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235,000 Fewer Programmers by 2015

Posted by CowboyNeal on from the negative-forecasts dept.

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!"

29 of 982 comments (clear)

  1. I knew I should have gone for an EE degree by Knetzar · · Score: 5, Funny

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

  2. Programmers == Carpenters?? by MontSegur · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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!"

    1. Re:Programmers == Carpenters?? by sql*kitten · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

    2. Re:Programmers == Carpenters?? by Rostin · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

    3. Re:Programmers == Carpenters?? by malkavian · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

    4. Re:Programmers == Carpenters?? by jjohn · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

    5. Re:Programmers == Carpenters?? by gagy · · Score: 5, Interesting
      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.
      --
      -I DDoSed your mom.
    6. Re:Programmers == Carpenters?? by Greyfox · · Score: 5, Insightful
      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.

      --

      I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?

  3. Forrester Research? Pffft. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:Forrester Research? Pffft. by perly-king-69 · · Score: 5, Insightful
      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.

      --

      --
      This sig is inoffensive.

  4. Will this match the population reduction? by Knetzar · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

  5. Computer Science is not everything anymore! by Shisha · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  6. Too many people in IT because it pays by Manic+Miner · · Score: 5, Insightful

    When I started doing work with computers, and my computer degree, I did it because I enjoyed the work and appeared to have a natural talent. This was the case for most people on my degree course.

    A couple of years ago I worked for a UK university and I was so disapointed at the number of people who had no interest in the subject but doing it awayway. It seems that people think you can get a high paying job in IT, so will get the degree in hopes of getting a job despite not having any enthusiasm or talent or skill.

    Maybe this will be a good thing, we might see less people going into IT just because they think it will pay well.

    --
    If you ever drop your keys into a river of molten lava, let'em go, because, man, they're gone.
    1. Re:Too many people in IT because it pays by Schnapple · · Score: 5, Interesting
      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.

      --

      Schnapple

    2. Re:Too many people in IT because it pays by loginx · · Score: 5, Interesting

      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.

  7. I beg to differ... by Gethsemane · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

  8. Re:Big Deal by Amiga+Lover · · Score: 5, Funny

    (damned mozilla)

    > you better start looking elseware

    What a neat term for software made by overseas contract programmers

    "Elseware"

  9. A few years back... by joostje · · Score: 5, Insightful
    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!

  10. Are you in the real world? by ejbst25 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

  11. Is nothing sacred? by CompWerks · · Score: 5, Funny
    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...

    --
    If you can read this sig - the bitch fell off.
  12. Don't jump to any conclusions by mcpkaaos · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I seem to remember that not more than 10 or 15 years ago, people were predicting that by the end of this decade there would be such a demand for programmers, due to every little thing in your house having a computer of some sort in it, as to cause a shortage of supply. Well, that just didn't quite happen the way we thought it would. One might say it's due to the .com bust, one might not. The twists along the way don't really matter much. Any way you look at it, the predictions were and continue to be unfulfilled. I wouldn't bet my future on this "new" one coming to pass either. I would presume that these predictions rely heavily on current or near-recent trends (especially when programming could be concerned). Who knows what the next couple of years might bring, let alone the next decade.

    --
    It goes from God, to Jerry, to me.
  13. Re:the, err, rest of the world by Qzukk · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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).

    --
    If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
  14. Something the article didn't mention by taliver · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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!

  15. Amen to that by palad1 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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

  16. Straight-line extrapolation is accurate? by stankulp · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Since when?

    Five years ago they did a straight-line extrapolation to predict federal budget surpluses as far as the eye can see. I don't see them anymore, do you?

    Nobody can foresee the future. There are 10% as many telephone operators now as there were 40 years ago, handling ten times as many calls. Is that a bad thing?

    Over that past 40 years I have seen engineers in high demand and engineers stocking grocery shelves. If it's bad now, give it five years and it will be good. If it's good now, give it five years and it will be bad.

    That's the way it goes. Everything is not good all the time.

    If you blow your brains out during the bad times, you miss the good times that are just around the corner.

    --
    We must be alert to the danger that public policy could become captive to a scientific-technological elite. - Eisenhower
  17. You'll always have a job if you have a clearance. by BulletProofMonk · · Score: 5, Informative

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

  18. Re:extrapolation? by sopuli · · Score: 5, Funny
    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.

  19. A better way to measure this by dstone · · Score: 5, Funny

    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.

  20. Re:Going Out of Business USA by Strykeforce · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.