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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."
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
An industry average of unemployed people as would be expected pre-recession.
i.e. if under normal economic conditions the unemployment rate is 3%, then software development is at that level.
If you're expecting it to mean 100% employment for all software developers then no that's not the case, because in every industry there'll be a few percent of incompetents who are just always unemployable no matter how desperate that industry gets.