Employability of Computer Programmers in the US

Yes I have cautioned him about the language realities BUT he, being the thinking kid he is, noted that by the time he gets finished with the 4 years both India and china will have become far too costly for IBM, MS, et al and he'll need to guess the subsaharan tongue to master. Why go through all this, and simply cater to the coming geriatric needs of the American elder-group by being a nurse?

I was recently talking to an engineering manager at a local company. Five years ago you could get ten Indian programmers for the price of one US programmer. Now it's 3:1 and going down. The wage increases in India are being driven by engineers moving around to get the best pay, so you can't count on your knowledge base sticking around. Finally, I've seen their code -- it's crap for anything mission-critical.

I think all of these forces will drive a lot of outsourcing business back on-shore. Like anything else, look to the US strengths and plan on working for smaller companies that need English-speaking engineers working in the same time zone as management or for defense contractors that need US citizens.

It will also leave a lot of furriners in a position to start their own high-tech companies making their own cool stuff. Whether this will be bad for us because we'll have more competition or good because there'll be more wealth for everyone everywhere to buy stuff is an open question.

One final comment: There are so many languages spoken in India that when two strangers meet they generally start the conversation in English, then move to a more common language only if there is one. So Chinese would be more useful than Hindi, most likely.

Thanks Tim very insightful. I've tried sterring the boy into security or something else that requires a physical presence. Having gone through the pain of an engineering program myself, I don't want to send him down that path also. Besides, my wallet's just not that fat!

Wages for tech folks here in the NW have leveled off IMHO from the highs we saw in 1998. Journeymen carpenters make more and don't have to deal with doubly linked lists:-)

Thx

Wally

With me it was a choice between Physics, electrical engineering, or foreign language -- if one of the three wouldn't pay, I would have chosen one anyway.

And I have a friend who's a union pipefitter, he makes more per hour than I do.

The basic answer is "Do what you love, and love what you do!"

If he really enjoys programming, and is good at it, he will find employment, or go into business for himself. If it is just a job or a paycheck, it doesn't matter...

There are always positions open for GOOD programmers and software engineers, as well as other technical positions. The hard part is always having the people skills to find them.

I would do all I could to cause my sons to find something outside of computers. Trades are more valuable and offer more flexibility, IMO. If you can build a house, plumb it, wire it, or add onto it, if you can repair automobiles, or other mechanical devices, you will always be in demand, and no one can outsource their car repairs to another damn country.

The most important issue is doing something that you enjoy. Being content, and having fun, is more important than money or the imagined prestige of being a programmer, or a hardware engineer. If you enjoy those things, that is great, but my mistake twenty five years ago was choosing electronics because it was popular and seemed to offer opportunity, not because I was particularly enamored with it. Now I am paying for that error in a big way.

Good luck to you and your son.

John

Based on the programs I see, and the way that code is written, I think two for a penny is about the right price......

Maybe it should start to resemble the advice you'd give to a kid thinking about a career in MLB or something. Keep going with it, but have a backup plan so you can fall back on something reliable like law or medicine.

Best regards, Spehro Pefhany

Really? Just because anyone can talk it doesn't mean that they can think.

Within 10 or 15 years the programming language will be plain English or Chinese. Programmers will just speak into the microphone.

Programmers will be two for a penny.

Good question. (Substitute any other tech education) Some flexibility for the location of the job provided, together with the basics in hindi and/or chinese ...

Rene

Hello Tim,

Because a busted water main cannot be outsourced. Same for the UPS package, dry-walling, roofing, tiling, a broken washing machine, acute tooth aches, twisted ankles, heart attacks and so on.

In today's environment one has to look at things through the cold hard eyes of a business man and leave all emotional stuff off the table. Which professions are outsourceable? To what extent? Is there a sharp decline or aging out of existing talent (and don't always blindly believe some trade org or other 'authority' on that one)? When baby boomers age, what are they going to apply their nest egg funds towards? Home improvement? Vacation homes? In-home care? Medical? Dental? A pristinely restored 60's Corvette that they couldn't have when young?

The next question would be: As an adult, do I think I could really run my own business? Do I want to? Would I be ready to move wherever it takes, no matter where my folks live? Out of state? Overseas? If out of state, which ones are best for biz? Now I don't want to stray into politics on that last one but I'd sure know which ones these are and which ones are not.

Then, a thorough look at Monster Board will give a pretty clear picture of what's en vogue and what's not. I don't believe it'll change too fundamentally in the near future.

Just my two cents.

Regards, Joerg

Maybe not the urgent situations, but it is getting popular to travel to Thailand and similar places for "medical vacations" where you can get surgery done "on the cheap"... :-)

And of course the dry-walling, roofing, and tiling trades are getting flooded with Mexicans, at least around here...

Max

A fact only inland of the US and perhaps some other big countries. Over here, with the border being less than 50km, it became popular to import cars to save a few bucks. Whatever manual work to be done, eg carpentry, plumbing, is being imported from the other side of the border. Beside that they get here in less than half an hour, and work for less, I guess a certain amount of work is never being taxed as a country border is in between the payer and the one being paid.

Yes, true.

Rene

Nurses are being imported from wherever. Over here, we get have predominatly foreigners doing this job, as it is amongst the lesser well paid ones.

Rene

Its among the highest paid careers known to mankind, very rewarding and the future is secure. There is perhaps nothing more certain to be in demand.

There are many programmers in the US. Unfortunately the massive use of offshore outsourcing was the fault of the incompetent programmer "en masse"

If there was a rise in demand for programming in the 80s/90s it produced a culture of incompetent, inept dolts who charged ridiculous rates to produce spaghetti code that was fragile and impossible to be revised.

Companies could not afford the organized unions of incompetent American software engineering companies to fix the bad software, sort of like an auto body shop charging $100,000 to fix a dent in some old Chevy, or get a better job done in TJ for $50

So the push to use offshore outsourcing was a practical one. Companies based in India would offer software analysis to fix the bad code done by lazy Americans too incompetent to study SW eng principles, they became proficient, cheap and well known. The stupid, lazy American programmer type would want $60 per hour or more and milk it for months until threatened with being fired, then at the last minute throw together some junk, get paid off, the company would then seek the next lazy bum to repeat the same cycle. The same task could be done by some India company for some fraction of cost, delivered in one week instead of 6 months.

So if your son wants to get involved in software eng, get a formal education that emphasizes proper design style. Do Microsoft Windows programming using Visual Studio & the dotnet platform, or WindRiver embedded

If Microsoft has there way you will have to shove the mic up another part of your anatomy and fart code in visual procto 17.

Rocky

Well, that's not really true. The vast, vast majority of Indians don't speak English-- though the Brits were a hegemon in India for 2 centuries, their power really didn't extend much outside the major urban centers, so most Indians don't start out with English b/c they can't *speak* English to begin with; only about 5% of the population, at most, is really conversant in it.

Usually we'll just start out speaking whatever the lingua franca of the state in question is, which is Hindi for a plurality of states, or Tamil, Telugu, or Malayalam in the South (or Bengali for West Bengal, etc.). Increasingly Hindi is becoming the lingua franca for Bangalore oddly enough, even though that's in the South. In much of rural India there's no question about the lingua franca since it's the language of the state (Gujarati or Marathi for example). Oftentimes we can guess each other's first language based on accent.

To the extent that India does have a national lingua franca, it's not English-- rather, it's a sort of "pidgin Hindi" that's got vocabulary, phraseology, and pronunciation affected by India's other languages, the Dravidian ones in particular. I don't know what you'd call this-- "modified colloquial Hindi"?-- but this is what you'll increasingly hear in cities throughout the nation.

I'd never cast doubt on the utility of Chinese, many of us in India are learning it now, but don't dismiss Hindi so easily. Within 10-20 years, esp. if India becomes wealthier, Hindi will be widely spoken and it will be a language that people in India expect foreigners learn to do business there. It's already spoken by close to 600,000,000 people worldwide (even more than English) and it's numbers continue to rise. Chinese and Hindi are both going to be very important within a couple decades.

Vijay

Ahgh! I've disseminated erroneous information! It's interesting because I was repeating what was told to me by a friend who's managed the US side of Indian/US software projects including visits to the Indian site -- that was what he observed, but I don't think he ever stepped foot outside of Mumbai.

Thanks for the update. And here I thought I was so clever learning German in college.