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US Bureau of Labor Statistics: Programmer Jobs Will Decline 8% (computerworld.com)
theodp writes: Two weeks ago, as the nation's schools 'taught kids to program' with an Hour of Code, Microsoft and others celebrated a 6-year lobbying effort that culminated in the passage of legislation that made Computer Science a core K-12 subject, which the software giant said "will advance some of the goals outlined in Microsoft's National Talent Strategy." But on Tuesday, Computerworld reported that the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics has put somewhat of a buzzkill on the learn-to-code party, saying IT jobs will grow 12% over the next decade, although computer programmers will see an 8% decline. "Computer programming can be done from anywhere in the world, so companies sometimes hire programmers in countries where wages are lower," explained the government. The silver lining is that software developers, the largest occupational group in IT, will increase by 17% or 186,600, over this period. The nomenclature here is a little muddy, since "programmers" and "software developers" are often used interchangeably. Here's how they're distinguished in this article: "Programmers are focused on coding and implementing requirements, and that’s why they may be more susceptible to offshoring, in contrast to software developers who may be more engaged with the business, analyzing needs and collaborating with multiple parties."
Long term, get the hell out of tech, and stop giving your employers any loyalty ... because they'll drop you like a hot turd the moment they can.
But, then, we've pretty much all known this teaching all kids to code was a self-serving thing to get them more cheap labor.
Got kids you want to be gainfully employed? Get them into a trade like an electrician, welder, or plumber.
Tech is being gutted to the lowest bidder. So all of these years of saying tech jobs were the way of the future ... well, so long, suckers.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
We can bargain with megacorps quite effectively so long as supply and demand of labor is balanced. Compare your consumer experience when shopping for personal electronics (lots of competition, abundant supply) vs dealing with Comcast (monopoly). It's exactly the same with jobs - if you have a skill set which is in short supply, you will get great deals without any unions.
So the best solution for oversupply of labor is for government to hire part of the workforce away from private market and put them on projects that reduce fixed costs of living for everyone else and increase disposable impact to purchase privately made goods. That's why New Deal worked well for recovery from Great Depression. If we build good roads, affordable housing, public transportation and affordable domestically produced energy, we provide lots of jobs while freeing up most of people's paycheck to go into private economy rather than mortgage and gas bill.
So politics is a better direction to put your time in money than unions, although I guess the later is a useful stopgap measure and can be an organizing force for politics.
Forgetting 'programmers'/'developers' for a minute - contractors and consultants are leading market indicators since their demand peaks during market instability (both growth and contraction). And, IMHO deep embedded work is a leading indicator for the manufacturing sector since they produce hard goods such as appliances and infrastructure. That said, hourly rates are off FY2000 highs by 40% and are flat since the mid 90's, and there are almost no positions open. The only exception is medical devices where there seems to be a bit of a bubble happening, but the financing for the companies hiring is all highly speculative VC and hedge funds, which is a red flag if you expect a gig to run more than a few months. The contract agencies that place workers are compensating for the fewer positions by increasing markup, from as low as 20% on corp-to-corp basis to upwards of 40%, which they can only get away with by submitting cheap inexperienced workers and marking them way up, which seems to work since hiring managers are more likely than not to be clueless to what the job actually requires, which is in part due to hedge fund weenies placing line managers with inexperienced cronies or cheap imported labor.
The view from down here is there was no recovery from 2000 or 2008, there is no recovery on the horizon, R&D infrastructure is being dismantled, manufacturing is gone, and the engineering job market is in a luge-ride race to the bottom. There's a little money to be made picking the bones or sucking up health care dollars or green energy dollars or whatever is fashionable enough to attract foolish greedy investors, but long term it looks bad to me. I'm getting out... buy into a wood pellet fab or something else that will do well when everyone becomes poor.