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The Incredible Shrinking Programmer
by R. A. Isaak

July 14, 2005

It is a great thing to have a job that is hard to do. It makes it that much harder to replace you, and it generally means you will command a salary premium. For a long time, programming was such a profession.

So it is that I find it painful to admit my profession—programming—is in decline. It is a job accorded ever less respect, with diminished prospects for the future, and where management is increasingly isolating itself from the person who writes the code that makes its business processes run. I know many programmers who have left the profession in recent years, and appear to be happier for it.

Boom-and-bust cycles are normal in our profession, and we just experienced an enormous boom during the so-called Internet bubble, with a fairly harsh bubble-popping that coincided more or less with the release of .NET. (This coincidence led many of my fellow developers to blame .NET for their diminishing prospects.) Technology investments continue to rebound from that bust, but the situation is fundamentally changed from what it was before the onset of the last boom-and-bust cycle. The shortage of skilled programmers during the boom cycle prompted many companies to search hard for ways to contain costs, including bringing in foreign workers through the H-1B visa program.

Of course, the biggest curb on developer salaries and opportunities was to send the jobs overseas. Sending jobs overseas where labor is cheaper has been happening for decades in other areas of society—in the manufacturing sectors, for example—and now it is happening in our sector, too. Conventional wisdom holds that the process of outsourcing is slowing down as companies reassess the pros and cons of sending work overseas—and maybe it is—but just this week IBM announced that it is hiring 15,000 workers in India and letting 15,000 people go in the United States. It’s always struck me as strange to know people with solid job skills who are out of work, while companies lament the lack of qualified applicants.

The traditional free-market approach to acquiring more qualified applicants is to pay them more. This approach works wonders in attracting the best and brightest. The new paradigm is to hire people who will work for much less halfway across the globe. It works, to a degree, but it’s also short-sighted. Someday America will regret its loss of industrial capacity, as well as the loss of a significant percentage of its high-end service economy. Of course, short-term exigencies remain such that companies often feel they have no choice. We are mortgaging our futures for short-term gains that few benefit from today.