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!"

Comments

Programmers == Carpenters??

[MontSegur]

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!"

Re:Programmers == Carpenters??

[sql*kitten]

Most programmers are little more than carpenters who don't have to provide their own tools...

I'm sure, had Slashdot been around back in days of Steampunk, there would have been many articles cursing the disappearance of steam-engine related jobs, complaining that these days, steam trains were only used overseas, etc, etc. Meanwhile, the invention of the aeroplane would receive only a passing mention, everyone would think it was cool, then they would go back to complain about the decline in the use of steam technology.

Moving jobs overseas isn't a bad thing. One thing the third world is good at is being cheap labour*. One thing the third world is very bad at is innovation**. Westerners who are good at what the West does - innovate - will be as in demand as ever. Those who can't or won't work to remain on the cutting edge, well, there's no helping them.

* I'm not saying this is a good or a bad thing, just that it's a historical fact.
** Also a historical fact. Look at where the new knowledge was and is created over the last 500 years, in technology, pharma, media, you name it - in the West. Even big countries like China and Brazil use Linux, for example - they didn't (or couldn't) start from scratch.

Re:Programmers == Carpenters??

[Rostin]

I've been itching to say this for months, but just *knew* that I'd be modded down for trolling. I had a CS prof in college (before I dropped that major) who said something like, "A lot of people think programming is art or something like it. The question is, should they?" His view is the programming is like plumbing or carpentry. The skill-set to do it is something you can pick up in trade school. The difference between a computer scientist and a programmer is the difference between a draftsman and an engineer, to put it a different way. And I mean a real engineer, not one of those people with an MCSE certificate.

Re:Programmers == Carpenters??

[sql*kitten]

Third-world countries don't innovate because they are hungry and poor not because they don't have the ability to.

You have it backwards. They are hungry and poor because they don't innovate and create value. Even the ones that aren't hungry and poor don't do much by way of actual innovation.

Re:Programmers == Carpenters??

[malkavian]

Yes, a lot of new knowledge has been provided by the West in the last 500 years. If you discount Russia (East) and Japan (East), who have come up with their fair share, then the west has been the main innovator. Actually, most of this has been from Europe (with America really appearing in the sights within the last hundred years or so).
However, paying for the training of offshore people to do the low grade work that has been previously done onshore is a tad dangerous.
All the 'high level' people that understand what the game's about have come up through the ranks of those junior positions to slowly acheive where they are.
The premise of offshoring seems to be "Well, we'll set up the whole of our operations abroad, where it's cheap, and automagically, when we need them, experienced people will join the organisation as we need them.". Except, due to most work at the lower levels being done offshore, thus most training being done there, the experience for the higher level jobs will be required to be performed offshore.
The setup then becomes one of having a shell company in the west, populated by a few suits with little technical knowledge, asking for a product from the real company investment (in workers and experience) in, say, India.

Now, with having few people trained (nobody can get a job in the west, so why study?), and no experience being gained (no job), then the raw ability to innovate in that area vanishes.
Lo and behold, the country that HAS the skills forms their own industries, and makes new products derived from their EXPERIENCE in the old (western initiated) ones.

With sufficient saturation of skill base, and lack of draconian legal restriction, new innovation is pretty much guaranteed. That's how the US managed to kick start it's high tech lead (the "Brain Drain" is still well remembered).

To put this in perspective, the Eastern Countries led development in technology for several thousand years. Only in about the last 500 has it lagged behind (except for Japan which is still at the forefront).
Now, after a period of 'sleeping', the East is beginning to fire up it's technology engine, and get in the 'Innovation' mode.
Definately not good for Western companies longterm, who are taking the short term view of a quick buck now.
And that buck, ten years down the line will most likely vanish into an eastern company who does exactly the same thing for a quarter the price or less.

Your reference to steam engines misses much of the point. Nobody here is crying out about losing jobs on a defunt system.
The point is, that if, once the planes and cars developed WERE actually all made in the 'third world', and all it's engineers and manufacturing were based there when the industry was in it's infancy, then the west would not be where it is now.
India would have the great roads, and the most advanced cars around would be of Indian manufacture. The west would now be playing catchup to the more established Indian markets.

The sad truth is that, these days, companies are run by accountants and lawyers. These are exactly the people who look at what the money does, and NOT at what happens to the world around.
Nobody seems to care about 10, or 20 years down the road. As long as the cash is on the table NOW, and LOTS of it, all is good.

Your premises seem to assume that the world is generally static, and moving one part of an ecosystem and transplanting it to another area en masse will make no difference to either one.
Read up on a good many disasters that have occurred that way.
Computing (and society) mirror nature very closely. The big industries are playing a very dangerous game.

Re:Programmers == Carpenters??

[jjohn]

Are you insane? Hammers, saws and screwdrivers aren't provided to carpenters, but materials that will stay with the customer, like 2x4 planks, I-beams, nails, are. Why on Earth would a programmer, that's not with a VAR, bring a computer to the job? A programmer's tools are nearly all insubstantial (the notable exception being books, but even those are going electronic). Programming is a skill, not a piece of hardware. You don't need a programmer to run a computer. You need the programmer to make the computer do something useful.

The constant equating of programming to an industrial process is without merit and has been debunked before by Fred Brooks, Steve McConnell and others. The construction techniques for software aren't as well understood or as systematized as those known to physical engineers and fabricators. This makes every software project mostly unique, although certainly experiences from previous projects will help the next one. McConnell identifies four legs of software development that must come together to get a successful production. These are people, process, product and technology. In reverse order, the technology piece is simply the OS, the hardware and programming language chosen for the job. The product leg deals with scope of the project, such as listing the required features, inputs, outputs and whatnot. The process bit relates to how the project is (or isn't) managed, risk management and customer feedback. The people aspect comprises the quality of the programmers doing the work. This can have a huge impact on the shipping product.

Outsourcing addresses only one leg of software developement: people. By reducing the cost of this one leg, the cost of the process aspect will go up. It remains to be seen whether paying for more management and process will produce more profitable results than simply working with the native talent pool of programmers. I suspect it won't for most cases. However, there will surely be some outsourcing success stories.

It's grossly unfair to expect the art of programming, which is hardly sixty years old, to be as well understood as construction, which has been a human endeavor for thousands of years. Those managers and market analysts that labor under this delusion are in for a rude surprise.

Re:Programmers == Carpenters??

[Greyfox]

Management doesn't understand the distinction between grunt programmer and computer scientist either. A lot of grunt management will disappear when the grunt programmers are shipped overseas. Grunt management also inevitably dictates that the grunt programmers use the wrong tools for their job, and they try to justify their existance by applying "Scientific methods" (IE: The latest XP buzzwords) to prove that they're actually doing the right thing. Of course, you can prove anything with scientific methods if you start with a flawed initial hypothesis and carefully pick only those methods which will not show the underlying flaws in your reasoning.

The programmers who treat it as an art are usually computer scientists even if all they think they're doing is programming and all it looks like they're doing is programming. Look at any of the developers on the Linux core kernel team and you'll see a guy who treats programming as an art. I know this because I've seen their code. Superficially it looks like they were just programming but you can't create an OS kernel by just programming. Management does not really understand this and will attempt to hire a batch of grunt programmers and then dictate that they write the kernel in Java. And the grunt programmers will agree, set up XP pair programming teams, require test-first design and will still fail.

So the grunt managers and the grunt programmers will get outsourced to India where they will continue to pass or fail at random at a tenth the cost of the same team of Americans.

Here's the magic piece of the puzzle that Microsoft is looking for: OSS projects have such high quality because OSS projects by their very nature do not include grunt programmers. Grunt programmers have no incentive to work on such projects. That doesn't mean that all computer scientists work on OSS projects, but it inevitably means that all OSS projects are populated by computer scientists of varying degrees of skill and experience (Except when a company is paying people to work on the project, that opens a door for grunt programmers.)

Here's another thing you can put in your crack pipe and smoke; large companies will inevitably have a large number of grunt managers who don't understand computer science nor event the business logic of the requirements they're presented. These are the guys dictating that the entire CRM application should be implemented as a set of JSP web pages because that's the latest buzz in the industry. If a small company emerges that has both managers and computer scientists who understand the requirements and can dictate the implementation of their program, they will take market share (and be profitable) from the larger company, even if they're using an all USA based team and the larger company is using an all overseas one.

Forrester Research? Pffft.

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Forrester Research? Pffft.

[perly-king-69]

Mod parent up.

I'd like to see some research carried out on the speculation these guys (Forrester, Gartner etc) come up with.

They can't even agree upon present day issues, for example, the TCO of Linux is cheaper than Windows or vice versa.

What hope have they of predicting the future.

Are details on who they are calling programmers?

[Shivetya]

The numbers won't mean much unless you can define who they are? I know some web page designers who are classed as "programmers".

Computer Science is not everything anymore!

[Shisha]

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.

Too many people in IT because it pays

[Manic Miner]

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.

A few years back...

[joostje]

A few years back, analysts were predicting numbers of programmers to skyrocket. They were wrong. Now they predict them to go down. Why should I believe them this time?

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!

Don't jump to any conclusions

[mcpkaaos]

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.

Re:the, err, rest of the world

[Qzukk]

Why do you think an American deserves a job more than some hard-working, enterprising person in Bangalore [or wherever]? (PS: I'm american.)

Why do you think a corporation deserves market protection from cheap foreign goods if they're exploiting the lack of labor protection?

If companies want to play the "global market" game, then either A) labor should have tarrifs or B) goods should not. Make it fair for everyone involved. Joe Normal will be able to afford to continue his lifestyle after being laid off in favor of people from Esbotsunania who do a quarter of the work for a tenth of the pay. At hourly wages, he'd probably even be able to buy more DVDs at hong kong prices, more toys for his kids imported direct from china without all those brand names. And afford cheap software written in India by the independent programmers who are not owned by American corporations (or those who defect from their outsourcing agreement and set up a competing shop).

Absolutely right

[Marxist Commentary]

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.

Re:Absolutely right

[Albanach]

So you go to your boss and ask for a raise because you're good at your job. He says 'no'.

What is he sacks you for _asking_ for a raise? Have you got the money to sue your employer?

How about the guy in the cubicle next to you gets a raise, yet he's no better than you and does no more work than you. You ask for a raise and get turned down.

The boss decides to cut your annual holiday entitlement to 10 days to boost productivity.

Tough. AT least in a union there'd have been someone there to fight for you.

is this a joke

[Metaldsa]

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 :)

Amen to that

[palad1]

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

My guess...

[tgd]

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. ;-)

Re:My guess...

[CrankyFool]

You almost touched on one of the biggest problems I see we're going to have in offshoring: Entry point.

Lets assume, as you do, there'll be a lot of jobs for senior-level engineers. Lets assume there are far less than now for entry-level positions. Now, *I'm* a senior-level engineer (13 years in IT). I wasn't senior-level when I entered the field, though -- I entered the field by doing data entry on registration cards for a software company and becoming known as The Guy Who Could Fix Macs. I know I'm not the only one.

Skilled industries (everything from programming to carpentry to electrical work) have traditionally depended on mentoring, apprenticeship, and a growth path that starts with you being at the bottom. If we're sending all our bottom-feeder jobs to India, where will our next senior people come from? They're not going to burst fully formed from the foreheads of the current generation.

Straight-line extrapolation is accurate?

[stankulp]

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.

The goal!

[mabhatter654]

The goal of Programmer/IT right now should be how to move the industry from Corperate types to the model that Doctors, Lawyers, and accountants have! Or even the model that Pumbers, Electricians, and Carpenders have. They all share the fact that in spite of huge technology advanced, they are still basically one-man shows. Expecially look at Electricans plumbers and such...While "anybody" CAN do certian work on thier own, at some point or another, EVERYBODY has to call in the pros in those fields when they get over their heads. Even after 100 years of mail order houses, you still see a huge number of them still build by hand one-at-a -time, just like software.

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!

Been here before

[HangingChad]

If you've been in the IT industry any length of time then you've been here before. Anyone remember the "death" of mainframe programmers? Companies scooping out large pits out behind the plant to bury their COBOL and FORTRAN coders. It's a good thing they didn't cap those pits because a lot of companies had to dig some of them up. Partly because of Y2K and partly because they were still using those systems 20 years later. Overall we survived the transition to client-server and PC think.

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.

Thats good for programmingdom

[mnmn]

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.

Gloom and Doom

[Odonian]

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.

Re:Regarding "941,584 programmers today"

[Glonoinha]

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.

Why I did engineering..

[xtal]

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.

Re:Going Out of Business USA

[matdodgson]

You are an idiot. It isn't taxes that's the problem, it's the relative standard of living. Living in the USA on US $10k / yr is extremely difficult - living in India on the same you live like a king.

Re:Going Out of Business USA

[Strykeforce]

Not that everyone already hasn't roundly discredited this theory, but it's not taxes (whatever this "4 layers of 93% = 1200% mumbo jumbo is, I have no idea) that make US labor so expensive. While taxes play some part in it, the major difference is cost of living. This is why US companies outsource to countries such as India with a roughly comparable income tax to ours - 20 to 40 percent, depending on tax bracket. US companies still have to pay corporate taxes on any profits earned, so those taxes do not figure into the equation.

US labor is more expensive due to the cost of living. I would hardly take a job at the same wage Indian programmers are getting paid because I can't buy groceries as cheap as they can, or live in a house for as cheap.

You are correct in a change in economics in the world; 20 years ago outsourcing technical jobs would have been almost impossible because of the capital requirements to test and build products, the high cost of communication and goods transportation, lack of an educated workforce, and trade barriers. However, this might be bad for individuals (sadly, including me) but not for the country as a whole. Society is better off as a whole due to the basic economic theory of competitive advantage.

While "Free Trade" agreements do have serious problems - for example, labor is cheaper in India in part because US corporations don't have to worry about pesky things such as unemployment insurance, safety, environmental restrictsion,and a host of other workers' rights there - in principle they do benefit rather than harm to this country. Your complaint about the tax system is misplaced; the government's main culpability in this is helping guide the country to such a high standard of living that we have priced ourselves out of many labor markets.