Slashdot Mirror
Software Development Employment Rises 45% In 10 Years
dcblogs writes "Software employment is rising at 4 to 5% a year, and may be the only tech occupation to have recovered to full employment since the recession. Other tech occupations aren't doing as well. In 2001, there were more than 200,000 people working in the semi-conductor industry. That number was less than 100,000 by 2010, according to a recent study by the Economic Policy Institute. Darin Wedel, who was laid off from Texas Instruments, and gained national attention when his wife, Jennifer, challenged President Obama on H-1B use, said that for electrical engineers, 'unless you are in the actual design of circuits, then you're not in demand.' He said that much of the job loss in the field is due to the closing of fabrication facilities. Wedel has since found new work as a quality engineer."
seriously, this is slashdot -_-
if you take a growth of 4% per year, that already reaches over 48% over 10 years (you know, it's accumulative, this nice little exponential growth) -_-
I'm betting average wages haven't risen that fast, especially over the last four years.
Darin Wedel, who was laid off from Texas Instruments, and gained national attention when his wife, Jennifer, challenged President Obama on H-1B use, said that for electrical engineers, 'unless you are in the actual design of circuits, then you're not in demand.'
What is OP's definition of "full employment"? Not sure it's the same as mine.
A lot of companies that used to maintain their own fabs have closed them over the years. Trying to keep up with the leaders in process technology is very expensive. It has been a long time since it was even as cheap as $1,000,000,000. Not many companies can afford to build one.
Semi industry fab costs limit industry growth
By 2020, current cost trends will lead to an average cost of between $15 billion and $20 billion for a leading-edge fab, according to the report. By 2016, the minimum capital expenditure budget needed to justify the building of a new fab will range from $8 billion to $10 billion for logic, $3.5 billion to $4.5 billion for DRAM and $6 billion to $7 billion for NAND flash, according to the report.
It used to be that companies could leverage their own fabs for competitive advantage in process or design technology, or simple scheduling. Not any more. Now you outsource the fab to one of the big providers and get in line. More and more of the fabs are outside the US.
Some of the smaller old fabs get retargeted to specialty products, but even that tends to die eventually.
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
The irony is that the electrical engineering requires more talent and education than run of the mill software development jobs. But by the time these guys are laid off, they're usually age 40+ so they have a tough time getting a job in software even after retraining themselves.
I wonder if these numbers include hourly contractors, which are increasingly in demand. Our software company has used offsite hourly contractors exclusively for the last 15 years, which is much better in so many ways, particularly our ability to get very skilled labor for project length gigs.
I would venture to guess that without the smart phone market taking off the way it has, that we wouldn't see as good of recovery in the software development sector. Thank goodness something came along. Oh, and here's the full article on one page.
I'm curious, what does the data look like for 12 or 15 or 20 years?
Wedel has since found new work as a quality engineer
He's checking the accuracy of the drive thru orders at McDonald's.
There fixed it for you....
It seems to me that the only growth of S/W is in places like Bangalore and Chennai and not in the US or Europe.
How will we complain about offshoring and H1-Bs now?!
Personally, after being in the developer/IT rat-race for 14 years now I'm recently experiencing a spike in 'bugging by recruiters' myself, just now when I'm ready to ponder a career change. I don't know what to make of it, most are lazy recruiters who want me to do their data entry job for them - nothing new here - but just these weeks I've had recruiters come back to me and actually report on the status of a given occupation (that's a rare one).
This is all just anecdotal and probably has to do with me adding a few buzzwords to my online profiles, but it's interesting none-the-less. The ratio of clueless/lazy/crappy-paid recruiters hasn't changed much though.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
So is this a genuine across the board spike in demand, or is it a spike in jobs that can't be filled? I see a lot more pseudo-demand than in the past, but it's for bizarre niche skills in vertical market packages, CMSes, and just plain off-the-wall stuff. (eg Drools - never heard of it - it's Prolog in Java with Scheme syntax!) And I never see the same job twice, so there's no across the board increase in any specific area. It's one random job after another with no pattern.
My guess is that the cost cutting of the past 15 years or so is coming back to bite companies. They've thrown out their in-house software, fired their programmers and most of their system admins, and they are stuck with a vertical-market package no one has heard of. The managers who did this got their bonuses and moved on. Now the upgrade cycle is starting to hurt, and they need experts in these vertical-market packages, but there just aren't that many to go around and the company is stuck. They want to hire someone for six months to come in, do an upgrade cycle, and go away. But they only want someone with 5-10 years experience, so there aren't many people out there at all who could fill the job, and those few people aren't necessarily available.
Unless you already have 5-10 years experience with some niche technology, there's no point in learning it, because (1) you never see the same job twice, (2) if you applied you would be ignored because you don't have 5-10 years hands-on project experience, and (3) the best you could do is a temp job even if you had the experience.
Will the pain get so bad for companies that they would actually hire someone who knows software development and train them on a vertical-market package?
Wedel has found new work. He has been employed for about a year as a quality engineer for a large eye care/pharma company.
Ask about outsourcing, Wedel said it has "affected just about anyone with a technical degree -- it's purely business getting its way with government. Lobbyists have bamboozled our politicians into thinking we have a shortage of qualified engineers and that we need to import more via the H-1B -- simply not true.
I have a PhD in organic chemistry from a pretty good school and used to have a pretty good career. Most of the people like me, over 50, are out of work or grossly underemployed. And it's very bad for new grads, too. And not great for the rest. We're not so happy about that H-1B and STEM talk coming from everywhere either.
Let me see if I get what you're saying:
"I got my BS 10, 15, 20 years ago and learned stagnating or dying technologies, and refused to update my skills or spend any time learning something new or keeping my skill set current. Now somebody's gotta pay for my laziness! I can't be held responsible, I had a reasonable expectation that I would be able to coast for 40 years in a career based on half a dozen undergrad courses and my charm!"
Is that about right?
That's not a "rib" - I actually respect that!
* "Fight the GOOD Fight, every moment..." as the great tune goes -> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sp3zhgXDDSs
APK
P.S.=> Reminded me of Mr. Spock on Star Trek TOS whenever figures came up, he'd mess with everyone's head pretty much as you have, with "exacting data"...
... apk
I take it that Dice Holdings has a quota, every week a story must appear to support the astroturf campaign wailing about "a shortage of STEM workers in the United States".. Check the box for this week! What will it be next week?
Ok you make a good point.
So when I advertise for a skilled S/W dev the only people who reply are Indian? Most originate from Chennai, Bangalore or Mumbai.
Then I get companies trying to sell me 'A fantastic resourse just waitting to do the developent for you'. The bad news is that they are the likes of Mastek and other Indian oursourcers.
See the pattern here?
I graduated in MechE in 1975 so I am just thankful that I only have 5 years before I retire. By then I fully expect that 90% of all S/W dev will be done either in India/China or over here by INdian/Chinese expats.
I went to a local school to talk to pupile about careers a couple of years ago. Not one person was interested in a career in Science, Engineering or IT. They all wanted to work in the media, be a professional footballer or didn't have a clue.
The general concensus was that those courses were 'too hard' and didn't pay a £1+ a year.
My Alma-Mater stopped doing most Science courses a few years ago citing not demand and a very high drop out rate.
Now they are shutting down many of their Computer related courses. So where are the devs of the future going to come from? India & China.
This is the biggest hurdle many people face.
It is not easy to move to The Next Big Thing(tm) unless your current employer is actively working on New Tech (tm) - i.e. If you wanted to move from Java into .Net or whatever, even though the theory behind algorithms, oop, if statements and loops generally remains the same.
My employer has multiple open positions that we just can't fill. There aren't enough qualified engineers for the positions open. Friends of mine at other companies are reporting the same thing. This is true for both software and hardware engineers. I'm constantly being contacted by other companies and recruiters to the point where they sometimes call me at my work number (which they must be getting from some of the mailing lists I've posted to).
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Here in Silicon Valley I see a huge demand. My company has multiple positions that have been open for some time. We prefer to hire locally, but if we can't we will hire people where we can get them. Friends of mine at other companies are reporting the same thing.
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This explains why my wages have kept up with the cost of living so nicely....
Oh, wait.
It seems like its become a subsidiary of the WSJ's oped page.
Seastead this.
My employer has multiple open positions that we just can't fill. There aren't enough qualified engineers for the positions open. Friends of mine at other companies are reporting the same thing.
What is the definition of "qualified"? That's the key qualifier in most of these posts. Does it mean "has solid, demonstrated experience in the software development field and an aptitude for quickly mastering new languages and systems", or "has 5-7 years experience doing the exact thing that the position calls for"?
So many companies seem to be looking for an exact fit, so people with good skills in, for example, one or more computer languages, but not the specific language the employer uses, won't get looked at. Even if a programmer has taught him or herself that language, unless they can put on their resume that they've used that language in a production environment, it's tough to get a look.