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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!"
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
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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!
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 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.
You've been importing way more than you've been exporting for years now. For a while foreign investors used these dollars to buy up American companies and other investments, but at the moment that doesn't look very promising (and the interest on dollars is way too low). As a result, the world doesn't need any more of the dollars you give them so the dollar is now falling as a rock.
Pretty soon, the rest of the world will be too expensive instead.
I believe posters are recognized by their sig. So I made one.
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
"America and it's corporations will be less relevant to the rest of the world, IT-wise, in 2015."
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.
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.
Interesting graph, but just observing a correlation between two parameters does not proof that one is influenced by the other. Even if there is an explanation, it might be the reverse relation, or both parameters might depend on a third. If I remember correctly, presidents in the U.S. are elected by the people. Likewise, the economical situation is also determined by the spending behaviour of people.
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 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
"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)"
I can't think of anything worse than having a doctor that doesn't enjoy what they do.
My experience has been that programmers who do it for the money alone tend to try to get by with as little programming as possible. Now apply that mentality to a doctor.
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.
So I'm guessing that you don't wear Nikes, choose not to buy clothes with a "Made in China" tag, and don't have and Sony/Nintendo/etc devices in your home. Or is your choice to be able to buy all those overseas products at vastly reduced costs and still somehow magically have jobs for Americans too?
All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain.
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.
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
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
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.
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
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
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.
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.
Using this same logic, given current trends, the world population in a few centuries will be less than the current US population.
You remember when Wal-Mart claimed everything was made in America. Apparently you missed the part where they got busted for fudging labels or some such and silently dropped the "Made in America" scam.
slashdot broke my sig
Everybody I know wants a Ferrari in my garage and a supermodel girlfriend, but none are willing to pay $250,000 for either - that doesn't mean that there is a shortage of Ferraris or supermodels, nor does it imply that the government needs to take action and make damn sure that everybody gets a Ferrari (destroying the value of the Ferrari and cars in general in the process.)
It really doesn't matter why it happened, or how the Clinton regime justified it. Trust me, there were enough programmers in the 90's to get the job done, and via organic growth (ie, American college graduates coming out of college with C/S degrees) we would have been able to handle the load. The Clinton administration sold you out, which is funny because you eagerly put them there and support them to this day.
Boil it down. Look at the facts. One point three million H1-B visas issued. One point three million software engineers/techs currently working in the United States. Pretty simple math. If Clinton hadn't been in office, it wouldn't have happened and you would still have a job. A good job at that.
-Nowadays, an even cheaper alternative to going through all that is just to ship the whole of your IT operations to India, no muss no fuss. Which brings us to today.
Perhaps had the floodgates not been opened bringing us the brown tide, this wouldn't have been the case.
And those are the facts. Boil it down to simple numbers and those are the facts. And yes, I hold Clinton responsible - completely.
Glonoinha the MebiByte Slayer
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.
This is a great idea, but it isn't easy for everyone to 'do what they love'. Can you honestly tell me that every single person working at Wal-Mart should quit their job, put their kids well-being on the back burner while they pursue some other career, like being a champion checker player or a country music singer? Please.
Maybe, just maybe, a better solution would be for corporations and business owners to develop a better long term strategy around making their employees happier and more content in their jobs.
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
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
Are there any resources that are "just sitting there" today? In our highly populated world there are no such resources that I know of. As for the spirt of your question I suspect you and I have different values. A coding guru cranking out some complex code to solve someones problem, a CEO making tough choices on how to address changes in the market, an actor bringing a story alive on the screen, or a truck driver delivering goods to my door, all these and many more contribute to the economy in a fundamental way. In many cases the land speculator or land holder is actively keeping the resource from being used to increase its value. This actively harms the economy(*) and benefits no one except the land holder. I do not value land speculation because I believe it harms the economy.
(*) 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.
90% of the wealth is in 2% of the pockets. Bummer to be in the majority.
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.
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
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
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 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.
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.
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.