats, and the US will find a new innovation to replace the 20 year old microcomputer to build our next waive of growth.
Alex
The key for the industry would be to figure out what features of those other industries can be "enhanced" or "embraced" in programming. OSS can be the solution to such a problem, but it has to get big enough to knock down companies like MS...who have commoditized software to a fault. the neat thing about it though is that programming is a "market" and as more people get laid off from the "megacorps" they go out and start the next revolution without the old players. Look at how HP, Apple, NVidia, etc were founded...and realize that it should be about to happen again!
Remember when FrontPage came out? That was around 94-96 time frame(?), right about the same time every night school on the planet was offering "webmaster" *snicker* certification. Everybody and their dog was calling themselves a web developer. But it never nicked the market for people who could produce really professional looking high-end sites. Then came the marraige of web sites with a database back end and db skills separated the webmaster employed from the rest of the pack.
If you've been in IT a long time you're used to being a techno-chameleon. There will always be new things coming along that will open up new markets. And even if it doesn't, even if I finally transition out of IT into a different kind of business, look at the technical advantage I have. I can build my own web sites, know how to market and promote them, write my own db's, program my own applications, or tweak OSS apps to do something specific for me, run my own network. It puts me miles ahead of my peers in any other line of business.
20 years in IT and analysts keep coming up with the same crap, like some karmic manure spreader. Just keep your head on a swivel, bank cash when times are good, and don't get boxed in thinking the only way to make a living is working for someone else.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
For what i've gathered an artificial intellignece doenst so much "get programmed" as "learns". so instead of programmers, we'll have to become teachers.
--- Back to the trees, back to the trees !
So take the free tools you have been given, run with them, be innovative and turn them into something new.
If you can't be innovative, you'll never compete against anything anyway - you'll just go on re-inventing the wheel for the rest of your days.
It doesn't mean less programmers required, just less run-of-the mill "programmers" required. If you can be imaginative and innovate, you will always be able to compete.
Organic free-range music... yum!
...and Kazaa (!) will have long since launched the nuclear strike...
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
Unfortunately, most companies are a tad reluctant to put "Professional Knob-dicker-arounder" or "Leader of the Free World" on business cards.
Cole's Law: Thinly sliced cabbage
I was hoping that in 5 years time it wouldn't matter where you were based as long as you provided the best service/code. Awarding a contract to the lowest bidder is usually the quickest way to find out why the bid is so low (and it's not all down to hourly rates).
Why not push half the population of Wyoming off-shore and keep the programmers?
Hey, I tease! :-)
--- Ban humanity.
have a bald co-worker named Wally do you?
From excellent karma to terible karma with a single +5 funny post...
An overwhelming number of programmers, software and web developers I know went "yeah I know Java". They dont really have a clue about real structured programming as in the Linux kernel, almost never heard of code optimisations and look great in a tie.
Universities are churning out students of ADA, Pascal and Java, most of whom applied to the university thinking of the good fortunes of being in IT around 1998.
I doubt many of the developers of the applications in sourceforge will be in this number. A market booms, you get hundereds of thousands of extra golddiggers, then it goes bust, the golddiggers leave, the ones dedicated to the art stay, the market booms again, the golddiggers return, the experienced ones make good money and buy McLarens.
Fewer programmers mean a guy who can port Linux or NetBSD to a specialized ARM MCU will be more in demand, and will not get laid off like today. It by no means means the cults and culture that churn out the code for sourcecode will disappear.
"Give orange me give eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me you." -Nim Chimpsky
If you subtract healthcare benefits and social security taxes company pays to every employee and every project will be 30% cheeper see: http://deanforamerica.com
OK, granted tech jobs are going offshore. But I've been in this long enough to know that the reality will not be as horrible/scary as all the predictions. Anyone remember the "Japanese will take over the entire electronics industry" panic of the 80's? Everyone predicted that there would be no more chip design anywhere but in Japan. That didn't happen. They certainly are a still a big competitor to the US electronics/semi industry, and things did indeed change here, but new things came out of it and I don't think the fact that the US doesn't make memories or TVs anymore devastated the tech industry here -- quite the opposite. How about the NAFTA "Giant Sucking Sound" of jobs going to Mexico? Unemployment didn't skyrocket due to this as some predicted. The US economy adapts and changes based on the external environment.. it will continue to do so IMO.
Doesn't that mean that about 1 in 300 americans is a programmer or something along those lines. Makes sense to me. Maybe every other person you know is a computer programmer, but you should probably get out more if this is the case. People do a lot of things.
but wow, that's half the population of Wyoming!
And you know what: The other half of the population in Wyoming can do nothing but Visual Basic scripts!
I was looking for a Wyoming link...
Without open source, companies such as IBM, with hundreds of thousands of employees would share within the company and lower their costs, while the thousands and thousands of smaller companies that employ the majority of people would find it harder to compete because they would have to pay more salaries to write all this code themselves.
By reducing the competitiveness of small and medium sized companies, these companies would be less profitable and be able to pay fewer people.
While being inefficient will make a company need more people, it also reduces that companys chance of expanding and even of surviving, and hence is longer term bad for employment.
Society is much better off with increasing efficiency, as it increases capital return on investments which again makes it more worthwhile to invest in new ventures or in expanding existing ventures, and makes it more worthwhile to hire people.
Based on your arguments, developers should work as slow as they can, because it would result in a need for more people. However all that would achieve would be to drive those companies out of business or reduce their growth and prevent them from hiring more people in the long run.
Dear Representative xxxxxx (and Senator, and President, etc.),
As one of your constituents, I wish to bring to your attention a very important issue about jobs being lost from the United States, and ask for your support in any and all legislation that will help keep decent middle-class jobs in this country.
Recent studies indicate that U.S. employers will move about 3.3 million white-collar jobs and $136 billion in wages overseas in the next 12 years. The most recent study by Gartner, Inc. ("U.S. Offshore Outsourcing: Structural Changes, Big Impact") reports that an alarming 500,000 IT jobs will move just in 2003 and 2004. That is $136 billion in wages that will move to countries like India, Russia and China. Up from $4 billion in 2000.
Major high-tech companies, such as IBM, Hewlett Packard, and Microsoft, have already started moving work to cheap labor countries such as India, Russia and China. In many cases, U.S. employees are required to train their foreign replacements, and then they are laid off. With the current economic recession and the depressed state of the high-tech industry in the U.S., this is the most unpatriotic action a company can take.
These are not just manufacturing jobs; these are highly technical jobs that require advanced college degrees. What is a 50-year-old Software Engineer to do when replaced by a foreign worker? What can he/she possibly "retrain" for?
When our jobs move overseas, who will be left to pay taxes in the U.S.? What careers could our children possibly aspire to?
The big corporations arrogantly believe that the US Government will do nothing to stop the exodus of jobs at these alarming rates. Companies such as IBM, Microsoft, Hewlett Packard, etc. have brazenly admitted that as many as 3 million US jobs could be lost by the end of year 2015! It is outrageous that so many people in this country will suffer losing a job they have worked so very hard to keep; especially after they have battled to keep the pensions they worked hard for; seen their 401(k) retirement plans decimated by corporate thievery and malfeasance and then watched as their sons and daughters went to Iraq to fight for the freedom of the Iraqi people, and to root out terrorists in Afghanistan. I hope you will do the right thing and vote for any legislation that limits corporations from taking jobs offshore and abusing the H-B1and L1 visa laws.
I strongly urge you to support any and all legislation that will:
1. Require U.S. employers to disclose the jobs they are moving, and provide incentives for keeping high-tech jobs in the U.S., and provide deterrence to moving them abroad.
2. Eliminate the H-1B and L1 visa's that allow foreign workers to take U.S. high-tech jobs. The IT unemployment rate is high enough that experience U.S. workers can likely fill all available jobs currently being performed by foreigners.
I hope I can count on your support.
Sincerely,
TWW
"Encyclopedia" is to "Wikipedia" what "Library" is to "Some people at a bus stop"
Using this same logic, given current trends, the world population in a few centuries will be less than the current US population.
Oh, and Narada, the mischief-maker is not to be confused with Mentos, the fresh-maker.
--- Ban humanity.
Most programmers are like most people incompetent. Trimming off the least competitive 25% and sending them back into management is eugenic.
A security clearance is the closest thing to lifetime guaranteed employment that I know of.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I'd laugh at these goofs by non-technical HR people, but these are the same goofs who will evaluate my resume before passing it to someone qualified.
(And this being Slashdot, I expect posts telling me how HTML and XML are too programming languages.)
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
Somehow, I have a feeling that you might be correct.
"To confine our attention to terrestrial matters would be to limit the human spirit." -Stephen Hawking
This hype goes to the beginning of computers. The invention of compiled languages in the late 1950s were going to make computers "self-programming" (compared to assembly programming) and computer programming would become a dead profession. Every major advance since then- structured programming, visual programmming, etc.- was supposed to do the same thing.
...that everything is not black or white. I avoid buying foreign goods when locally made goods are just as good. I will even pay a bit more for local goods. It's a guideline not a track. Considering that the US clothing and shoe industries have been near-death since before I was born, I reject your insinuation. I can't ressurect dead industry, only support what exists.
Blar.
Business consulting like Forrester, McKinsey, Deloitte-Touch, etc. does not require a physical presence in the USA. Hopefully all these people will be outsourced to Asia, where consultants are much cheaper.
According to the US Dept of Labor, from their 2002-3 Occupational Outlook Handbook, s/w engineers "are projected to be the fastest growing occupation over the 2000-10 period" while employment growth for programmers "will be considerably slower than that of other computer specialists, due to the spread of pre-packaged software solutions".
If you're worried about your job security, start learning more than just programming languages and APIs. (Of course, until we have a proper accreditation system, anyone in the s/w industry can call themselves an engineer...)
Most big business's were complaining that Dell's over seas tech support was a farce and demanded english speaking tech support reps that new the nomenclature of IT.
;-)
Funny; I've heard a related but different explanation for the exodus of programming jobs: We have to farm out most of the development to other countries, because most of the world doesn't speak English very well, and you can't develop software in the US that works in any language but English.
Actually, my response to this tends to confuse them. I argue that there's no problem finding people in the US who can handle other languages. The problem is that American management is generally contemptuous of foreign languages, and won't support development of UIs in any other language.
This is based mostly on personal experience. I'm not fluent in any other language, but I know several well enough that I could produce a UI in them. And I have the sense to ask native speakers for criticisms and suggestions for improvement. (And I know how to find the native speakers.
But when I've suggested such things at work, the response invariably is to simply pretend that I didn't make such a pointless suggestion, and go on discussing important topics.
There is a common belief among Americans (and which is rampant in American management), that the rest of the world is learning English, so there's no need of any other language.
One of the real frustrations with working in the US is the difficulty of making even 8859-1 work correctly. Thus, I have guest accounts on machines in Finland and Sweden. When I copy files to my Mac Powerbook (using rsync or tar), the marked letters in the file names often come out garbled. When I copy a directory back, those garbled names appear on the remote machines. Macs sold in Scandinavia seem to work fine. But no amount of digging around in Help or FAQ or mailing lists seems to come up with anything that works for my machine. I'd have to recommend that if you want to develop something that works in Finnish or Swedish, you should not use a machine sold in the US market. (Windows machines are even worse, with their bizarre file-name transformations, though I must say that stuff that I develop on linux and *BSD machines seem to work fine when copied to Finland or Sweden.)
Computers are becoming common all over the world, and we really need UIs in whatever languages the customers speak. It should be no surprise at all that software development is moving out of the English-only American enclave.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
And for that reason alone we should all own our own business.
Nick Linn
Supreme dictator of IT
Nick Inc.
... but hope that high skilled jobs remain in your turf.
Back on topic: when I learned programming a could not speak a full English sentence without mistakes. Hell, I still can't, nevertheless I can program in several computer languages and can make a living out of it if needed.
For call centre people proper English speaking skills may be an advantage, fro programeers English language is nice to have but necessary relevant.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
I wasted my last mod point last night modding something as funny. After reading your post, I really regret doing that.
Dammit.
the world would be better off, if people did what they love, instead of what is the hot career of the week. There are so many crappy, lousy people who are in the wrong job and are totally unqualified. The world and work place would be much more efficient, if the majority of the people had careers doing what they really love. Doing something because there's some big monetary payoff is puzzle to me. Do what you love. If you're graduating and question whether that career is right for you, then it isn't. It's just that simple.
You know, based on all of these cock-eyed predictions, I think the most important thing to take out of this posting is that there's only a half-million people in Wyoming. Seriously, any slashdotters from Wyoming out there??
Rooting for the yankees is like rooting for herpes.
that's the idea, dumbass!
For those of you who have a hard copy or are willing to purchase the online version, this recent article in Time Magazine predicts the opposite (at least in the semi-near future). IMHO, two things are certain: 1) computers will become even more ubiquitous, and 2) they will always require new development and maintenance.
I grew up there. Half of Wyoming really should be
shipped over-seas. Start with Carbon county!
~AC
And this being Slashdot, I expect posts telling me how HTML and XML are too programming languages.
You know, HTML AND XML are prograah... DOH!
Hammer of Truth
Forrester Research is the same outfit that hyped the bubble and a techie SHORTAGE not long ago.Their old press agent, Red Herring, is mercifully defunct. Why are they still around? We should all have fiber optic connectors on our brains right now, and a brickless society.
Do they wear turbans with rubies on them? I hope so--that at least would be entertaining.
Looks like Neal Stephenson was wrong: "microcode" is not one of the things we'll be known for in the future. He was right about the "pakistani bricklayer's idea of prosperity", though. Oh well, at least there's always High-Speed Pizza Delivery...
I am a programmer who understands companies wanting to get cheaper labor. Let's face it, Indians are getting good, Russians where always good. Soon China will take Indian jobs....blah... blah... blah.
Here's my problem. I don't want my Credit Information, Health Information, Criminal Records.... in a country that does not have to abide by the laws of the United States.
I know that their are bad people in the US, but if they get caught, they go to jail.
www.thejulingtoncreekplantaion.com
VaLinux is doing its best to keep offshoring viable. Check out their recent press releases:
t ed =LNUX&symbol=LNUX%60&textpath=20031208%5CACQBIZ200 312080845BIZWIRE%5FUSPR%5F%5F%5F%5F%5FBW5258%2Ehtm &cdtime=12%2F08%2F2003+8%3A45AM
t ed =LNUX&symbol=LNUX%60&textpath=20031208%5CACQBIZ200 312080845BIZWIRE%5FUSPR%5F%5F%5F%5F%5FBW5323%2Ehtm &cdtime=12%2F08%2F2003+8%3A45AM
http://www.nasdaq.com/asp/quotes_news.asp?selec
and
http://www.nasdaq.com/asp/quotes_news.asp?selec
VALinux (LNUX) is the parent company of slashdot.
Unfortunately you can't read the article anymore without paying, but they make a pretty convincing case in the Sept. issue, showing how some models predict an increase in the # of computer-related jobs (they claim the tech sector will soon return, if it hasn't already, as the fastest growing sector in the American economy). Couple this growth with baby boomers retiring, and you get a very tight labor market.
You see, though some of us might not see it everyday (including me), apparently a large percentage of today's programs are baby boomers who are nearing retirement. Starting in a few years there will be large percentages of the programmer population leaving the job pool. In recognition of this, many large companies are already returning to handsome bonuses and good pay.
Having said that, I do suddenly realize that there is a difference in terminology. I shold not talk about the "number of programmers" here, but rather the "number of IT jobs." That is, include project managers, MIS directors, and all kinds of people who are technically oriented, may do some programming or other admin, but are not strictly speaking programmers. So also keep that in mind with this article--how broadly do they use the term "programmer?"
Maybe it will get rid of some of those clueless wankers who went into technology for the money. Certitfied monkeys who were hired because they talked a good game, had a certification and management thought that throwing lots of low cost programmers at a problem would get it done cheaper and faster. Not realizing that it was these sorts of programmers that made the situation worse and increased the work load for the truly competent. This could leave behind those who really do care about solving problems for thier own sake and about the quality of thier work.
Cynical? Just a little.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
The article does not say that there will be fewer jobs worldwide, but fewer in US. This is simply a result of companies moving to places where the salaries are lower, like India which has a giant population of well educated engeneers and programmers willing to work while you sleep.
So, what can you do? Look on the bright side, why don't you just move your self to some pleasant place where a lower salary still makes life pleasent? Relocating yourself will put you in the first row since you are not only well qualified but also know the language and the buisness.
- I wouldn't mind a relocation to say Rio de Janeiro, less pay, more sun and more beautiful girls... Hey, anyone, I'm willing to dump prices to do this! Go surfing in the day, go programming in the night, this must be life!
And remember, money is worth nothing untill you spend them!
I wonder if this is one of the impacts of the Open Source movement that no one bothered to expect? Bill Gates allegedly says that he could be put out of business by a kid working out of his garage, maybe the door swings both ways?
I would disagree strongly. Programmers are more like architects (the good ones, anyway). I walked past a room in college teaching VB programming. That's carpentry for the most part, but the line that separates "Make me a web-site in front-page and put in a message board" versus the more advanced stuff is a line that management NEEDS to see. Some companies treat their developers as stock-- these companies seldom produce the same quality products as do companies who realize the dynamics and creativity that is required to engineer a product, and not just put it together. M
Wer mit Ungeheuern kämpft, mag zusehn, dass er nicht dabei zum Ungeheuer wird. --Nietzsche
Moving jobs offshore is actually GOOD for the economy. Most of these jobs transferred to other countries are old-school technologies, which opens up space for companies to use the workers for newer technologies. Also, the offshore jobs create offshore wealth which has a demand for American products.. see how it all works.....
-Cnik
The economist they don't want you to know about!
Say a big thank you to Microsoft for the new technology for "user friendly" programming... .NET in a few hours...
God, my sister can make a program with
ajf
FYI. There is a game company called 2015
:
....
Anyway, try to sing this to the tune of Zager & Evans In the Year 2525
In the year 2015 If programming is still alive
if coding can survive
They may find
In the year 2025
Ain't gonna need to reboot
no retries
Everything you think do and say is in the chip you implanted today.
feel free to add your own stupid verses too. for 2035, 2045, etc.
"You'll get nothing, and you'll like it!"
At the current rate of decline, I predict that Forrester will no longer be a company by 2005.
THe avoidance of offshoring stories by /. editors sure does make sense now!
eat shiat and bark at the moon
Entrepeneurship (sp) is the defining difference between the software industry in the third world and in the Wester World (read US). Business opportunity exists where there are consumers. The US is the largest consumer economy in the world, ergo tremendous markets for business related software and services.
The beauty of the software industry is that for every major corporation employing a team of programmers there are just as many independant contractors and small programming teams. While the corporate software industry is fading, the independant and contract programmer is seeing increasing stock. Custom software development is too expensive for most business to afford. However, most independant contractors will hack out a respectable piece of software for a fraction of what a large firm would charge due to substantially lower overhead.
I frequently have people request software from me, and usually, after going over a cost breakdown and giving them an estimate on the project they are willing to pay my price (usually a few thousand US depending on the scope of the project). Software written for you and your business will always be better than a store-bought generic solution.
So, my advice to out-of-work or fearfull programmers is to brush up on your sales skills and embrace the entrepeneurial spirit.
Not counting sheep, of course...
The displacement caused by the "offshoring" is hurting lots of people. I know dozens of un-employed and underemployed developers. Many of them are quite good. Most will never work in IT again. As the article states, this is a "structural change", meaning irreversible. The really bad thing is, there isn't any technical field in sight that will absorb all these people any time soon. They will not make anywhere near what they made as developers in whatever work they end up doing. Meanwhile, the schools keep churning out people. My neighbor's kid graduated in May. He has no prospects so he's detailing cars.
The damage is not limited to just the unemployed and underemployed. The displaced software developers paid more in taxes that some people make. State budgets are in crisis. When their unemployment benefits run out and after they've been out of work a year or two and burned through their savings, they'll become wage slaves. This is double-bad. They ain't going to be happy and they will be displacing the people who used to do those low paying jobs. After a downturn in the Texas oil business many years ago, a joke circulated about an unemployed geologist who was turned down for employment at McDonalds with the explanation that all their geologists have masters degrees.
Wansu, th' chinese sailor
That's supposed to be funny! Where's your sense of humor?!
It's the season to GIVE... moderation points for comparing puke to today's HOT artists!
We have secretly replaced these Slashdot mods' sense of humor with a rusty nail. Let's see if they notice!!
Does this mean we can send them there?
Even the Muslims say so. . .
I think that programming requires a lot of expertise. I'd like to find someone else to do some programming for me, but I find that there are too many decisions that affect the quality of the product each hour that I program. I have not been able to find someone else capable and interested in making those decisions.
In my whole life, I haven't seen even one perfectly designed program. I haven't seen even one perfectly designed web site. For example, I was just looking at the Creative Labs web site. There is no large photo available of the products! Creative Labs says, "With over 200 million sound cards sold, Sound Blaster is the world's most trusted PC audio brand." (Under the heading "UPGRADE to Superior Stereo Audio Quality".) After all that business experience, Creative Labs doesn't even provide useable photos of their products.
What will be the result of the work of bored Indian programmers, who are bored because they have to follow some poorly developed specifications, and have no control over the design of the program, and no way to talk to the customer? Eventually the code will be a tangled mess, and will be thrown away.
In the 70s, hiring PhDs was very popular. Then companies found the drawbacks. PhDs were not willing to do the tedious work that exists in every project. Hiring offshore programmers is popular now, but I think companies will slowly begin to realize that good programming requires a high proportion of extensive thought.
The need for technology does not increase for the next 12 years. The fact is that IT is still a developing and expanding field and innovations are still being introduced at a rapid pace. Who would've foreseen the growth of the Internet 10 years ago? Or the WiFi? Or the pace of PC game development? Or PDAs? Or MP3s? Or any of the numerous technologies that are available to us today that we take for granted? When these new technologies are introduced, they require a supporting infrastructure and software development is generally a large part of that infrastructure.
-B
A century ago, something like half the U.S. population worked on farms. Now it's down to a couple percent of the population, if that.
Let's say it went from 50% to 5%. Does that mean that 45% of the work force is unemployed?
Of course not. The environment changed and people adapted. Those who did not adapt, perished.
What did that 45% do? They got jobs in new fields that never existed before... In the last 100 or so years, we have seen the dawn of automobiles, airplanes, assembly lines, radio, TV, telecommunications, and computers. We have seen the government expand without bounds - the dawn of the income tax, the Social Security Administration, the Securities & Exchange Commission, and so on. Those areas have been responsible for creating a couple of jobs now and then...
Anybody who is intimidated by this forecast is not interested in ideas, success, prosperity, or progress -- just drawing a check and playing with toys.
Put another way, imagine a village in a remote corner of the world. This village is five miles away from the nearest water. A good samaritan comes in and drills a well for them so they don't need to spend literally all day just meeting their basic needs. Do the village water boys fret because they are losing their jobs?
That said, I don't put much stock in a 10+ year forecast like this. These folks don't even know what happened yesterday.
Bottom line: your cheese is going to move, but you don't yet know how. Learn to adapt - learn to think - and don't get too comfortable.
Good thing OSS/Linux is a superlative tool in educating the folks who will take our jobs.
When Clinton was pres, the general perception was that there was a serious drought of talent needed to fill the tech boom. Why do you think so many of us got paid so much and treated to such excesses? We were valuable because there was a perceived need that we were scarce.
Inviting h1-b's into the country might have brought salaries down a little, but ultimately the tech bust is what killed thinks. The reality of millions of venture capital dollars drying up and disappearing without any kind revenue is what killed jobs.
Blame Clinton? That's like blaming the weather for losing a chess game.
m.
I grew up in Wyoming, town of 150 people. 30 years later, it now has a whopping 250 people.
Last time I checked, the population of Wyoming was just over 300,000 people, but I do not have the most recent census data.
That being the case, 235,000 programmers (or lack of) would be about 2/3rds of the population of the great state of Wyoming.
If Wyoming was near an ocean or one of the great lakes, everyone would want to live there. :)
Regards,
Fredrick
Apple is going out of business
Computers will make our lives simpler and easier
We have reached the end of Moores Law.
And in Business news...we will need a quarter million more managers in 10 years to verify that offshore programming is going as planned.
Any other crystal balls at CNN?
Today is a gift. Save the receipt.
forigners are smarter, study harder, work harder.
american's are stupid, lazy, try to do the least work for most money.
I started university right when things were getting crazy in IT, for better or for worse. I was sitting in my physics class in high school when I realized that there seemed to be hordes of people going into Computer Science, and I didn't think it would be particularly difficult to get through. Then I got a test on basic electronics back. I did very well; a lot of other people didn't. So I figured what the hell, I'll try the electrical engineering thing instead. I do embedded systems and communications work mainly, although I've dabbled in a bit of everything. There is more work than I can deal with in a small town, working on automation projects - the kind of projects that make companies competitive with third world producers. Show a CEO how he can turn a 10 minute process into a 2 minute process multipled out by thousands of units and I'll show you how to make yourself a nice little income.
Right now, CS/IT employed people could benefit from getting organized and professionalized to the degree to which engineers are. Engineering associations look after things like H1B visas (although I'm not an American), and other political policy matters that can directly impact your life. There seems to be an inability of extreme reluctance to do this though, largely because I suspect there are a lot of extremely good programmers without (formal) qualification.
I'm not talking about unions - historically engineering associations have been very outspoken in this respect, but then again, historically engineers weren't employees for the most part, either.
I've always drawn a distinction between programming as art, and programming as a matter of business. Art doesn't always make you money while you're alive.
..don't panic
Consumer spending makes up 2/3 of the GDP. We have much more power to affect the economy (by deciding to spend or not) than any President or Fed chairman has. All they can do is try to make spending vs. saving more attractive to us at a given point in time.
Hey, the only other place where people kiss your ass because your smart. I'm going back to become a professor.
Enough of trying to spending hours upon hours trying to explain to pointhairedbosses that corporate wide standards are a good thing.
I'll never have to implement a god damn SAP system again. Those things are the modern version of slave boat masters from Roman days, except they follow everyone. It helps HR people be that more cold and calculating while maintaining the "I have no idea how anything happens in business, especially your department, but I'm good in conflict resolution, and I love shopping!"
So I am going back academia to earn a living getting government grants.
I never broke six figures in the IT game anyway (got real close in late 2000 though), and there is no money there anyway. My last job only paid $160 a day, and days lasted from 8.5 hours (minimum, otherwise it wasn't a "day") to an average of 10-12 hours. I was laid off a scant month after I signed my contract, and because they paid me as a subcontractor from the five months preceding my eventual hire and layoff, they didn't have to pay me unemployment. Of course, I don't have a chance in hell of getting hired back in the future, because my job is going to India.
Thanks Bush! Thanks Congress! Thanks for giving big corporations huge tax incentives to move overseas! Thanks for giving the wealthiest 5% huge tax cuts so they'll never know near-poverty, like I do. Thanks for cutting back college grants, so even though I only earned less than $12,000 last year, I still only qualified for $1700. (WTF is $1700 going to do towards tuition? nuttin).
And especially thanks to Enron, MCI and Tyco. You fuckers put us in this mess, collapsed the economy by wholesale lies and fraud, forcing competitors into ruin trying to compete with your fictious earnings and growth reports. Because of you, not anyone at any dot.com, America's last industry is in smoldering ruins. And you go free! MCI still gets government contracts! They got the contract to put up a cell phone network in Iraq!
And here's a special thanks to the 6 million supposed supporters for Dubya - the first American president to START a war. The first American president who detained American citizens, in the United States, without charging them, or intending to charge them, locking them up for unlimited amounts of time for "investigative reasons".
So, thanks to giving corporations unlimited access to their leaders, they have removed the checks and balances not just in their own industry (which is resposible for payments-in-kind of futures contracts, the primary motivator to overstate earnings on financial reports), but throughout government.
Do you know that we are holding over 660 men at Camp X-Ray, in cages, like dogs? Only a handful of them have seen a lawyer, and only Westerners, and only recently. They are isolated physically, with masks, goggles, earmuffs and tied up for most of the day. This is psychological tortue. And that's what they let us see. What goes on inside their interrogation rooms where prisoners are walked in, and wheeled out on gurneys is another matter.
I'm sure our torture methods are not permeantly disfiguring or life threatening, and that's what allows the walking shitsticks pretending to be human beings to go on, pretending to be human beings.
So, thanks to the 49% of the country that did vote for Bush, and those who still support him, we have a hitler in office. A man who says religion plays a huge role in his political decisions, but still managed to execute nearly 150 people.
My job in IT, and countless like them are dissappearing - and whats most disturbing is that our industry is only 35 years old! Only 10 of which did our industry emerge from specialized functions to become an sizable group, and already we are sent out.
So thank you, America, for sitting back, watching your reality TV and 4 hours of sportscenter every night and allowing all this to happen.
Bravo, you're a "scientist". You clearly know nothing about the knowledge and skill the "average carpenter" is equipped with.
The illegals that Joe contractor picks up down at Home Depot are not carpenters. Union Carpenters are educated in their trade. The two trades are actually quite similar in that both usually require four years (approx) of classroom education and several years of apprentice-level work.
Diff between a carpenter and a "computer scientist"? The Carpenter has a tan and callused hands. Otherwise, both are learned skills.
Damn.. you're right! :)
I can believe you guys, defeated so easy. It's on out hands to fix this... Tariffs? Don't deceive yourselves tariffs will not fix reality. I you are not competitive, then you are not. You can put as many tariffs as you want; still, that will only protect domestic markets, but what about the rest of the world????? How are you going to compete in the international market? Forget about exporting again, theres no way to force another country to buy an expensive U.S. product. So, there's only one way out!! Lets unite and block or DoS all NetMeeting, VoIP and whatever ports coming from India and China!!! This is the time to stand up and fight for our rights!! No more "nice guy" programmer!!! The time for
So fuck you bitch. The nuts in your mouth make it slightly difficult to understand your words.
That, of course, is NEVER the case.
They're trying to extrapolate a complex system with lots of variance with simple trends. It's meaningless. It ignores politics, aging, innovation, lack of innovation, economic shifts, and bloody near everything else.
A few examples from my own experience:
The sad part is people are going to look at these simple numbers and base important personal and business policy off of them.
What's the future? Hell if I know. I just don't think anyone else does either.
"The Sage treasures Unity and measures all things by it" - Lao Tzu
...the losses will be useless IT analysts and consultants that CIOs will have figured out by then to ignore and not pay for advice from.
Think about it: it makes sense - in another decade or so, we should have enough of the "wheel" work done, that is, infrastructure will have stabilized on standards and won't need to be upgraded and tweaked as often as now.
I think that in our zeal to denounce outsourcing, people are forgetting the flip phenomenon. The importation of skilled labour. The jobs that can go overseas, goes overseas. The jobs that remain, are filled by "imported" labour.
Companies want what's in their own best interest, not the workers. If the two happen to match, then so much the better. But one shouldn't count on it.
CNN has been yellow dogging the economy since Bush got into office. According to I believe USA Today, and other sources, there was a 6% rise over the last quarter; and IBM is hiring 10,000 new programmers next year. Don't believe what you read in the tabloids, or CNN Money. I'm sure there will be less and less of us programmers, however this field is not eliminateable; only condensable. I'm not too worried. You also notice most of the article was about a textile business going..out of business.
The best thing IS-types can do is to get out from their cubicle and get engaged in their place of work. I've seen too many colleagues who just wanted programming requests left in their intray and didn't want to work actively with the users. That kind of relationship is easily outsourced, as opposed to the person who understands not just the code but the working process that it supports. Once you've achieved that goal, users will want to have you in the room when critical decisions are discussed, as opposed to being thousands of miles and several time zones away...
Stop by my site where I write about ERP systems & more
I hate when some fool goes up and says, "well, the L stands for language!"
Well, the M just before it stands for markup. It's not HTPL (Hypertext Programming Language), it's HTML (Hypertext Markup Language).
The only time when web design approaches programming is when there's CGI or the like involved. But most HTML monkeys just copy scripts from other places anyway.
I do translations as well as localization of software (very limitied). The translation business is very particular about who translates what into different languages. Because my primary language is English, that is pretty much the only target language I translate, although I speak Spanish (fluently) and Italian (near fluently).
When U.S. companies go looking to translate their software into other languages, they often go to U.S. translation agengies, who in turn outsource the work to either a) foreign companies with a substantial reduction in price, so as to keep their profit or b) native-speaking translators located either within the U.S. or abroad. It always comes down to cost. And many times they end up paying more in the long run.
I can't tell you the number of times I've been given a document that's already been "translated" by babelfish/google/whatever, and the customer (with good reason) thinks it's crap. So I end up retranslating it at a higher rate. These companies, whether corporate end-clients or naive agencies (plenty exist), would do well to realize that it's usually more productive to pay more upfront and have the job done right the first time.
A lot of website projects, where entire teams work on it, have both designers AND programmers. In this case, the programmers ARE in fact the carpenters. The designers are the architects. Now, there's always exceptions, but whenever there is someone handling the look and feel of software, and handing it off to a programmer to make it work, then the programmer becomes the carpenter.
Buy Steampunk Clothing Online!
Writing computer programs to handle tasks that computers can do as well, or better than people will always make sense economically. Well, as long as electricity costs less than human salaries. As time goes on, computers will be able to do more, and more tasks can be automated. Will programmers from other countries provide the best bang for the buck? I wouldn't count on it. But since we're in a field where 2-4 years experience and study can put you at the top of your field technically (the skills we need change pretty quickly), the American programmer will have to fight to stay on top. The same opportunity to learn everything yourself and be an expert, whether you're a 16 year old highschool student or a 35 year old nerd with a Masters in philosophy, also applies if you're a bright Indian who can feed their family on $5 a day. The only advantages we have right now are being familiar with the American culture, and being able to afford computers and net access easier than people in third world countries.
Technology is a meritocracy, but it's mostly been a national meritocracy so far. Soon it will be an International one, and America's slowest programmers will be pushed out. So let's all support politicians who really try to keep other countries from starving or overpopulating themselves. I may be smart, but I wouldn't want to compete with a guy who's bid for a job is "a bite of your sandwich".
Well, I can tell from your concise eloquence that you are a reasonable man.
How do you figure?
It's actually this sidebar that I'm referring to. It reads (with the other jobs omitted):
Top 15 jobs with the largest projected increases, 2000-10
380,000
Computer-software engineers, applications: as long as computer upgrades are constant, so will be the jobs.
After the great predictions of the past (16K memory for all and market for 2 computers)
this is yet another prediction for the future.
Any prediction which is as accurate as 235,396 should be pure baloney!
DO NOT PANIC
WTF does this mean? Can someone translate this to English?
... based on the management of abstract forms of wealth (rather than land ownership)."
The key phrase is this:
"A system of political authority
In other words: it's the Information Economy.
-kgj
-kgj
Slashdot needs a new motto.
Slashdot
The end is near.
Dude. If you're this cynically and jaded, academia is not for you! Tenure is hard to get and most schools now have PTR (post-tenure review), so "lifetime employment" is a romanticized vestige of 20th century academia. Assistant professors are expected to get six-seven figure grants to build "centers" to do "research" on projects lasting from 12 to 30 months! Most of DoD and all of ARDA/DHS are 12-18 month projects. NSF is falling in love with biomedical stuff ala NIH.
If you think acadmia is nirvana, you're mistaken. Better to stop feeling sorry for yourself, get smart, find a niche, and develop a real product that you can charge money for (skip the OSS kool-aid).
---- It puts the lotion on its skin or else it gets the hose again. It does this whenever it's told.
The article is not about programming/software engineering but is about "vanishing jobs." These are jobs that are eliminated by technology or other means. It treats programming just as it would textiles or steel. That's not a fair thing to do because in terms of maturity, programming is like a teenager whereas everything else on the list are older adults. If you want to automate Task A either with a machine or unskilled labor, you better understand Task A really well. This is just not the case with programming.
On the other hand, programming should be under a lot of pressure to scale back. Right now if you are some large business that needs some kind of system, the most expensive part is the programming. Hardware is super cheap. Networking ditto. Some of the core enterprise software (dbs, app servers) are still a little expensive, but that is coming down quickly, and open source is becoming a viable alternative. But programming is really expensive.
You know who has known this for a long time now? Microsoft. They've been trying to dumb down programming so that unskilled people could do it for a long time. Now we are really seeing the major Java players (Sun, BEA, and especially IBM) start along the same path with Java. Obviously this kind of thing makes outsourcing much easier. So it's only natural to expect that the number of programming jobs will (already has?) plateau and then decline, and the remaining jobs will feel a lot of price pressure. If you are planning on being a programmer ten years from now, you better make sure you can write better code that "Visual Tools for Java++" will be able to write...
It really isn't hard to figure this out. If one man is forced by his government(by taxation) to markup his labor 150% and another doing the same job does not have to do this, the choice between who to hire is absolutely clear!
Imagine two canned drinks of equal brand etc. You are the consumer. One machine selling charges $1.00 the next door machine charges $2.50 for the same drink. I am reasonably certain almost anyone would buy the cheaper one all other factors being equal.
This is the choice in Computer Programmers. The US programmers must mark their wages up 150% or more to pay the US taxes on their wages. We can go into why and all those other issues some other place. They have to do it! The issue here is that nothing else is going to happen but the decline of US Jobs until the USA fixes its tax system to account for the taxation differentials in the rest of the world.
Many people do not realize just how true this illustration is. The compounding of the US Income Tax actually makes this markup much higher than I have stated. (4 Layers takes it to 93% of Gross or a Markup of about 1200%) When it is reversed out even at the 150% rate most US Workers are cheaper than their foreign Competition. Yes the USA Labor is Cheaper, it is our TAXES that are so DAMNED expensive.
With the war situation and many other issues there is little prospect that the US Congress will lower taxes much any time soon. So Americans had better get ready to put up the "Going out of Business" sign on their government shortly unless they wake up and fix their tax system which was debased by NAFTA and GATT and the other "Free Trade" agreements.
I am sure some people will not cry at the prospect of fiscal ruin for the USA but I would suggest that it is nobody's interest and is not a good prospect. This points out the arrogance of those who dismiss the issue as unimportant or just a change in the economics of the world. This is in fact a trade war against American Citizens (and green card holders) by the United States Congress!
Never Politically Correct ~ I prefer the facts If you don't like what I say, get a life, or comment yourself.
Yeah, I know that I'm just using this as an excuse to mention Moore's law again. Still, one of the things that makes it so interesting is that it IS a predictable trend.
The reason I bring that up is simple: This article is predicting a very unpredictable trend. In other words, the article is utter bollocks. How does the programming market (or nearly any aspect of computing) compare to where we were twelve years ago? Did most of the code in 1991 come from automated code generators?
There is NO WAY that the market for programmers is going to remain so static that a trend like this can be extrapolated for over a decade; and even if it could--who cares. Yeah, that's a lot of jobs but it's a lot of jobs over a LONG time! It's about the half-life of a typical career, these days (higher, in fact).
In 2015, if we find that the market for domestic programmers has dropped by what this article predicts, then it'll only because all of the market forces will have changed against each other and miraculously cancelled each other out--NOT because "current trends continued."
(Posting anonymously, because I've already modded people up in this article)
I agree with everything you say - but what is beneficial for society is not the same as what is beneficial for programmers.
It's funny that you mention working as slowly as possible, because I've come across this behaviour many times: IT departments wanting to avoid having their budget slashed, software houses trying to milk their clients; etc.
Easy way to get modded Troll: attack Open Source.
need a free COBOL editor for Windows?
Disco Stu: "Did you know that disco record sales were up 400% for the year ending 1976? If these trends continues... AAY!"
nuff said.
Endless arguments over trivial contradictions in books written by ignorant savages to explain thunder in the dark.
VALinux and IBM are very interested in keeping offshoring going. IBM has been offshoring their engineering for years, and they are teaming with VALinux to make this transition as smooth as possible with their new offshoring software focus.
Cheap labor and "free" software - it is a combo that CFO's love!
It was Bill Clinton who signed NAFTA and GAT into law (after Clinton promised not to during his run for pres).
Thanks for giving the wealthiest 5% huge tax cuts so they'll never know near-poverty, like I do.
Everyone got tax cuts and that wealthiest 5% of Americans still pay nearly half or the US tax base. Also for someone who came close to six figures a couple of years ago to be near poverty now does not say allot about how you managed your money.
WTF is $1700 going to do towards tuition? nuttin
Its a good chunk of tuition at an Undergrad school you don't have a right to college money for school take the money which covers the fees and be glad. if you flip burgers 40hrs a week in the summer you can earn most of the years tuition and if you work 10-15 hrs a week in tuition like I did you'll get the rest and beer money to boot.
e first American president to START a war. The first American president who detained American citizens, in the United States
Lincoln did not start a war?, LBJ did not start a war?, Clinton did not drag the US into Kosovo? BTW Lincoln also detained without charging people, and without due process but why let history interfere with your rant.
Do you know that we are holding over 660 men at Camp X-Ray, in cages, like dogs?
Really being allowed to practice, your religion, 3 squares a day, seeing an imam is being treated like a dog? I am against camp x-ray but moronic exaggeration is not going to help.
So, thanks to the 49% of the country that did vote for Bush, and those who still support him, we have a hitler in office.
Its called the constitution, and the Electorial college system, gets over it. Its designed to make urban and rural area equally politically important if Gore had managed to win his own state it would not have mattered. That's it compare Bush to Hitler, its so clear to me now Gross use of slander for those you politically disagree with has shown me the light..
My job in IT, and countless like them are disappearing - and whats most disturbing is that our industry is only 35 years old! Only 10 of which did our industry emerge from specialized functions to become an sizable group, and already we are sent out. So thank you, America, for sitting back, watching your reality TV and 4 hours of sportscenter every night and allowing all this to happen. It's the fault of both parties and both wings, Republicans wrote NAFTA/GAT and Bill Clinton Signed it. Bill Clinton allowed the Chinese to get computer and rocket technology that should have stayed secret. And finally its your fault for bitching about it on slashdot and not registering voters, and pumping for a third party candidate who cares about the US (this excludes the Greens).
What a bunch of crap. Americans are always pontificating about the free market, but when it comes to reality, ie. letting the market determine the price of a commodity, they always jump to protectionism.
Its ironic that Clinton appears to have more faith in the free market than Bush.
I'd better run out to Wal-Mart and buy a life now, before they're all snapped up by these people!
It doesn't mean less programmers required, just less run-of-the mill "programmers" required.
I hope you dont write specs with logic like that!
I'm not against efficiency and innovation, just pointing out that there will be less work to go around, and that Open Source is contributing to that.
On a philosophical level I approve of Open Source; on a professional level it worries me.
need a free COBOL editor for Windows?
Programming may not be carpentry yet, but it's heading there. More and more creativity has been sapped out of my job in the last few years. It's a long time from when a programmer was the master of a mysterious dark art, and business types knelt before the altar, praying for some kind of good result. These days, things are much more thoroughly spec'd out, by people other than programmers, and you pretty much do what you're told.
The job is being distilled out into its component parts. Graphic design, interface, feature lists, specifications, coding and testing are often different teams now. I've been trying to move more on the functional specification side than the implementation side. That's where the creativity is; coding is just implementing someone else's idea.
Offshore programmers are extreme case. Specs need to be exact. If anything is not precisely specified, something weird will come back. I'm not sure why that is, maybe when programmers are in the same room as you, they catch your drift even if it's not captured on paper, or maybe the shared cultural background plays a part, or whatever. In any case, this is forcing a new discipline in writing the specs. Soon there will no room for interpretation at all for the coders.
Of course, there is still creativity at the code level itself. If you get your thrills writing very efficient code, that's great. I was always more interested in the business needs, listening to users, and thinking of a solution.
In any case, we all had it coming. I've seen college dropouts with no experience but a sense of entitlement. Thinking that they deserved to be making 80 grand, while waiting for the stock options to vest and make them rich. I was one myself. Meanwhile, my English major friends graduating from Columbia with massive college debt are making under 30 grand, but hoping one day they will make editor of a magazine, or write a novel.
Of course it couldn't last. It was just too much money, too easily made. The company stock did a reverse 10 to 1 split, twice, and then we declared bankruptcy and were bought by someone else. My 30% raise one year, was a 4% raise the next, and then no raise at all the next year.
Last month, I took a severance package and left the company to go finish school. If the company can afford to start hiring again, there will be plenty of people to take my spot at more rational salaries.
I thought "Thank you! Come again!" WAS Hindi?
It seems like the new American dream (at least in Washington and in board rooms) is to wipe out the middle class and reduce the nation to mostly have nots and a handful of economic elites. Sounds like we are returning to the middle ages.
The thing that bugs me about predictions like this is, who's going to remember that they prediced this in 12 years if they're wrong (which they're likely to be)? Even if they're still around, that is...
"Destroy science and religion. Science would re-emerge exactly the same; but not religion." - Penn Jillette, paraphrased
My research suggests a reduction of only 235,394 programmers.
--This isn't a man who is leaving with his head between his legs.
When are these analysts ever right projecting 3 years into the future? We're supposed to believe them about 12 years?
Sometimes I think they take a couple years worth of data, plot it on a chart, and simply extend the recent trends well into the future to come up with their numbers. Don't believe me? Think back to 1999, every new technology that came along was going to be a multi-billion dollar market by 2003 or whatever.
One thing economists agree on is that while they don't exactly what new kinds of jobs will be here in the future, they WILL be tech jobs. Tech jobs grow like crazy, because every new tech product creates all kinds of problems to be solved, and new opportunities. A major impediment to creating tech jobs is the cost of workers, so if you can reduce costs by hiring offshore workers, that allows on-shore workers to work on new problems that were too expensive to tackle before.
In short, don't throw away your tech degree just yet and become a burger flipper.
By reading this sig, you agree to the terms of my sig license.
The next wave after offshore will be outsourcing all IT functions to outside vendors. After that comes COTS (Commercial Off The Self) solutions. COTS means the end of IT departments. I'm sure that many will argue that their business "needs" custom inventory tracking software because their business " really" is different. How many MBAs do you see demanding custom spreadsheet programs? The truth of the matter is we should not need IT departments. We need programmers. Very very good professional programmers at that, but we don't need droolers writing VB front ends to badly written legacy Cobal inventory programs. Businesses need IT as bad as they need IT departments to go away.
Also, what percentage of workers on H1B visas in the period in question were tech workers?
A few minor changes in labor law, and the US would be as unionized as it was in the 1950s, and as unionized as Canada is now.
They know they are screwing the workers for 'one-time' gains. There is no long run for ~75% the managment types. They just want a quick $$$ so they can spend the rest of their lives in the Caribbean. The west is at a critical point, do we acknowledge one of capitalism's main flaws or do we sink into the ocean and let asia take over. Hint: The Nazis fled to South America after screwing over Germany.
NPR report link
(note: The Real version didn't work for me, but I think it's because of my company's overly anal firewall policies).
The Russians have won. They have made the world a cesspool of distrust, greed, fear and hate.
I have been out of school for a while, and was speaking with a friends son yesterday about what his education is costing him. Did it dawn on public policy officials that the cost of a BS from a good school is surpassing $100,000 USD? (with some hitting $160K)
Making the assumption that smarter people tend to gravitate towards BS programs (Comp Sci, Engineering, Biotech, etc); who in their right mind is willing to invest $100,000+ in a future career that will probably gross $35,000 USD annually in a few years?
You wonder why there are less technical degrees being churned out in the US!
For example, some of our clients got their hands on a Forrester report that said outsourcing creation and management of email newsletters was the way to go.
After a bit of digging, we found another Forrester report that said it was better to keep those functions in house.
As other folks pointed out, Forrester's job is to keep people subscribed to their service. They do that by providing ammunition to the armies of middle managers who are trying to justify their positions with "facts" and "research."
Yeah, right.
Well, for the complex stuff, they're looking for monkeys with several years of VB.NET. ;^)
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
When I started college in 1997 I had about a decade of computer time behind me, half the required CS classes taken while in high school, even an insanely detailed (and now practically useless) knowledge of BIOS interrupts. Hiring had a whopper of a positive slope, with even talented high school programmers getting paid ridiculous salaries. CS was a natural choice for me, right? But I majored in physics instead.
That's because I saw programming for what is is: high-tech plumbing, mostly. I recognized that, at the time, most PC Magazine-reading, spreadsheet-literate business programmers write cookie-cutter code to process and route the flow of business information, or display a bevelled square on the screen. Even kids like myself could learn it on their own without a formal education. Or hordes of backwater workers in India. It was a scam, it seemed to me, that "computer people" pulled on the computer illiterate who were still so frightened of destroying their expensive new computer that they couldn't through the bozo they were paying to clean up the icon clutter on their desktop. There would always be computer programmers, just like there will always be plumbers, because most people wouldn't want to bother with it themselves.
It's just a tool to get things done, and once the tool is written, you're SOL. How long before most software is high-quality pre-fab? Look at Microsoft Office!
What kind of first-year student did this study? To give absolute numbers for how many people will be employed in various fields in 2015?!? That's laughable!
Whenever you see a prediction for something to be at an absolute level more than a year from now, then just ignore it!
For 2015 the most you can say is something like "the level will be at 200 000" or at most "it will be at 240 000". It's just ludicrous that they put it down exactly.
Die dulci fruere. Have a nice day.
If we as Americans want to be morons and outsource software jobs to foreign countries, that's fine. If we can get it done cheaper, then that is the American way. Maybe if we are to be so concerned about it, we would take the step of only buying American made products - including software. But then, and pardon me for lacking my usually jingoistic patriotism here - I don't give a fuck who writes the code behind the software I use, so long as it works for my purposes. If it weren't for foreign programmers, I would'nt be free from microsoft, able to watch DVD's on Linux, or program more efficiently (QT vs .Net, MFC, etc).
I wonder...how many "outsourced" programmers are bitching about their plight while driving their Honda/Kia/Toyota/Nissan/Hyundia/Suzuki/Isuzu/etc. Sure the American automakers might have sympathy - not.
I too once held this belief that only those that enjoy the field should be in it. And I think its important to like what you do. But you cannot fault people for wanting a better life than they have right now -- even if it means they don't like their job. I mean, does it really matter if people bought into the ads on TV about becoming a MCSE? This isn't some exclusive clique, this is people trying something else in their life (which I think everyone should do). And if they're willing to work for it, then so be it. As the hype around IT dies down, the salaries decrease, and people will defect to other fields such as business.
Now, if you have to put up with people that barely know the material and don't care to, I can understand frustration, but people may have equally valuable reasons for going into IT that don't include, "I like it."
craftsman, they want interchangeable parts. With that midset comes
necessarily the belief that what you do is factory work. And for 90% of programmers this is actually true.
Quote:
Developers inhabit a continuum from just below real Software Engineers
(those that have read Knuth and understood him) down to the burger
flippers coding in VB to a spec someone else wrote. They are the post
modern agricultural laborers AND THEY KNOW THIS really.
-- read full article
Dyslexics have more fnu.
Yah, play the ideology card and blame Clinton but ignore Bush who hasn't changed a damn thing. It was your buddies in the board rooms who demanded all of those visas. Anyone who objected to the visas got the usual business scare tactic, "We'll have to lay people off or go out of business!". Bullshit
Programmer/IT is unlike all your other examples because it has no inherent tie to locality.
Doctor -- has to be local to examine my body.
Lawyer -- has to know and live local laws, and be under the local bar.
Accountant -- you want local so that he is accoutable for his mistakes under our law.
Pumbers, Electricians, and Carpenters -- have to work on your house, which is local.
-----
Software Developer -- ships the bits over the wire in an instant. Do it from anywhere. No locality.
If there's going to be a 25% reduction in programmers, then the industry had better get busy making things simpler. Emerging technologies, by and large, keep making things more difficult to accomplish the same things. Toss in some DBA's and other kinds of technical administrators, and it's difficult to see how employment is going to shrink if we approach things the way we have been.
"If Clinton hadn't been in office, it wouldn't have happened and you would still have a job. A good job at that."
Really? So it wasn't the demands of corporations that pushed for it? I have a feeling that no matter who had been in office the same thing would have happened.
If you want to play the blame game go walk down to your nearest board room.
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
The biggest supporters of the free market are those who haven't been hurt by it...yet
The "MBA as admission to the boardroom" idea was outdated five years ago and is a leftover from the 80s when it was valid.
How can they make that kind of forecast without taking into account three things (that haven't happened yet):
1) major new technological advances that we don't know about yet that require larger investments in domestic IT
2) government-mandated protectionist policies (that don't exist yet) to help stem the tide of outsourced jobs to other countries
3) a backlash against outsourcing to countries and "giving away" our technological edge?
all they can do is plot a little line and see where it lands 12 years from now. Don't ever take reports like this seriously--no one can predict the future that far in advance.
But - it should be a wakeup call to people so they are at least aware of the trend.
That book explicitly debunks the idea that any one ethnic group is more murderous or fiendish than another. Instead, it claims that the richness of the land they live on determines who will invade others.
:-)
Well, that's certainly supported by my independent research while playing Civ III.
What if instead of farming out your skills as a carpenter (code monkey) you took your expertise and started building / selling houses (software).
:)
If you're as good as you think, you should be able to come up with something, no?
Just a thought.
Small Business makes up far more of the workforce than corporations do. There are millions of small businesses and only a few hundred publically traded companies. Don't pander to the monoliths, work for people who have real vision, or even start your own business.
Small businesses aren't going to outsource your job, its not cost effective. They normally are going to value your work because you normally are going to have a specific place you fit in. There's always going to be customers are willing to pay a little extra for people to go the extra mile for them.
The Anti-Blog
Have you seen the diet of Programmers?! By the year 2015, 25% of them will die off from natural (or unholy and very unnatural) causes...
http://www.beanleafpress.com
No matter where you hide, management will find your red stapler.
235,396 fewer Computer Programmers... wow, that's half the population of Wyoming!
For those whose base unit of measurement is not 'Wyomings'... if we lined those programmers up head-to-toe, they would stretch approximately 250 miles from Silicon Valley out into the Pacific Ocean heading towards Asia. At that point, of course, many would drown.
Alternatively, if the computer programmers were laid end-to-end, the chain would be longer than 4,000 football fields. Of course, it would be dangerous leaving so many nerds lying down in fields if football players were around.
You are viewing the future through the lens of the present. This is natural; but, I believe you are overlooking a lot of the changes currently taking place.
First, there is the matter of data integration. As it gets easier to collect data, it becomes harder to do anything useful with it. Management will want to synthesize this data from these disparate datastores. That is going to require constant interface writing, etc.
Back in the early nineties, Ed Yourdon predicted the "Decline and Fall of the American Programmer." He said jobs would move offshore as CASE and OO tools made programming more of a drudge and less of an art. Partly, he was correct; but he missed too many things.
Mostly, he made predictions about the future as if the future were like the present, without knowing that much about the present. The present of 1992 included the Internet (though used almost entirely by educational institutions), the booming consumer software market, etc.
Now we have many smaller businesses that can afford the kinds of ERP software that were available only to big business just a few years ago. These sites will require installation and customisation, just like the big corps. This is one emerging market, helped on (to a large part) by freely-available software.
There are other markets for software developers. Yes, they may have to specialize in one area, and write variations on the same interface over and over, but it's still work.
I don't think there's any prediction concerning availability of programming jobs we can make today that will be accurate in 4 years. That's like trying to predict the next nation on which the US is going to declare a "war on X," where X contains the subset "terrorism," "drugs," "badly-dubbed movies," and "women with facial hair."
Microsoft is to software what Budweiser is to beer.
Lawyer A: "What do you call 235,000 fewer programmers by 2015?"
Lawyer B: "I dunno."
Lawyer A: "A good start."
I had the (mis)fortune of growing up in a family plumbing business...and I can assure you that programming is much more like bailing shit than tapping nails! But it does have the advantage that it can't be offshored, and pays pretty damn well. A good plumber can pull down $250K/year pretty easily in a growing community.
Roto-rooter, here I come!
A long time ago, I was a carpenter. I imagine when geeks drive by a construction job sites many of them probably figure that they are better than the carpenters, or at least that they are happier in their work than carpenters.
They would be wrong. Carpenters love their work. Like programmers, when carpenters are done with their job, they can stand back and be proud of their handywork. And some days are better than others.
Oh, most programmers nowadays have college degrees and other pretty bits of paper, but today, as in the old days -- and like today's carpenters -- programming is a craft that requires practice, practice, practice.
Schooling is nice, but you aren't worth dick to a construction foreman or a software project manager if you can't demonstrate your ability.
Good analogy.
--Richard
PS: When I drive by construction sites today, I
still get a kick out of the scent of fresh lumber.
Resources are limited.
Properly controlling and allocating them does increase the value to society.
This is why the free market works.
In my experience, there is room for a cut of that size in IT. There are plenty of unqualified people, management needs to prune 'em. Take this real world example:
- Consultant shows up at client site to develop software, and requests a development workstation and software.
- IT staff provides an off the shelf box with Office.
- Consultant re-requests the development software package. IT staff takes it under consideration. Consultant twiddles thumbs.
- IT staff provides development software.
- Consultant realizes he does not have admin access to his workstation, and can't install software, and requests admin access.
- Consultant is informed that he is not allowed to have admin access to his own developer workstation.
- etc....
A simple example, but it goes on every day at all levels of large corporations. Lots of companies invest in large IT staffs that in actuality provide little direct benefit to the corporation. They need to figure out how to trim back to the minimum, effective IT organization, and sub the rest out.
That said, I think that domestic firms are going to provide equal or greater value than outsourcing, it's just too difficult to keep continuity with the client with overseas development.
... for a number of reasons.
While certainly this is predicted based on the number of programming positions lost to off-shore programming sites, I consider it a bogus estimate for a number of reasons:
First, this is a classic contractionist economic argument. This argument is based in part on a zero sum view of the global economy in general and the American economy in particular: if someone loses, that means someone has to win. It makes sense in football, but not always in economic issues. Both global and American economies tend to expand as years go by. Liberal economists (and the article cites union labor reps, who are by definition, liberal) often use alarming language and predictions to create crises through sky-is-falling rhetoric. They do this because the whole liberal ideology is dependent on class envy and the ideas that a). there is only a fixed amount of economic activity and b). if someone else has a piece that means my piece is smaller.
Second, technology fuels expansion by enabling working productivity gains and increases in efficiencies in the use of resources, be they natural or human. I find it ironic that the article says "some 3.3 million service-sector jobs will be shipped overseas or rendered obsolete by technology." This will likely be true, but the question is: If technology renders jobs obsolete, who are the technologists who are going to create and program the technology that renders other jobs obsolete?
Third, the article doesn't describe its assumptions. On what calculations and assumptions is the "loss" based on? How can we know the model of the future on which the predictions are based? I'm always skeptical of any kind of projection that goes beyond a couple years -- at least in terms of something specific like the loss of 235,000 jobs.
Fourth, How can any such prediction be considered credible when the consequences are being projected for a date 11 years from now? The complexities of global economies make such predictions with an eleven year horizon highly questionable.
Fifth, the most commonly quoted sources were involved in the textile industry. Though the article attempts to make a connection between textiles and programmers, I do not think such a link is reasonable. Textiles are products that are made by union labor which is low-skill in nature. Programmers are, so far, not highly represented by unions and the trade requires substantial skill. I have read about the future of self-programming programs but I doubt this simply because the nature of technology changes so rapidly that the programming programs will always be behind the cutting/bleeding/leading edge. As long as humans are the creative force behind new technologies, programming programs pose little threat IMO.
I think that historical data indicates that over the long haul, global and American economies have expanded incredibly from decade to decade. New industries are created from the advance of technology, which generally tends to create jobs. Technology drives expansion and technologists will always be needed.
In industries like textiles, automotive and manufacturing, there is a significant movement of manufacturnig jobs to off-shore companies. The predominant reason for this shift is due to union labor. At one time, unions were a vital presence in bringing equity to laborers. In the most recent decades, however, unions have been their own worst enemies by forcing industries into labor costs that outstripped the value of the labor. As a result, companies like GM look at off-shore labor as a very compelling alternative to laborers whose low-skill work commands $60,000 a year plus benefits in the US.
The movement of programming jobs to low-cost off-shore programming houses is significant today and there is a trend of concern. Yet much can happen in 11 yrs. Companies may find that language barriers, communication complexities, culture differences, etc. will not have contributed to the overall bottom line as was hoped. Programmers will likely discover ne
-Everyone laughs at lemmings but no one ever wants to admit to ever being one.
So there.
When I saw the article title, I hoped it meant that a lot of people who got into it just for the money in the 1990's were quickly jumping ship leaving more jobs for those of us who got into programming for the sheer love of it.
But nope, that title should have read 235,000 fewer Programming *Jobs*. Very depressing numbers indeed.
--Won't that be grand? Computers and the programs will start thinking and the people will stop. - Dr. Walter Gibbs
80% of what Forrester says is completely wrong. Those numbers are highly inflated - and probably way off the mark.
Don't believe any of it.
It's not easy to slow this process down, but it can be done. First off, always put on your "good employee" face. Be at work on time (or early). Always have a positive attitude (Sure thing, boss). You need to fuck up the process of outsourcing jobs in every way you can. It's the little things that can grind the process to a halt. Do they need the IP address of a machine to QA against? If two numbers got transposed in the communication, they couldn't log in. Oops - an honest mistake (especially if it was verbal and nothing can be shown to be your fault). It's especially helpful if you can push off all communications until right before you leave for the evening. That way, no corrections can be made until you get back the next morning and at least two days of productive work is lost. Another important thing to remember is to be sure to do your job AND NOTHING MORE. Don't answer questions that haven't been asked. Don't provide helpful information (unless the boss is looking, then do it only if you feel they may be suspicious about your Good Employee Credentials). The techie people that I see are way to eager to help the boss downsize jobs. Sometimes geeks are really, really dumb.
Just thought I'd mention it....
I just seems you can't get the one without the other....
Do you really think letting free trade push the social/environmental/etc standards to the least common denominator is a good thing?
How many new jobs did the invention of the iPod bring about? Or the invention of flash USB cards? Or Microsoft's Clippy? Every tech product does *NOT* create new oppotunities or problems to solve.
Mac OS X and Windows XP working side by side to fight back the night.
"(*) The classic example of this is the empty lot in a city or the lot with a broken down building on it. The owner is holding out for windfall profits (i.e. speculating) and meanwhile people who could be profitably utilizing that land or building are kept from participating in the economy."
Never owned property have you?
Property that just "sits their", is still a liability. Taxes still have to be paid, and "liability" doesn't go away if someone gets injured in that "broken down" building. Property that "generates" money is the way to go. It's kind of the difference between putting your money in the bank, vs putting it in your matress.
Time to start your own company. I believe that we the IT professionals need to gather our courage and go out on our and make this industry again. Big words but what is the alternative. If IT goes abroad and we want to continue to be IT people then we need to start our own thing.
Did it work well in good old England where people were denied the ability to farm land and consequently forced to work in the factories? The free market works, because we have a stick to beat it down with when it gets out of line.
I think the original poster did not chose Carpenter by accident.
/. ers, that programming is ART, suddenly becomes true.
Programmers, especially self taught programmers are carpenters, or lets better say: craft men, IMHO.
Look at all those guys arguing that PHP is the superior programming language. No offence, but most of those people arguing that, have no clue what a servelet engine is, and what it all does. They don't know anything about frameworks, design patterns, UML, CASE systems, MDA, CORBA or anything about large scale system development with 100 and more developers.
Most people who call them selves programmers do not deserve the title "Architect".
Its ridiculous that a Java programmer, who does not know what I mean when I say: "use a factory", earns over $50/h.
I clearly see several levels of maturity for "IT workers":
craft man
engineer
architect
Someone who titles himself a "geek" should have passed all those levels and should be able to think in terms of an architect, apply responsibility like an engineer and conduct work like a high quality craft man or tool smith.
If you are on that level, then the opinion of some
As long as "programmers == carpenters aka craft men" get placed off shore, there is still enough to learn to advance to the engineering and architectural dimension of "programming".
angel'o'sphere
P.S. the good indian programmers, are software engineers or software architects and are as expensive as US or european programmers and most of the time they dont get the wages they demand in India and thus locate to the US or the UK.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
There is one aspect of the discussion of offshoring US software engineering jobs that I have not seen discussed much: where are all of these Indian software engineers coming from?
India has been and remains, by US standards, a poor country. The roads are terrible and inadequate. The electric power infrastructure is so bad that companies than can afford it have their own power generation. Hunger is a big problem and much of the Indian population is still agrigarian. Violence inspired by religion is not uncommon and the ruling party in India makes use of this violence near elections. India borders Pakistan, which is considered by many the most dangerous country in the world because of its political instability and nuclear weapons. In short, India is not a country that can afford a first world level educational infrastructure of high schools, colleges and universities.
India does have the famous Indian Institutes of Technology. These are world class schools that have classicly sent Indian students on to graduate schools in the United States and Europe. Howver, IIT only graduates a few thousand students a year. In addition to the IIT grads there are Indian students who graduate from Universities in the west.
As the US and European job markets have turned bad, some Indian H1-B visa engineers are returning to India. However, it you add up all of the engineering graduates from IIT, Indians who went to foreign schools and the returning H1-B visa engineers, the sum does not seem to be sufficient to supply all of those jobs that are being moved from the West to the East. So where are all these people coming from?
Some are coming from what I call the "Matchbook School of Computer Programming". These are the kind of schools that used to advertise on the back of matchbooks in the United States. They teach basic Java, Visual Basic and ".NET" programming. Their students have no background in algorithms or design, but they can crank out simple software, especially GUI software. I've noticed that many Java programmers in the United States seem to have little command of algorithm design beyond the use of the class libraries, so the barrier to entry for Java programmers seems low.
Obviously I have no statistical information on any of this beyond the speculation I've listed above. I am certainly not writing that the problem does not exist. I am just trying to look at the real issues, with as little histeria as possible. Although much of the focus is on India, my guess is that the real problem is the combination of a set of lower wage countries: India, China, Russia and Eastern Europe. The combined number of skilled engineers (e.g., a software engineer who actually knows what N * log(N) means) is a significant threat to the US work force.
There is a lot of thoughtless blather in this whole discussion. Not only regarding the issue of where all these foreign engineers are coming from but also regarding the course that US engineers are supposed to take. The classic line, echoed in some of this discussion is "retraining". But no one answers the question: toward what? This is because no one knows.
Sometimes it is easy to forget why I went into this field long ago in the days of the punch card. I went into software engineering because I love it. I am still not ready to give up on my field (perhaps this makes me a dinosaur slated for extinction).
I have spent over twenty years building my skills as a software engineer and computer scientist. This is a hard and demanding field. I constantly read articles and books. I writes software not only at work by in my free time. Good software engineers, who can not only engineer complex systems but actually write clearly to document these systems are rare in any country. I still hold out the hope that there will be jobs in the future for people with these skills, although I admit things look bleak now. But these are bleak times. The question I try to answer is: what is a factor of these bleak times and what represents structural change?
Few, if any. That's the same logic that says, in the hands of a George Gilder, We create a handful of millionaires, therefore our society is successful. Will you still feel optimistic if you're not one of the minority who can "exploit virtual organization?" And even if you are, how will you feel about friends and family subjugated by debt, diminished income, and thwarted economic mobility?
The new feudalism -- which isn't necessarily virtual: Wal-Marts, you know, have mass and form -- is easy to discern but incredibly difficult to combat. How does a serf resist without committing economic suicide? That trap is the lever of his obedience, as our feudal lords perfectly understand.
If there's any upside to be located in the short-term, it's actually virtual -- rethinking, attitude shifts. When right wing politics of the Rush Limbaugh/Bill O'Reilly leads to shipping his job overseas, even the most unimaginative IT person starts to get it. Pity that he might be forced to take that Wal-Mart job before he acts politically; once moved down the ladder economically, he'll quickly find his political capital is a meaner coin and his paths for redress all seem to circle back endlessly to the point of his despair...the punch-clock.
I am a programmer and a financial underwriter. I guess its back to changing oil...
How strange it is to be anything at all
These conditions reflect about 90% of the situations that we find ourselves here (in the USA). Why would it be any different if you put an Indian in there?
My last boss retired from the USAF with a Masters degree in compsci and experience in about 10 different programming languages. If it weren't for his Top Secret clearance he would probably still be looking. I myself just started a MIS to go with my Compsci so when I retire in 4 yrs I'll have something else on my resume.
Science is the Real TRUTH!
Through first hand experience I have learned that quite a few US firms consider Canada as a viable "off-shore" source of tech work.
I amaware of several small-time IT consulting firms which have been bought out by US firms as the average salary here(when converted to US dollars) is damn near half of what the same person would demand in the US. Add to that free health-care and a government which loves to hand out billion dollar contracts Canada is fast become the "off-shore" location of choice.
Reality is in the mind of the beholder - me 1996
I'm sure, had Slashdot been around back in days of Steampunk,
And when was that, exactly? Last I checked, "Steampunk" was a form of science fiction, not an actual historical era.
Jay (=
(I want my steam-powered android and difference engine, dammit!)
Half of the population of Wyoming is programmers?
"Talk minus action equals nothing" - Joey Shithead, D.O.A.
"Talk minus action equals
You are correct that the US does have a low personal income tax rate (not the lowest, the article you quote specifically states that Hong Kong has lower taxes), but that's only part of the story. The US corporate tax rate is actually quite high. This may seem a bit odd since one of the real selling points of business in the US used to be it's low corporate tax rate, but that is no more. Even many of the countries that are often called "socialist" or even "communist" countries by many Americans, ie Canada, Sweden and Norway, have lower corporate taxes than the US.
Here are some numbers for 2002. As you can see, only Italy, Belgium and Japan have higher corporate tax rates than the US. The main thrust of the problem is that the US corporate tax system hasn't really been updated in ages while most other countries have reduced their tax rate singificantly since the mid-90's. The above article also briefly makes mention of corporate tax avoidance, something that seems to happen in the US more than most other countries. It suggests that the somewhat dated corporate tax laws almost tend to encourage the "creative accounting" practices, with Enron being put forth as the obvious example.
Cost of living isn't the answer that you're looking for, it's the lower cost of doing buisness that is pushing companies to countries like India and China. Certainly the wages of the workers has a lot to do with it, but that's far from the only thing. If low worker wages were the only requirement for these things then everyone would move their business to Africa where wages tend to be the lowest. On the flip side, we also aren't seeing the rates of job loss in places like Hong Kong where the cost of living and workers wages are very high.
He makes a very good point.
This is a plague, and only those that are technically fit will survive.
After this only the elite will be left and this will have countless benefits.
Instead of beatching about this go hit the books and prepare for judgment day.
se ya all in 2015
What I do worry about is being lumped together with other supposed peers who would take seriously a prediction 12 years out in a field as volatile as ours.
What's the explenation? Will each one of us become 10 times more effective? Will a gr8 war wipe out half of the planet? Will people just find out computers suck?... Hmm... the way I see it: less competition. tougher teams, more fun!!
Exactly right. Management of programming is usually exactly wrong.
I've talked with Indian programmers. They are even more detached from management, if that is possible, by distance and culture.
Hands-off, no-group-feeling management is not good management.
Okay, nobody currently alive can foresee the future.
We must be alert to the danger that public policy could become captive to a scientific-technological elite. - Eisenhower
I'm fairly certain that we had the infrastructure for massive overseas connections by 1998.
Also, the word 'significant' is meaningless in the present context. It doesn't matter if 'significant' numbers of workers on H1B visas were programmers. What does matter is how many jobs were created or lost each year and how many workers were imported through the H1B visa.
The last year I could find numbers for was 2001 which had 150k of H1B visas approved for workers in the tech sector. How many of those 150k jobs would have been filled by workers already in the US if those H1B visas would not have approved? My contention is that the majority of those jobs would have been shipped overseas if the H1B visas would not have been available.
If anything the availability of H1B visas kept those jobs in the states longer they would have remained had their been no H1B program.
Yeah! Look at people buying all those cheap SUV's and homes.
So is an ordination.
You need to restart your computer. Hold down the Power button for several seconds or press the Restart button.
1. Each of the 235,396 laid off programmers gets a girlfriend. Okay, the hardest part is done. ... er, ONE HUNDRED BILLION dollars.
2. Move to Wyoming, displacing the current population (all of whom are in the witness protection program anyway).
3. Secede from the US and form a Geek Nation.
4. Hack NORAD and hold the world hostage, demanding ONE MILLION
5. Profit!
all those unemployed coders...
"Academicians are more likely to share each other's toothbrush than each other's nomenclature."
Cohen
You are so right. I work as a consultant, and am constantly amazed at how often I have to force my clients to sit down and go over program specs. I've developed a package for clients interested in working with me so they understand the process. I go over the package with them so they understand the contents of that package. Still, my biggest nemesis is the fact that I have to force them to take the time to look at preliminary UI mockups and give me feedback so they get the best possible product.
I doubt that offshore programmers will be able to even come close. I know, as I've done similar work - hired to do projects for people I've never actually met in person. It's almost impossible to deliver the same kind of product under these conditions.
I've seen too many colleagues who just wanted programming requests left in their intray and didn't want to work actively with the users. That kind of relationship is easily outsourced, as opposed to the person who understands not just the code but the working process that it supports.
Yes! Absolutely.
Developers should look at agile processes like Extreme Programming. All of them require more collaboration between geeks and non-geeks. XP, for example, requires that a product manager be in the same room as the developers.
Businesses like these processes because they're fast and efficient compared with traditional methods. But the outsourcing trend provides programmers with a great reason to make the effort: it lets them heavily exploit the one advantage over distant programmers: the high-bandwidth, low-latency medium of face-to-face communication.
This article is the great motivation for my additional marketing & sales study... I've been coding for 10+ yrs and was a project manager already for 4+ yrs now... And believe me - requirements change, technology changes, motivation changes and job-requirements change...
I do not expect me to do the same stuff I've done until now in 10 yrs from now... it well be sure some sort of combination thing with an excellent mixture of all good ingredients, 25 yrs work experience in software development, management skills and (web.)marketing/sales/pre-sales and other activies... hell - what do you call that type of job???
If you believe only a bit of such reports, then get some good books, inscribe a university or just spend your money on courses, trainings and certifications and make sure you are always miles ahead of the IT-gardeners...
Christoph
Why would the poster point out that this is half the population of wyoming. Is that meant to impress? Wyoming is a great big EMPTY state. That number is also half of 1/2million, which is 1/4 million. These are statistics that are not meant to impress beyond their means. Wyoming is a state that has a smaller population than most major urban centers. THATs impressive. :p
So where's the 235,396 figure coming from? 26% of 3.3 mil? We have two public reports (BLS, Fed) and one private report from Forrester keep in mind public and private methodologies for surveying and collecting data are different.
...
Well guess what, not all tech is strictly service-sector so that throws the results off.
Also, this one caught my eye:
"require fewer skills, are automated or are highly portable." The observant reader will note whoever drafted the collection of different studies and whomever sponsored them might have an agenda of grouping as much data as can be believed (excluding independent verification of such data) into a single set of data for presentation -- misleading in the case of individual statistical surveys whose purpose is to identify specifics.
Think about what they were surveying if what's printed were the words used in questions to respondents/clients/etc. Most of our work in the tech field ends up being automated at some point. Portability is a compartmentalized issue and has many angles, product performance and ownership structure not the least of them.
"
Since 2001, some 2.9 million private sector jobs have been lost, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Many of those jobs won't ever return, even as the economy recovers, say experts. What's more, this isn't just true for blue-collar workers
Another estimate by Forester Research goes into more specifics. Forrester estimates that by 2015, some 3.3 million service-sector jobs will be shipped overseas or rendered obsolete by technology. Forester analyst John McCarthy says jobs that are most at risk require fewer skills, are automated or are highly portable.
Those include computer programming and software engineer jobs, that have long been leaving the country. By 2015, 26 percent of those jobs will be gone, says McCarthy.
"
In the forward for "The Universal Computer" (by Martin Davis) there are a couple of quotes:
"If it should turn out that the basic logics of a machine designed for the numerical solution of differential equations coincided with the logics of a machine intended to make bills for a department store, I would regard this as the most amazing coincidence I have ever encountered."
Howard Aiken in 1956
Let us now return to the analogy of the theoretical computing machines... It can be shown that a single special machine of that type can be made to do the work of all. It could in fact be made to work as a model of any other machine. The special machine may be called a universal machine..."
Alan Turing in 1947
NOTE: In Mr. Aiken's defense, he is probably referring to a differential analyzer (which was an analog computer)
When I was in high school, my (supposedly) CS teacher read an article that stated, "the world would no longer need programmers". She attempted to persuade me from becoming a programmer because in the future no one would need programmers. It would be a dead profession. The year was 1994. Okay, she was half right (there won't be anymore jobs for a while, and they'll all go overseas...), but still.... You can't extrapolate. My teacher never would have imagined (or actually just read the other article) about the internet.
What if AI takes off? I think in the future even the soft sciences will become more computational. Look at fields like bioinfomatics or computational linguistics. There are all kinds of new areas opening up. The problem is that the world doesn't revolve around computers, but all the phenomena of our universe may be one really grand one. Programmers have to learn other skills. I see biologists, actuaries, and engineers (outside of EE/ECE) write code all the time. You need to attach an extra skill to your code.
All this just goes to prove, you shouldn't extrapolate about science or computing, unless your one of these guys:
Alan Turing
Albert Einstein
Kurt Godel
Nikola Tesla
Gordon Moore
Jules Verne
Of course, I'm extrapolating (and as you can guess, I'm not one of these guys...), so if you're a good philosopher you can safely ignore my post. Nothing to see here.... Carry on.
What do you mean my sig is repetitive? What do you mean my sig is repetitive? What do you mean....
There are NO large photos of their USB external sound cards, even though there are external controls and connectors that are not described.
XML can be a medium for expressing programs anyway (eg: <car><list><a/><b/><c/></list></car> ; == <a/>).
___
The ends are ape-chosen, only the means are man's. -- Aldous Huxley
Of course. I'm moving to Canada, personally. (marginally) Better IP laws, no DMCA, no Patriot Act, no warmongering. And I still work for a US firm (mostly because I haven't convinced my partner to move yet).
I am a Programmer/Analyst who lost my job due to the nonsense going around with modern businesses. I am tired of managers who cannot manager properly, and I am back to college to learn business management. I'll be the Anti-PHB that IT folk love to work with. I'll empower them, work them in teams, pay them based on their sucess, and share the wealth. If they make an idea that saves the organization 1M USD, they get 10% of that.
Remember, Slashdot does not have a -1 disagree moderation, and no, troll, flamebait, and overrated are not substitutes.
In at least some cases the security clearance is tied to the job/contract. When you lose the job/contract you lose the security clearance and have to apply for it again when needed.
It's flamebait or a troll, and bullshit.
Right, after a few hundred years of European hegemony over much of the current third-world, you expect the countries to recover over-night? Much of European wealth over the past 300 years was built on income from China, India and Africa. Check your history before you spout 'facts'.
Normally your comments are spot on, not this time...
All bow to his Noodliness!! His Noodle Appendage has touched me!
The upshot: theoretically, it's possible. Now for some reality.
Visas: The Indian government slots visitors in order of preference: persons of Indian hertitage, other persons, Pakistanis and Afghans.
If your ancestry traces back to India, there is a special visa program for you. It's assumed that you've picked up some skills out in the world, and India wants to encourage you to bring 'em home to develop the nation.
If you are of other nationalities, a work visa is available. When applying, you must present documentation from an employer that they will be responsible for you. Good luck on that. If you're bringing a lot of capital and a business plan, well, that's another matter. Your visa must be renewed every year and a half or so.
If you are Pakistani or Afghan, it's obvious they don't trust you, and you'll have to submit considerable additional documentation.
Work Environment: Universities in India are pumping out a lot of tech grads, and there aren't yet enough jobs for all of them, although regional labor shortages do occur. Ergo, there's a lot of competition for jobs, so unless you were lead architect on the NT or Linux kernels in your last position (and if you are, you aren't getting outsourced, yet), don't think you're a shoo in. In fact, for an employer to even go to the bother of hiring you, you'll need to show a truly sterling CV. After all, it's a major business risk and pain in the ass for them to bring you in country in the first place. As an aside, there seems to be opportunity for Japanese speakers now that firms are seeking to tap the demand for outsourcing from Japan. You'll working in a 1.5m square three sided cube, if you're lucky. Some up and coming companies claim to respect that employees might have a life beyond the office, which should tell you what the norm is. When a contract is finished, you may find your ass back out on the street very quickly, just like in the States, and the social safety net assumes you've got family to lean on. You do not want to go broke in India.
Renting: As a foreigner, you can't buy property. There is a wide variety of rental properties, ranging from mansions and modern high rise condos you couldn't afford on a San Jose salary, to the very pits. You really need to do your homework on this. Even though you may be working on an Indian pay scale, land lords will assume you're loaded, so it would be a major plus to bring an Indian friend to help you negotiate.
Getting On Line: The Indian government has only started moving to open up the infrastructure. In the meantime, brother, welcome back to dialup, and it ain't pretty. Getting regular phone service enabled can require several trips to the telecom office, with a side trip to the switching station to introduce yourself to the technicians. Getting dialup on that same line means more money, and more delays. Count on the link being noisy and unreliable. ISDN is available in some areas, but usually isn't linked to a TCP trunk(!). Switched 56k and up is available in some locations, but even 56k is well over US$1000/month. This might be an ideal environment to start an 802.11b freenet, but the equipment
Luke, help me take this mask off
Now, they might be right in their predictions and they might be wrong, but predicting that offshoring will be huge seems to align with Forrester's interests. Predicting that offshoring will create many unanticipated organizational and business headaches, will cut off decision-makers from line workers, and will probably create strategic and HR problems that no one has yet foreseen --- that would not be in Forrester's interests.
Remember that the next time you notice that Forrester has been generous enough to share the results of their "research" with the media, for free.
Dow goes up, jobs get lost.
The tech guy is the ultimate inventor.
Theorized back in 1700's, an inventor puts a man out of a job, and eventually no men are working.
What the tech guy does is: automates a company, then gets a new job.
The thing is that the market gets tougher every time. So they get paid less and have to work harder for every job.
The resources are out there, being made by factories, but for a tech worker to get any of them is the difficulty.
If you think about it, intellectual property doesn't even make sense to hide, when it benefits mankind more to share.
But lets see how this thing plays out, shall we.
God spoke to me
I am not saying it is for sure a fad, but management practices tend to get caught up in various fads. Over-investing in IT in the late 90's is one such example. Maybe when the economy picks up management will prefer on-site labor, given less budget pressure. Who knows.
Table-ized A.I.
or tenure
"for several thousand years"
There is something seriously WRONG with you.
Actually, the skills level of those Indian programmers is generally acknowledged as being far higher than the average American programmer. They are better educated and work harder to obtain that education. They then work harder within their jobs
Hmm. I can't agree. See, here's my take, based on somewhat anecdotal evidence and a bit of reasoning.
Indians and Asians, at least in the United States, have an excellent academic and engineering reputation. This, however, has a lot less to do with any kind of racial difference than it does to do with deliberate social filtering. The US tries very hard to encourage only skilled, educated workers to immigrate, and allows talented workers to be brought in on H1Bs. These people are the cream of the crop -- the ones smart enough to acquire the right skills and interested enough in bettering themselves that they went through all the work required to end up in the US. There's a good chance that, even ignoring any kind of genetic influence, that they tend to teach their values to their children, so they have driven children as well.
This is where you get an "Indian workers are good" repulation from.
However, it doesn't have anything to do with outsourcing to India, where *Indian resident workers* are used.
Right now, the Indian IT industry is flush. Stupidly flush. There is incredible demand -- you lose a job, you're back in another in a week. Furthermore, it's young, with not a lot of quality enforcement or much reputation to go on. This is an *awful* environment to get good developers from. It's as bad as the dot-com years in the United States. Instead of choosing from the cream of the crop, you're choosing from the dregs.
Jobs that can be moved to cheaper workers effectively will be. China, India, and Indonesia will get a lot of US jobs. But it's not going to be a single smooth movement. It's definitely not as clean as the business rags represent it to be.
May we never see th
How about this scenario: Every 5 to 10 years or so a company could lay off a few top level programmers with 10+ years experience each then hire new programmers just out of school. Could even increase head-count at a lower cost if needed. Not to mention that it's easier to con younger engineers usually work longer hours because they don't have families yet.
People have been talking forever about a techie union and with good reason. But chances are it's going to take something like what's in the article before the techie mass rises up to come together.
Not that it's all gravy in our industry right now. It's pretty scary when I think of all my techie friends and techie ex-coworkers (and techie people that I meet on the street for crying out loud) that have been out of work for 6-12 months or more.
While I haven't been laid off, sometimes I feel like I could loose my job at any day without notice. I sure wouldn't be surprised if it happened (but I'd be in shock of course). I don't think I could prevent that from happening if it was to happen. I don't feel that it would be linked to my performance in any way. It'd just be a cost cutting measure. So all I can do is save my money and quietly prepare for it to happen some day.
Anyone else out there "quietly preparing" for the pink slip?
And this means that all the talentless people that graduated with Comp Sci degrees hoping to be "the next Bill Gates" will have moved on to something like management, leaving the programming to the real programmers.
I just don't understand these people--they hate/don't understand computers anymore than my mother (still doesn't 'get' double-click) trying to become something they're just not cut for doing something they don't enjoy.
Really IMHO a comp sci or sofware degree doesn't mean much because of people like this. They don't know what they're doing, and they're diluting the market for people that do.
If my tin-foil hat were a little tighter I might even think that these people could be the cause of the economic downturn--people who don't know what they're doing, working for less, getting less done = less productivity => recession
Security clearances and investigations are similar, but not treated the same onleaving a position. The investigation is current if the time lapsed since its comletion is within the prescribed limit: usually the higher and more detailed the investigation, the shorter this time. This is regardless of the job status. The clearance is based on the investigation, and that DOES come and go with position/need to know. But when you leave a position, you can regain the clearance level as needed with a much shorter renewal process--no full investigation unless the level is higher or too much time has passed. Sometimes you can luck out and get the clearance picked right up with a new brief and a couple of questionaires. Five minutes. Having held a clearance without incident is the important part...proves you can be trusted and that you were at least clean once and chances are you could be proven clean again.
I hear that they are outsourcing medical professionals and lawyers.. Business people you are playing with fire.. What goes around comes around y'know.. Soon business people will be outsourced, and you will be thrown into the darkness where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth..
Just say no to license servers!!
So you ho for high skilled labor and what happens exactly when the rest of the world becomes just as highly skilled?
People don't exist to serve systems, systems exist to serve people.
Even if India becomes like the USA the jobs will never be coming back here. The Jobs will just go to Asia or Africa. There is always a place cheaper.
People don't exist to serve systems, systems exist to serve people.
235,000 Fewer Programmers by 2015
How do they know there will be this many fewer programmers? Is this like a murder confession? "I'm going to kill 235,000 programmers, by the way."
The only place where this is true is developing nations. America is being destroyed by Unions.
How about this scenario: Every 5 to 10 years or so a company could lay off a few top level programmers with 10+ years experience each then hire new programmers just out of school. Could even increase head-count at a lower cost if needed. Not to mention that it's easier to con younger engineers usually work longer hours because they don't have families yet.
This is called 'business', they taught it at a school I went to once. If the company in your scenario is able to lose the experience and talent of those programmers with 10+ years of experience and still be profitable and effective, then they are DUTY BOUND to their shareholders to do it and reduce costs, not to do so would be wrong.
Not that it's all gravy in our industry right now. It's pretty scary when I think of all my techie friends and techie ex-coworkers (and techie people that I meet on the street for crying out loud) that have been out of work for 6-12 months or more.
Then they either: 1)Suck 2)Live in some area with no tech demand anyway 3)Are not looking properly The only people I've ever heard of out of work for more than a month are paper MCSEs and people in very narrow vertical markets. As demand shifts in the market, you sometimes have to make changes in YOURSELF as well, though people often deny this.
While I haven't been laid off, sometimes I feel like I could loose my job at any day without notice. I sure wouldn't be surprised if it happened (but I'd be in shock of course). I don't think I could prevent that from happening if it was to happen. I don't feel that it would be linked to my performance in any way. It'd just be a cost cutting measure. So all I can do is save my money and quietly prepare for it to happen some day.
Years ago, when the guy that drove the Ice truck saw that Sears was selling a refrigerator with a freezer, he should have started thinking about a change. Five years later, there were no longer any jobs delivering Ice in most places, and if this guy didn't take care of himself, he was out. Is that the fault of the Ice company? The fact that there wasn't a union? If you think there is a real possibility you could be laid off any day AND it would have nothing to do with your performance, you should be working on keeping your resume up to date and going on interviews at least once a month, just to stay 'warm' and get a feeling for the local market. Or you could just wait to get laid off and bitch about it like all these union guys.
Is there any chance we can outsource Managers and CEO's too? While we're at it, let's outsource all the corporate officers.
I agree. A better solution would be to push for Professional Engineer style licensing. The IEEE Computer Society is pushing for this very thing, through their "Certified Software Development Professional" program. Besides helping keep jobs, this is a good way to show mastery of fundamental skills and ensure public safety.
We should push for Professional Licensing to be recognized as a legal standard, with licensed professionals required for development projects and networks where public privacy and safety are important. If we require licensing for Electricians, Civil Engineers, and even Beauticians, we should require licensing for Software and Network professionals.
if a CEO makes $2M a year, let's say.... at fifty 40-hour weeks, that's an hourly wage of roughly $1000.
hire 5 people at $50 an hour, which is still a great wage, and you get way more brainpower, and you save $1.5M a year!
that's a lot of bbq.
m.
Walmart just lowered their guidance for this quarter...and I suspect more retailers will be following suit.
-ted
I did take econ in college. You are right, employment is a trailing indicator (especially after it takes the govt a month to analize the data).
Corporate hiring PLANS are a much better "current" indicator. Companies planning to hire new positions are confident about the profit picture for the next 18 months. Companies right now are not planning on hiring, because of the uncertain economic future. Companies are either reducing head-count or hiring short term contract employees...usually less than 6 months.
Yet the stock market runs upward. Unless things get dramatically better in the next quarter or two, look for a 10-15% correction next year.
-ted
Okay, while this discussion is on the topic of the future of programming, I thought I would ask another question. I use freebsd for everything, although I'm not the best at it. I don't enjoy Microsoft development or programming. Tons of my friends always boast about how they can get things done "so much faster" through Cold Fusion and the use of IIS/Microsoft SQL server, and how, by only knowing C, PHP, Perl, and a few other 'older' languages, I'm definitely going to miss out on a lot when I graduate college. My problem is that they don't worry about security at all, and I constantly see them updating/securing things while I sit back and twiddle my thumbs.
I guess my point is...my preference is to use and develop with UNIX. As a college student, am I making my life harder for the future by not using and fluently understanding windows-based development? Am I destining myself to be one of these "25%" less?
Sometimes not. I worked for a software/hardware company in Massachusetts, USA and MANY of our critical management positions were "taken over" by Indians.
This is not xenophobia... it's just a realization that as a culture, Americans do not work together as well and as closely as Indians. The Indian pioneers at my company did not CARE about pay: they often negotiated LOWER salaries with stock bonuses based on performance and cost-cutting.
Hold that last sentance..
Then they bring in other like-minded folks that clearly deliver a good price/performance ratio. See above.
In the end, the "graybeards" and "young punks" look like salary-oriented, self-centered grunts. while they appear to be efficent.
Now you can transition the company on two fronts: offshore, and US-based contract programming to Indians.
If the company was still privately-held, someone would have given a damn. If we grew without "venture capital", management would have owned a significant portion of the stock since we worked those 80-hour-weeks for 18 months to even attract the investers. There's a point here also besides "bashing" Indians... the "quarterly" SEC guidelines put too much emphasis on stocks and short-term results. There is too much emphasis on "going public"... companies that resist this, often retain an advantage in management since they're not going to sabotage your long-term work to pump-and-dump their options. But I digress.
We became aware that many of the "home office" US jobs were unfairly turning away Americans in violation of fair labor laws. To escape the law, they offered the US jobs to contract agencies and then selected the lowest bidders. Perfectly legal. You still have to INTERVIEW Americans, but that can be done over the phone... there are a lot of ways to limit phone interviews to 90 seconds. The job has already been decided. How many (refused) tech job seekers will contest a non-interview? None... even in a state with fairly liberal labor laws.
Politicians don't listen to angry, unemployed folks... especially those career pols who think they understand the market because they're not part of it. They still think manufacturing companies like Chrysler are American-companies even though there's nothing here but an office. CEO and middle-management donations to soft money candidates that help THEM, I don't see much changing anytime soon.
This is Slashdot, and so some international folks will say "GOOD - US living standards were too high... I'm glad your polititions are hurting your own country". There may be some truth there, but the fact is everyone wants to be the top of the pile (including the poster). Besides, in the poster's country they probably deal harshly with sellouts and political crooks. It's pretty blatent and wide-open here.
The worst thing to hear is when assholes on TV say US programmers "need to learn new skills to stay current with the market". What skills - "how may I help you?". When did selling out your country become business as usual? There is no such thing as economic treason I guess.
Me?? Pissed? Nah. :-) Now I'm trying to switch job fields... I figure I'll become a landlord. I always despised landlords, but I don't want to fight for a piece of a shrinking pie. They don't make land anymore and it cannot be imported. Sucks.
Those are intrest rate sensitive items...when intrest rates fall, sales of those items go up. Intrest rates can not remain this low without putting inflationary pressure in the economy.
-ted