Who Doesn't Have To Worry?

Sixty Minutes did a recent story on unemployment in Silicon Valley. Some discussion boards are full of American software engineers complaining that Indians, from the subcontinent not the Navaho Reservation, are taking their jobs. There's a trend to advise young people to go into medicine or law rather than computing.

Several things have contributed to this and offshoring and immigration being only one of many. First, during the dot com bubble more people got into computing than the field could absorb. Second, there is a lot of good software available all ready. Consider, in the mid eighties, someone working for a small business might need a program written to pull data out of a DBase database and perform some analysis on it. Today, the same data would likely be kept in Excel format and easily analyzed by the same person who generated it. The code to do so is already present in Excel and doesn't have to be written by someone else.

This use of building blocks constructed by others even extends to entertainment software. Take Second Life, for instance, Linden Research didn't develop code to simulate physics within their virtual world instead they used the Havoc Physics Engine. While integrating Havoc with the rest of their technology was probably hard, it was likely easier than writing their own physics engine from scratch.

In science, also, there are excellent pre-written tools. Scientists don't need to write or hire someone to write code for storing DNA sequences, they use MySQL. They also often don't need code written to extract specific statistics from their experimental data. Those algorithms are likely to be available as part of numerous statistics packages, including free packages such as R.

So, who doesn't have to worry? The answer for me would be people who work at a high level in computer security as they have human opponents who are always trying to come up with new ways to exploit the internet for ill-gotten gains, software architects with a track record of successful projects, and, in some cases, people with specialized skills such as working with embedded systems. The problem is that you can't just go school to land of these jobs. Everybody I've talked to with such skills has been very smart. My expectation is that at the highest levels software will still be a very good field to be in even in the United States, but that if you are not one of the smartest people around you will trouble making a long term career of it.

As very smart people who are interest in computers rather than something else are relatively rare, despite existence of many average programmers who have less work than they want, companies will still find themselves paying more than they'd like for the kind of talent they need. Thus, I expect both most programmers and many employers of programmers to be dissatisfied with the market for some time to come.