Slashdot Mirror
U.S. Programmers An Endangered Species?
CommanderData writes "USA Today reports that US Programmers are an 'Endangered Species' and expects them to be 'extinct' within the next few years, replaced by offshoring and H-1B visa holders. They suggest people will manage overseas projects, become self-employed, or switch to other fields. What do my fellow code-dinosaurs plan to do before the asteroid hits?" A report on Newsforge (which is part of OSTG along with Slashdot) shows the flip side of the coin.
Welcome to "god's country". Home of the free, right-thinking hardline religious zealots.
*elevator music plays*
The hawks and the war mongers practically built today's computing, you know. The Internet was originally a military project. Computing has gotten an enormous boost by military research.
Turning Iraq and Afghanistan from brutal dictatorships to democracies - a change already made in Afghanistan and fast-coming in Iraq - strikes me as something that is very, very good for the long-term interests of the US, the world and the nations involved. And thanks to our sophistication, we did it with a remarkably low loss of life, both on our side and the Iraq's.
I would recommend that you check out Tommy Franks' book American Soldier. Get to know military people a little better. They're not devils; they are people doing the best they can at a very difficult job. And over seventy percent of them are supporting George W Bush for re-election, because they believe what they're doing is right. I'm not asking for you to agree with them, but you should check out their side and understand that they are not cardboard cutout people.
If you're looking for domestic entry level programming that's going to stay here, I'd say the military's not a bad place to start; outsourcing is prevented by security considerations.
And if your domestic improvements are various subsidies and added government fat, that will just ensure that we become less effective than ever.
We are victims of our own success. We've bloated our cost of living to the point where a typical programmer salary of $60,000 doesn't buy all that much. So if people outside the US are willing to work hard for $8k a year, and feel rich, with a comparable lifestyle to what we have here, I can't really blame anyone for wanting to move operations to India.
So how do we compete? I don't know, but I don't think cutting our military (which is only about 6% of GNP) is going to help. The root problem is our cost of living, and I have no idea how to lower it.
One thing that will happen is that Indian salaries are going to increase, but it will be a long time, if ever, before they reach parity with ours.
Thoughts?
D
PS For more on Iraq from an Iraqi perspective, I think this sums it up nicely. Please read it if you're a skeptic about the Iraq war or believe we've done a really bad thing by invading Iraq.
this all part of the "global economy" that George W's dad started and he has just picked up. The businesses will be hurt in the long run.