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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!"
Ack. Please don't go into management. If you can't develop, what are your chances of understanding the developers in which you lead? Not that all developers will be great managers, but I like having someone above me who understands what I'm doing though may not duplicate it.
--
"I'm not bright. Big words confuse me. But Wanda loves me and that should be enough for you." - Cosmo
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.
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.
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.
In a number of printed articles in Australia recently there have been reports of the decrease of people enrolling in IT for this very reason.
I honestly have never been able to understand why someone would choose a career they have no great intrest in simply because they could make fairly good money.
There are a lot of places you can make good money apart from IT but people seem to have got caught up in the IT boom period and thought that IT was the only way to make good money and those not in IT would be at a disadvantage somehow..
37 - what does it stand for really...
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
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!
Still at least it's not as hypocritical as Clinton's reskilling platitudes when blue collar workers lost their jobs in manufacturing.
While the expected outcome of retraining for some segments of the blue collar workforce (older, less skilled) may have been overly optimistic, the idea wasn't at all hypocritical, it was logical -- a guy that worked with machines might likely have become retraied for running a more sophisticated machine tool or something.
Unfortunately, retraining can't take into account the zeal at which corporate management has decided to move ANY job which pays more than minimum wage overseas. In an era in which Wall Street considers a company with jobs that pay something akin to middle-class wages as having "uncompetitively high labor costs", then there will be nothing to retrain for, except operating the fryer at the local corporate fast food place.
In that reality, retraining is fruitless. But we're racing to the bottom, creating a plutocratic society where government and industry collude to create a handful of very wealthy people and a sea of working poor, with little in between.
But I wonder - what are they considering programmers? Are people who do drag-and-drop VB6 and don't code and won't move to VB.NET programmers? Are people who can handle data efficiently in Office considered programmers? I know that the COBOL programmer population is supposed to decline by 15% over the next four years due to retirement and death, how many other "programmers" will cease to be because they themselves cease to be or the need for their position (read: not outsourced, just not neccessary) ceases to be.
Actually, there's another point - a lot of people are VB6 programmers - 3+ million of them last count. There are VB6 badasses out there, don't get me wrong, but there's bound to be a large number of them who are simply put not programmer types and can't hang with newer stuff like VB.NET so they won't upgrade and at some point they'll have to change career paths. 235,000 out of 3 million isn't all that much.
And wait a minute. Quoth the article: 235,396 fewer ... This is a 25% reduction. Is the article saying that there are only 941,584 programmers today? At all? That's crazy - there's like 90,000 COBOL programmers alone. These numbers don't make sense.
Schnapple
> 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!
Are you suggesting there's somethign wrong with that? It's what all the analysts/consulatants/investment bankers seem to be doing, surely it must be right!
I once suggested during an intership that they quote errors, or at least reduce the number of significant figures from 9 to 1 or 2 when predicting market volumes 10 years in the future... all i got in response was blank stares...
crazy world!
Ponxx
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
It's also because this hype has been overly promoted on every broadcast 24/7 for the past 5 years...
All I hear on the radio is: "Hey, sick of your job? why not become microsoft certified and make money for doing nothing?!?"
Or on TV: "I was a trucker, never did anything in my life... but then I decided to go to ITT Tech and now after 2 months of distance learning, I'm THE network administrator for a fortune-500 company!"...
People actually buy that bullshit...
I mean... come on.
I also see a lot of people that one day, when it was time to decide to chose a career, decided "Hey... computer talk is cool... I want to be cool!" and also "Hey, I'm pretty good at warcraft III, I probably have some hidden talent for computers, I should go and be a programmer"
I hope they all die.
In my case: I'm a skilled US steelworker, trained at own expense (welder/fabrication) and I've seen my career degraded by management continually pushing the desired skill level down to nil over the last 15 years. Enter foreign competition during the same time. Recently (last year) I started going back to school for comp sci.
I now believe that [begin sarcasm] it would be OK to flip burgers and mop floors for 80 hrs a week if only Uncle Sam didn't call it "middle class".[end sarcasm]
Seriously, I don't think this kind of crap will end until the economy implodes under the weight at the top. Until then, there will be fewer and fewer "middle class" people who can afford the products/services so hyped -
gtg now before I get violently pissed, even. And BTW, I'm a non-union republican feeling your pain ATM.
C|N>K
Actually, the book is Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies by Jared Diamond.
Diamond argues that two cultural families have become dominant in the world - the fertile crescent culture which is the root of today's European and American cultures and Chinese culture which has spread throughout Asia. He further argues that these cultures are dominant for no other reason than environmental and geographic reasons. Both these areas had wild versions of a variety of domesticable staple agricultural products, readily domesticable draft animals, and room to spread out.
Other "root" cultures did not have all these factors. For instance, inidiginous Americans had no draft animals while horse and oxen were available in Mesopotamia. Corn was not readily domesticable in its wild form, and several thousand years passed before the right mutations occured to make corn a good staple crop whereas the wheat, barley, and oats that grew wild in Mesopotamia were easily domesticated. When corn was domesticated, it took a very long time for corn farmers from central America to spread through the deserts of Mexico and the American Southwest to the Mississippi valley. (The great plains are virtually unfarmable without more modern plows and draft animals because of the tough sod.) The Mesopotamian farmers spread far into Russia, the middle east, and Europe before running into barriers.
There's a difference between steelwork and programming. The tools get more advanced or better at a faster rate than steelwork.
I'm not saying that steelwork is easy. Shit, I can't do it, so I'd be the first to hurt themselves. There are a few perceptions of programming. One is the science, another is engineering. A third is simple programming.
The science will live on for a long time. It's coming up with new ideas and new ways of doing stuff "better".
The engineering.. it's the architecture and making sure things run like well oiled machines in real life.
The simple programming unfortunately, is what's getting deported or seen as easier. Anyone can become one of these. It's the learning of the simple things and applying them. Writing a program to do factorials, writting something that throws some data into a database. Even web-applications. It's menial programming.
Stuff like writing a web browser, an OS, a painting program, an mp3 player.. HARDER stuff that takes some research and analysis of how it would be implemented for everyone's best interests will always be in demand. It's what gets released as shareware, sometimes freeware (winamp) or opensource, but more of the good ones tend to be commercial.
--
"I'm not bright. Big words confuse me. But Wanda loves me and that should be enough for you." - Cosmo
If you move to India, don't go there to do programming. Go there to start a union of tech. workers.
;-).
Wages will be going up very fast. Many of these outsorcers have fairly long term commitments and can raise their prices and renogatiate at will. Plus reports show wages going up very fast in India (a tech. union there would do wonders for this
Plus, there is starting to be a consumer backlash agains non-english as a first language tech. support. What was bad tech. support years ago is now becoming bad tech. support that you can't understand.
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?"
-I DDoSed your mom.
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.
For example, Clinton fed the bubble despite a long cautionary history about preventing an economy from expanding too quickly.
I don't know about that. In his first campain he talked alot about the government investing in the national infrastructure. Then he got elected had some talks with Alan Greenspan, and decided that would be a bad idea for the economy and went back on his campain promises. He also decreased the deficit every year he was in office, exactly what you want to do during a good economy. Perhaps he could have done more to temper the bubble, but he certainly cannot be blamed for feeding it.
From what I understand it was one of the most tempered and drawn out bubble we have had in a long time. I blame the bubble on the tech industry, and the longevity on a wise FED chairman, a president willing to listen to him, and a congress willing to cooperate with the president on lowering the deficit. I likewise blame todays recession on natural business cycles, but will blame tomorrows problems on a president who goes against the advice of a wise FED chairman, and cuts and spends wrecklessly.
Then again, in the macro-economics class I took, one of the co-authors of the text was one of clinton's original (first term) economic advisors, so my understanding might be slightly biast, although I have read other sources.
Nope. Use of a symbol to represent the mathematical concept of nothing/null goes back thousands of years. Use of decimal places, on the other hand (which is what historians are usually talking about when they speak of the "invention of 0") goes back to the Hindus. See http://www.andrews.edu/~calkins/math/biograph/bioz ero.htm for more details.