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

Time for a career switch...

[Anonymous Coward]

I think I will start looking now or perhaps move to India.

Re:Time for a career switch...

[snkmoorthy]

As far as I know India doesn't have an H1B equivalent, so even if you are willing to relocate, it is near impossible.

Re:Time for a career switch...

[JWW]

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.

I knew I should have gone for an EE degree

[Knetzar]

Or maybe I should go and get my MBA in the next few years

Re:I knew I should have gone for an EE degree

[the Man in Black]

Modded funny, but an MBA from a decent, fairly reputable Business School WILL take you places, regardless of your skillset. Plenty of people who don't even need them get them. We as techies turn up our nose at management, but one thing you'll notice is that, while we're all getting laid off left and right and our wages whittled down to nothing, managers and executive salaries are going up.

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??

[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??

[RevMike]

So you're saying Europeans are murderous fiends?

Basically yes. I recomend reading "Germs, Guns and Steel".

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.

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.

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.

Re:Programmers == Carpenters??

[kalidasa]

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.

Re:Programmers == Carpenters??

[gagy]

Maybe you're sitting a few cubes over from me, and you don't even know it. But isn't it interesting how we both have time to yak on slashdot all day complaining how our jobs are being outsourced, while our productivity is obviously 0? :)

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".

Re:Big Deal

[the uNF cola]

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.

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.

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.

Re:Too many people in IT because it pays

[nich37ways]

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..

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.

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.

Re:Big Deal

[Amiga Lover]

(damned mozilla)

> you better start looking elseware

What a neat term for software made by overseas contract programmers

"Elseware"

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!

Re:A few years back...

[ponxx]

> 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

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.

Is nothing sacred?

[CompWerks]

I just want to sit in my cube, program and interact with as little of management as possible.

I should of known it would never last...

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.

Excellent!

[wackybrit]

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.

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.

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 :)

Re:Big Deal

[Total_Wimp]

We actually did it to ourselves.

First we made information networked and portable so that anyone is capable of working with it at any place.

Then we actively promoted "free" software that we work on for no pay. We actively promoted others to use "free" software and to produce it themselves.

Now we act surprised when others are capable of writing software in other countries and are willing to do it for low wages.

Survival of the fitest in this case means we ACTIVELY WORKED at making our jobs less valuable and our presense less nessesary. I'm not saying this is a bad thing; we just reap what we sow.

TW

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

Re:Not to be partisan or anything

[cgenman]

If I remember correctly, presidents in the U.S. are elected by the people.

Interesting theory. I guess that depends on your definition of "people."

Personally, I feel that the state of the economy is due to the combination of the policies of the sitting president and the president that came before them. For example, Clinton fed the bubble despite a long cautionary history about preventing an economy from expanding too quickly. However, a sitting president is most definitely responsible for the federal deficit that is racked up during their administration, as they have direct control over such policies.

Re:Big Deal

[the uNF cola]

It doesn't take a prior expert in the field to micromanage. It also doesn't take a fool not to micromanage. A good manager should know when to step back and when to get involved. But when my manager gets involved, I want him to fully understand what's going on and prevent bad things from happening, and encouraging the good.

My current manager isn't the most cluefull, but he's a good guy with good management skills. I try to make sure he understands w/o a doubt what i'm doing and why i'm doing it. Not to an atomic degree, but to a good general one.

Re:Big Deal

[TedCheshireAcad]

Oh come on. All managers really do is tell you to put the new cover letters on the TPS reports, and make sure you got the memo.

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.

extrapolation?

[Ubi_NL]

sounds a bit like this Elvis joke:

In 1977 there were 150 Elvis impersonators. By 1999 there were 35,000. If this rate of growth continues, by the year 2019, more than one third of the world's population will be Elvis impersonators.

Re:extrapolation?

[sopuli]

This reminds me of this joke, which extrapolates exponentially:

When I turned two, I felt a great anxiety. In just one year, I had doubled my age. If this goes on like this, I thought, by the time I'm five, I'll be sixteen.

Regarding "941,584 programmers today"

[brokeninside]

The US Bureau of Labor statistics has numbers from Y2K in its Occupational Outlook Handbook:
585,000 computer programmers
697,000 software engineers

And that doesn't include the 887,000 systems analysts, computer scientists, and database administrators, some of which are almost certainly working in programming positions.

However, given that these numbers (1,282,000 computer programmers and software engineers) are from the year two thousand, before the massive layoffs of the past few years really started happening, the 941,584 number doesn't seem all that out of the ballpark.

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.

You'll always have a job if you have a clearance.

[BulletProofMonk]

A security clearance is the closest thing to lifetime guaranteed employment that I know of.

S/W Engineers vs Programmers

[ReusableCoder]

According to the US Dept of Labor, from their 2002-3 Occupational Outlook Handbook, s/w engineers "are projected to be the fastest growing occupation over the 2000-10 period" while employment growth for programmers "will be considerably slower than that of other computer specialists, due to the spread of pre-packaged software solutions".
If you're worried about your job security, start learning more than just programming languages and APIs. (Of course, until we have a proper accreditation system, anyone in the s/w industry can call themselves an engineer...)

Re:Big Deal

[the uNF cola]

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.

Business 2.0 Agrees With You

[Faramir]

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?"

Arabic numbers were an INDIAN invention.....

[Salgak1]

Actually, the Arabs only POPULARIZED the "Arabic" number system: it came from India, originally, and was adopted by Arab traders, who saw its' ease of use as a clear reason to move to the "Arabic" numbering system.

Even the Muslims say so. . .

Programming requires constant thought/creativity.

[Futurepower(R)]

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.

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.

A better way to measure this

[dstone]

235,396 fewer Computer Programmers... wow, that's half the population of Wyoming!

For those whose base unit of measurement is not 'Wyomings'... if we lined those programmers up head-to-toe, they would stretch approximately 250 miles from Silicon Valley out into the Pacific Ocean heading towards Asia. At that point, of course, many would drown.

Alternatively, if the computer programmers were laid end-to-end, the chain would be longer than 4,000 football fields. Of course, it would be dangerous leaving so many nerds lying down in fields if football players were around.

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.