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

Will this match the population reduction?

[Knetzar]

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.

I beg to differ...

[Gethsemane]

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.

Are you in the real world?

[ejbst25]

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.

Something the article didn't mention

[taliver]

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.

Re:Too many people in IT because it pays

[Schnapple]

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.

I see your point but you answered your own question. My Old Man was a Chemical Engineer for thirty years - never liked or had any real interest in Chemistry, but he did it - because it was a job that would pay well. Hell, I never paid a dime in College, so that says something. The generation before us had that ethic: do the damn job, doesn't matter if you like it - you have responsibilities. Lots of people I knew in College went into fields where they had no interest and took jobs that no one dreams of growing up - they just wanted a career path with money. This is not to say that that's wrong - there are certianly worse things in life than being wealthy - but it does explain motivation.

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.

Re:Too many people in IT because it pays

[loginx]

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.

Re:Programmers == Carpenters??

[gagy]

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.

That couldn't be any more correct. I work for the worlds largest company (or so they tell me) and I think the CEO smokes crack some days. This year he said "If it doesn't generate a profit this year, don't do it." I almost snapped. It's not just people that live day to day, its multi billion dollar corporations too. They'll do anything to save a buck, even if it means sacrafacing something next year. As long as this years bottom line looks good, the cost at achieving it is having a reduced bottom line for the next two years. I proposed a great idea for increasing sales, but it would take a year or two to get the return, and that's just not good enough around here. This is also why all programmers are in a rut. Nobody cares about what happens tommorow, as long as today looks good. If it means outsourcing everything overseas, then so be it. I'm lucky because I had enough foresight to get two degrees, one in computer electronics and one in business admin. Right now i'm in Marketing and all my comp. sci friends are unemployed.