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Programming Jobs Losing Luster in U.S.
alphapartic1e writes "Yahoo! News writes "The U.S. software industry lost 16 percent of its jobs from March 2001 to March 2004, the Washington-based Economic Policy Institute found. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that information technology industries laid off more than 7,000 American workers in the first quarter of 2005. Gartner researchers say most people affiliated with corporate information technology departments will assume "business-facing" roles, focused not so much on gadgets and algorithms but corporate strategy, personnel and financial analysis. "If you're only interested in deep coding and you want to remain in your cubicle all day, there are a shrinking number of jobs for you," said Diane Morello, Gartner vice president of research.""
The short future is projects managed in US but implemented abroad - the far future is too scary to think about at all - they're gonna take all our jobs :(.
Pay girls to strip!
"If you're only interested in deep coding and you want to remain in your cubicle all day, there are a shrinking number of jobs for you," said Diane Morello, Gartner vice president of research."
Actually, if this describes you, and you are creative and business savvy to boot, then you are perfectly suited for starting up your own software business.
Unfortunately Gartner has beat you to the punch!
Anything with the name "Gartner" in it automatically has a taint(not the area between a man's genitals and his anus, though that may be an accurate description of Gartner). It's just hard to swallow their credibility. They seem to keep on coming up with research that says, "Offshore everything! oh and by the way, we just happen to have a large offshore consulting division, what a coincidence". If they are a research firm then they should stick to just research, anything else tarnishes their credibility....
Monstar L
is middle management. Everything else can be outsourced.
Entry level positions aren't necessary. Knowlege of how computer systems behave and are operated isn't necessary. Intelligence isn't necessary.
All you have to know is how to play petty office politics and sell people on useless shit. And run an office (either well or poorly.)
I thought this happened years ago after the
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I - I took the one the bus load of girls just went down.
The open source community?
No work for me, even though I write some grotesquely long and complex code. I feel like I've come a long way in 22 years since my early days of print rockets, but it seems like the industry is saturated. I've sent out thousands of resumes, but my only jobs I've gotten was a pity job from my university, and a job through my exgirlfriends dad.
I have only one last hope at the best game design job in the world before its back to the salt mines(minimum wage:soul crushing work.) And to be honest, its almost better not having a job at all than working for minimum wage after you spent a lifetime of blood sweat and tears in your field.
God spoke to me.
Then again, in what other industry do those struggling to pay for college or to get through unemployment amuse themselves by giving away the very craft that they think they're going to sell if they're ever employed later? Don't blame it all on outsourcing. Some of the lessened market demand can be traced straight back to free software. You can't give away huge quantities of something that has intrinsic value and expect it not to have an effect on market pricing.
Kent M Pitman
Philosopher, Technologist, Writer
If we all become managers, get MBA's, focus on corporate strategy/direction, and financial analysis. WHO THE HELL IS GOING TO MAKE THE PRODUCTS?? Top-heavy boats tip over.
Manufacturing jobs "lost their luster" a long time ago because a combination of many destructive forces converged on blue collar workers. Corporations with loyalties to no one, not even the stockholders, union bosses who wanted blue collar workers to live middle and upper middle class lifestyles, politicians hell-bent on judging their job performance in volume of regulation and prison/quasi-slave labor in countries like China all conspired to destroy those jobs. Now we are simply progressing toward the inevitable destruction of the white collar job market for anyone who isn't a business major in college.
One thing is certain about the job market. If the starry-eyed socialists would stop regulating our economy into the second world, we'd not be losing jobs the way we are. American workers are very expensive to hire, often too expensive to justify. A decent chunk of it is caused by politically correct bullshit like pushing for diversity over qualification, allowing people to sue merely for being offended rather than telling people to deal with it, the constant threat of corporate-to-corporate lawsuits over nothing and things of that nature.
The bottom line is that if you want to actually have a job and a society that produces wealth rather than living off of the wealth of bygone years, you'll vote for the Libertarian Party. The LP is the only party that actually wants to create a regulatory regime that works for everyone. The coin-operated Democrats and Republicans only care about giving back to those who put them in power and don't care about making the system work for the rest of society.
Click here or a puppy gets stomped!
Exactly, quite frankly most programmers are so far up their own asses that they haven't a clue as to what is paying their salaries. You're not interested in playing the political game, you're not going to have a job. That's corporate life, not just in IT but every field.
Entry level positions aren't necessary.
So is middle management willing to pay extra tax so that recent graduates who would have otherwise taken entry-level positions can go on welfare instead?
Gartner researchers say most people affiliated with corporate information technology departments will assume "business-facing" roles, focused not so much on gadgets and algorithms but corporate strategy, personnel and financial analysis.
The problem is that IT didn't start as a business facing department. They started as a bunch of people who thought (correctly) that they could improve the business with computers and software. Their budgets increased and they became incredibly large. Eventually, the IT department started determining the direction of the entire company. 5-10 years later the business is finally trying to reclaim control of IT. This is why the most secure jobs are "business-facing."
PS: Anyone who bashes Gartner is just afraid of the truth.
- * - * - * - * - * -
Brought to you in dvorak at 17 WPM and climbing.
I've been dealing with (mis)management ass-holes who never seem to get a clue that, when you've planned out a project if you cut the staffing and/or the budget for it, you still get what you pay for (meaning the original projections go out the window.)
Its not rocket science but the way these guys manage, it's more like voodoo (and about as effective as 'gris-gris' in warding off AIDS... NOT!)
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That is very true. Out of all the programmers I have met about 75% feel jobs like customer support, writting buisness plans, talking to customers on their specs are all below them. They are like I am the programmer, I am the Computer Wiz Kid (at 40 years old), I can do no wrong and I am the Best programmer in the world. Then they show a lot of anamosity to the employeed IT Professioal for because they are a sell out. Ditching Good programming practices for fast ones, and writting being polite to the customers and respectful to their boss.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Our problem is not lack of jobs, it's lack of qualified people. I've been in touch with folks in cleveland, chicago and denver and nobody can hire talented folks fast enough to keep up with growing demand \ businesses. It aint quite the late 90s, but demand is up folks.
What happends if someone is overall a great Door to Doors sales man but have a physical Adnormality that creates unbearable BO? what should he or she do for a living.
What type of mental disability that will prevent office politics. Buisness politics are different from say Education Politcs or Governemtn Politics. And they are all not based on other people tring to fire you. For Most people dealing with office Politics are learned. Concepts like common curticy to other people (If you have torrett sindrome or something like that, people would understand). Think about you job in the business perspective and figure out how your idea is profitable and record it. Quite honestly I have seen the Mentally Disabled people (With full blown Autism) who work at Walmart have more ability to handle office politics then many normal people who just dont want to try and they say they have a mild case of Auditism. Saying that you have a disibility doesn't mean you have an excuse for not trying.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
All businesses, governments, individuals are going to have to face up to this.
The Information Revolution has made sure that digital information of any sort is not a scarce resource. It can trivially be copied and distributed, therefore the inherent economic price (not to say value) is going to tend towards zero. Attempting to try to make digital information of any sort a scarce resource is doomed to failure, the ecomonics guarantee that and anyone who thinks otherwise is a fool or a dreamer.
Software development then is a service. And that includes business analysis, software design and coding itself. Some people will do the business analysis and design themselves and ship the spec over to India to have the coding done, some will do the analysis and design and code using rapid application design systems and build it out of off the shelf components, like free software.
Fundamentally, coders are going the way of the blacksmith. They're going to have to become engineers rather than blacksmiths if they want to make a living. Those who don't, won't or can't will have to find other employment.
Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.
I'm not trolling, but I do know it may sounds as if
I am.
Why do we have all this panic about the layoffs? Who remembers all the people flooded the market before 2000?
Many of those people were unskilled. They were in the industry because there was plenty of money to be made. They were not in the industry because they loved programming computers(or whatever your vice of tech is).
That type of person gave the rest of us a bad name. They made it hard for companies to hire the real programmers. The companies learned their lesson. They now have stronger hiring filters. They now must get rid of the bloat they hired on in 2000.
One person in the industry because he or she loves the industry can do the work of 5-10 people in the industry for the money. I say good riddance!
So about 30,000 visas a year? Big deal. I hear they are running out too quickly so the quota needs to be increased. Note that there are laws that regulate H1-B visas. For example, an employee on an H1-B cannot earn less than the prevailing wage in his area. Evidently, continued demand for H1-Bs means the local talent pool is insufficient.
XML UI Browser/Platform
I have been in IT for almost 15 years and *every* job I have had was a business facing job. Being able to sit down with an accountant, salesman or an AA for that matter and understand their needs and requirements and turn that into code is the basic function of most IT jobs. Most programmers don't work for software firms. Most of us work for companies that have bought a canned package. We spend our time tweaking it and value adding reports and interfaces for the end user. Understanding the business you are supporting is just as valuable as knowing how to code.
No the lesson is you should have your options more open to prevent you from getting to specialized in your field where you can be unemployeed. I rather have a soul-sucking job at 60k then a soul-sucking job at 12k a year, if the job you love is no longer in demmand.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Why the hell would anyone want to move to India?! There's a reason they can get away with paying pennies overthere yet still be making the native programmers rich....
Very few competent people have *all* of the qualifications that these jobs typically require. The resumes of these people are tossed out by HR for not having every single qualification and all you get passed on to you are applilcations by poseurs. Your sampling technique is flawed and there is no basis for your characterization of the talent pool.
The American standard of living is changing rapidly, it's just not quite as visible as it could be yet. Right now we're having problems with people in early life not being health insured, next it will be people in middle life not being health-insured, and unable to begin saving for their kids to go to college, last it will be old people without health insurance and young people without education, and uh.... yeah, that's a bad thing. A very bad thing. The US economy and quality of life don't look that bad NOW.....
My little site.
Companies need to suck it up. Maybe you would like to have an experienced developer, but the answer to a shortage of talent at that level needn't be whining or outsourcing. The experience threshold seems to be a reaction to the complete hacks hired into IT in the late 90's - by enforcing minimum experience, you reduce your chances of hiring a nitwit. The correction that needs to happen is that companies need to learn to filter and find qualified, inexperienced applicants. Companies aren't willing to invest in entry-level enough to create the mid-level talent that is needed. It's going to get worse before it gets better - I see new grads branching into other careers when they can't find a job, so there's even less new talent coming in.
Seen any BadMarketing lately?
China refuses to pay this tribute to the American Imperium so American politicians accuse the Chinese of "manipulating their currency".
$20/hr a major raise? And you're a developer? Good lord. Where are you? What's your education? My first full-time "Software Engineer" job out of college in '93 was $42500/yr, with full health care, 401k matching, other benefits, and (small) yearly bonus. My very first contract software job was at $35/hr W2. For over two years I billed out at about $78/hr W2, with a company which was NOT a .com and was not Internet related. I now operate my own consulting business, and my direct bill rate is $75/hr, though I did do a short term software job for $65/hr recently.
Larry
Anyone complaining that "experienced" developers are hard to find either 1. hasn't looked, or 2. is being too picky.
Obviously there are many factors, but let me relate the experience our company had in the last few years.
We decided to bite the bullet and hire some good/experienced developers and pay them what they were worth. We looked for quite some time and ended up hiring four people. Out of the four, two were what I would call GOOD, experienced C++ developers. The other two had some skills, but were nearly impossible to get along with. Since hiring these developers three have left. One because she didn't like the location, one because he was unproductive and one because he couldn't get along with anyone.
I'm sure there are many factors that go into our experiences, our location, the economy at the time of our hiring, etc... OTOH, in my experience, it can be difficult to find top quality individuals in any industry. The grandparent is right, the best software developers already have jobs and are paid well, if you want to hire the best you have to be willing to find these people and pay them what they are worth. If you aren't willing to do that you need to lower your standards.
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Ahh yes, history repeating itself before our very eyes...
This is simply more proof that the U.S. is on it's way down in world status. Don't give me that krap about wage parity either, because the Asians will for the forseeable future, have much more abundant labor force that is better educated than our (ahem...) immigrant labor force.
Forget the fact that more and more R&D will be done in China and India, but ALL the manufacturing will be done there. Americans and our ridiculously non-patriotic and money-grubbing politicians live in a fantasy world of a 'service industry' panacea. We'll live in a country of cooks, cleaners and corporate crooks...
We play the game with the bravery of being out of range
And you forget that inflation in India is rising at a much higher rate than in the US. So Americans are still not cheaper to employ.
Also you forget that there are other considerations apart from the salaries paid to programmers such as rent, utility bills and salaries for support staff.
While janitors and supermarket shelf stockers in America keep earning more and having a better lifestyle than fully qualified engineers in other parts of the world, American employees will always be more expensive to employ.
What most readers of WSJ are woefully ignorant of is that most companies require machinists to own their own tools. Not the multi-hundred thousand dollar CNC machines, but the general everyday measuring instruments, clamps, jigs etc that can add up to $20,000 to $50,000 of tools over a lifetime. When these guys retire, part of their retirement income comes from selling off their tools. When they get laid off, many sell off their tools as well. Just like car mechanics, machinists have a huge investment in their own tools.
So all the guys who know how to do this stuff are retiring, or were laid off when their jobs were offshored. Even if we as a country somehow woke up and paid attention, it will take a decade or two to recover from our current insanity. It is the same with engineering and software development.
As a country, we seem to be taking the Grasshopper approach to life, instead of the Ant approach. We've combined the eat the seed corn along with the naked emperor approach. However, we've also adopted the "why do you hate America so much" mantra when anyone points out the nudity of the emperor.
I'm an engineer and we outsource some of our projects to India. And I spend most of my day revising their "Curry Code" as I like to call it. Sure, $20 an hour is much cheaper then the $65 for Americans, but you get what you pay for.
You went to business school. Therefore you are completely unqualified to say anything about IT. B-school prepares you for a life of middle management doublespeak, meaningless and obfuscated bureaucracy, and profiting off of the hard work of others. People who create code (or in B-schoolese, "create synergistic software-based business solutions for new paradigms of information technology") do actual work.
... to get out.
(I've been in IT for over ten years)
Free hint: if your name has "Manager" or "Supervisor" in it, you're not in IT, you're getting in the way of people in IT. Seeing things purely in terms of the bottom line is incompatible with working in IT, and that's what all the b-school drones do. (After all, they can't compete on smarts, so they drag others down to make themselves look better.)
I was even advised by an older timer
He was probably sick of hearing you talking about "thinking outside the box" or "scalable solutions" or "getting to Yes". IT won't miss you; maybe someone with a clue will get your job.
Not posted as an AC because I believe in what I'm saying, and can face the consequences for saying it.
Never underestimate the power of stupid people in large groups.
If it was about getting cheaper labor, U.S. companies would have outsourced all the jobs to third world countries 50 years ago when the U.S. was the number one producer of manufactured goods and it's workers were the highest paid in the world.
The reason we are losing jobs in the United States (and it is not just the U.S., the Europe economy is in just as much trouble), is because we have created an enviornment that is hostile to honest buisness and production.
We have a system where is is easier to litigate than it is to innovate - companies that succesfully produce goods and services are taxed, punished, regulated and litigated until they are unprofitable, while other companies thrive by suing for intellectual property, or by having the government give them subsidies and handouts, or lobbying the government to put their competition out of buisness.
We have a system where someone who developes a new product or service for their employer will never be rewarded as highly as the person who sues their employer because a coworker told a dirty joke.
We have created a climate where it just isn't possible to run a buisness in the U.S... Unless your buisness is based on lawsuits, saturation marketing, government subsidies, government enforced monopolies, or local service (like fast food or retail).
"MIT betrayed all of its basic principles."
Talk about soul sucking. I couldn't imagine anything more soul sucking then pre-limiting your options just because you don't want to deal with a difficult job. Ruling out having kids and owning a home just so you can never have to worry about debts? If that isn't soul destroying then I don't know what is.
Mac OS X and Windows XP working side by side to fight back the night.
"Deep Coding" is just another bullshit propaganda term they've come up with to blame programmers for the loss of their careers. Here's how this fun game works:
Some soulless P.R. flack has to make a case that programming isn't a viable career anymore, so that he can claim that people who still want to program must have something wrong with them. So he needs to find a way to characterize programming in some negative way, to shift the point of view of the reader.
First, he considers the reality: most programmers really love programming, and it's a complex and interesting art best performed by people with education and experience. The real reason the jobs are going overseas is that the suits in charge of companies are vicious skinflints who think they can get something for almost nothing.
That's no good, though, because it's unflattering to the people who are paying for the P.R. flack's work, and it shows the similarity between comp.sci grads and engineers, doctors, lawyers, etc -- which isn't where the P.R. flack wants to go with this. The LAST thing he wants to do is turn the programmer into a sympathetic figure, someone who reminds Joe Sixpack of the scientists who saved the world in old fifties movies. Selling out nice Doctor SaveEverybody might not create the right public image.
So, somewhere, Mr. P.R. flack has heard the term "Deep Geek". He throws the term around a room full of interns, and they come up with the concept of "Deep Coding" -- i.e. programming as an art in itself. "Hey," one of the proto-flacks says, "why didn't these guys study business? It's their own fault. If they wanted to be successful, they should have majored in business like us. All the 'deep coders' are dead meat, and it's their own fault for not being business majors."
The P.R. flack gives the intern a bagel, then reflects on the statement. He can't really put it THAT way, because most people didn't study business, and they aren't going to be sympathetic to that point of view... But what if he turns it around a little, and says that programmers are too specialized! Sure! They focused only on programming, they just want to hide in their cubicles, the bastards, they're no good to a company. That way, he can say it's their fault without complimenting suits directly, and nobody will really notice.
He starts using the term "Deep Coding" when he goes out for his six-martini lunch, he uses it on the golf course around the executives, and before too long, ALL the P.R. flacks are using it. One bounces it off another, who quotes it to another, and pretty soon, everyone is saying that to be a programmer, you can't really be a programmer! No, you have to be a business major who happens to do a little programming on the side.
THAT is how bullshit like this gets created.
Farewell! It's been a fine buncha years!
Whenever a career disappears (literally) over the horizon, it seems to get the label "low level", "repetative", etc. This article does it also. This is often used as a justification to let globalization eat away at the variety of careers available.
How is sitting in meetings all day, placating paranoid CEO's, and playing office politics "higher level" than figuring out how to get Oracle to join 5 tables and 2 million records before the nightly batch job deadline is up?
We already traded "boring, low-level" factory jobs for the highly skilled and highly rewarding cashier jobs at Burger King and Walmart. They are just bending language so that they can get away with doing the same thing to tech careers without the guilt.
Table-ized A.I.
I find a lot of Gartner output to be utter tripe, but I'm going to have to come out and defend them on this one.
Most IT people work in an IT department in a large business, or for one of the big consultancy/service companies that pander to big businesses.
In those environments there are no tricky programming problems left. (Ok, that's a grotesque generalisation; I'm talking about 99.5% of the programming that takes place.) People don't get paid to devise new algorithms, to develop new technologies, to find new ways of storing data.
People get paid to hook up an off-the-shelf inventory system with a supply chain, with selling systems (web / retail) and with off-the-shelf fulfilment systems. They use known technologies, they put their data in Oracle or SQL Server, they host on Sun or HP hardware.
In such an environment, someone willing to spend three weeks debugging a complex thread deadlock just isn't needed. People that understand the business, can suggest and rapidly implement solutions that help the business, and that can work with the business are needed.
If you demand a requirements doc and hide in a dark room for two months before delivering your masterpiece, you've failed the business - in the last two months, their objectives have changed, the market has changed, and you've delivered something they don't quite need. If you're continually talking to them throughout that time then you can adapt, and you're more likely to meet their actual needs.
Unfortunately most business people don't understand IT. They have no concept of project delivery, and they don't realise just how much skill goes into making some things we do look easy. To talk to them you have to use their language, express things in terms they understand, and demonstrate that you do understand their needs and aren't actually working to thwart their entire business model.
This takes communication skills. It really needs people that are capable of understanding business concepts. Ideally it needs people that understand the industry itself.
So when the term "Deep Coding" is used, it's describing the programmer of lore, the genius sat at a terminal cranking out code all the time. And that's just not needed by most of the employers out there.
This doesn't mean you need a business major - but you do need to demonstrate you can interact with the business.
Incidentally, don't think I'm downplaying the need for technical skills too - there's a tremendous shortage of people that know how to design complex systems (and make them look simple), that can do proper application architecture, that can think abstractly and hone in on correct solutions. Those people will always find work, and Indian outsourcers are very definitely not filling that gap. And if you get that bit right, the programming is a very simple piece that comes after.
~Cederic