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I don’t hear much about it these days, but circa 2004 when I was going into computer science I had multiple teachers and a guidance counselor warn me that all t

by donatj 5y ago

I don’t hear much about it these days, but circa 2004 when I was going into computer science I had multiple teachers and a guidance counselor warn me that all the jobs would be going to India and tell me I should pursue something else. This seemed to be very much the prevailing wisdom of the time. I pursued it anyway as it was my passion. I was one of five students in my program that had been a huge multi-campus program only a couple years earlier. We were the last cohort before the college discontinued the program entirely, and I was the only one to graduate. What I found however for maybe five years after graduation was a insanely high demand for developers. There was genuinely a generation that was so strongly discouraged from becoming developers that there were very few. Seems to me like the folklorists have largely missed this.

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yojo 5y ago
I experienced the exact same thing (graduating in 2005) to the extent that it dissuaded me from getting a CS degree at all. Outsourcing was supposed to be the end of programming jobs in America. My career took a 6 year detour until I finally made my way to programming professionally. I wish I’d had your conviction - the jobs I did in between weren’t half as fun and my career started that much later.
jasonkester 5y ago
To be fair, 2002-2003 would have been a pretty rough time to graduate as a developer. The industry hadn’t yet recovered from the whole dot com thing and there were still a million “converted business major” developers on the market who hadn’t yet got the hint that they should go to law school. The advice you got might not have applied to you on the way in. But it certainly applied to all the students those professors had just seen graduate. It probably took them a few years to notice the tide coming back in. Incidentally, the jobs had all been “going to India” for a long time by then. I’ve personally heard about them going there for at least 30 years now and I don’t doubt they will continue to do so in the future. At this point I’m not overly convinced they will all make it.
- donatj 5y ago
  > The industry hadn’t yet recovered from the whole dot com thing You are completely right about that and that slipped my mind. Either way it was kind of nice how easy it was to get a job back then. Getting my foot in the door was a little difficult actually, but once I had some thing on my résumé I got an interview for basically every job I applied to. My résumé is much more impressive these days, and it may be in part ageism or higher salary expectations, but it’s much rare to hear back from a job application.
  - hellbannedguy 5y ago
    It's ageism. Sorry for being so blunt, but I know to many people who were just uninteresting to human resourses after hitting 45-50. I know more than a few homeless people in my life, and over half were once Programmers. It makes me sick. I do know this, if you are in tech, save up that money. (I have never understood this industry's way of hiring. Long drawn out interviews, and candidates whom are just average that get jobs. Why not hire a guy for two weeks. See how they do. And of course, be upfront. Tell them this is probationary. You don't sent a guy to relocate, just to be let go in a few weeks. There are some really great older workers that some company will scoop up when hiring is upgraded to this decade. Sorry about the sentence fragments. Too lazy to fix.)
    - sersi 5y ago
      As someone who's been in charge of recruitment, I've made an effort in hiring people who are less likely to get a chance at other places (minorities, older candidates) One thing that stood out to me though is that a lot of the older candidates I interviewed that had been struggling had deep knowledge of a technology that's no longer used and had had very little interest during their career in learning new things outside their job. So once the thing they were expert in was no longer fashionable, they had a hard time catching back up. I know it's unfashionable to say this and I know that a lot of people have full time jobs and don't want to have side project additionally to their full time job but if you want to keep a career as a software developer past 40 without going into management then you need to do side projects,you need to keep up to date with some of the latest fad (even if some of those fads are cyclical and recycle concepts from 20 years ago). Doing a job well and becoming an expert in an obsolete technology is no path to career growth.
ajuc 5y ago
Interesting. I was just starting CS course at university in 2003 in Poland and it was obvious to everybody it's the future and there will be enough jobs for everybody. There were 20 candidates for each place in the course so you had to pass the entry exams really well (and it wasn't the best university in Poland, far from it). I guess that's the difference between being the outsourcing source and destination :)
- KronisLV 5y ago
  > I guess that's the difference between being the outsourcing source and destination :) Personally i'd agree that this is good for individual employment prospects, but not necessarily good for the country itself. For example, here in Latvia i've heard that there's a shortage of developers and hence many government projects can't be fully staffed easily, because they're having problems being competitive in regards to wages, when compared to outsourcing companies, like Accenture. Of course, there's no reason for why any developer should work against their interests in regards to being able to save and earn money, but it does seem interesting - maybe i'm wrong and it's just a regional thing?
  - ajuc 5y ago
    I think for almost all countries the taxes developers working for foreign companies pay outweight the higher costs of hiring some of them for building software for the government. Let's say government hires 1% of the developers in the country, foreign companies pay them 3 times more and if not for outsourcing 50% of these people would have to emigrate. If X is base salary ignoring outsourcing then the country would earn 0.5 * X * tax_rate - 0.01 * X without outsourcing and 3 * X * tax_rate - 0.01 * 3 * X with outsourcing So the change is (3 - 0.5) * X * tax_rate - 0.01 * X * (3-1) = 2.5 * X * tax_rate - 0.02 * X = X * (2.5 * tax_rate - 0.02) So in this simplistic example for the country to benefit from outsourcing it suffices that tax_rate > 0.008 which is pretty much always true. Let's say government hires 10% of developers, nobody would migrate and the salary difference would be 500%. Even with such unrealistic assumptions the tax_rate would just need to be higher than 10% for the country to benefit from outsourcing. tax_rate > (5-1) * 0.1 / (5-1) = 0.1 If you want to play with it it's: tax_rate > ((salary_foreign - salary_domestic) * percent_hired_by_government) / (salary_foreign - (salary_domestic* forced_migration))
cm2187 5y ago
In all fairness, where I work (large european financial institution), all the dev jobs have been moved to India.
- Aeolun 5y ago
  But is it working out? Or is everything now an infinite shitstorm?
  - cm2187 5y ago
    The latter. But I can’t say that it was a lot more functional before.
Semaphor 5y ago
That’s strange, I started studying in 2005 and had planned to go into Comp. Sci. for at least 2 years, yet I had never heard similar sentiment expressed. Germany.
- deleted 5y ago
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- manmal 5y ago
  Same here (2005), but in Austria. I think Europe still had to catch up to the US‘ pre-2000 level of „digitalisation“ such that the bubble burst didn’t do that much to our industries.
  - Semaphor 5y ago
    Good point. I guess the language barrier was another issue, with English obviously being more popular than German, so "Indians in India taking our IT jobs" wasn’t really a thing.
    - ChuckNorris89 5y ago
      Except that Germany and Austria have an obsession to outsource, or more accurately nearshore everything to Poland, Romania, Hungary, Ukraine, Czech Republic, etc. so dev wages there hold no candle to the ones in the US or even UK and the only path to decent pay is going into management.
snapetom 5y ago
Yep. And everyone was afraid of all these drag and drop tools that generated Java code. "You just have to know UML!" was the promise. I'm reminded of that today in the rare instance when I run into the decision makers that are convinced GUI data engineering tools are the future.
- chii 5y ago
  > the decision makers that are convinced GUI data engineering tools are the future. The same train of thought leads to the idea that you can produce good software with mediocre developers by using processes, coding rules and checklists and "development methodology" like agile.
  - zozbot234 5y ago
    To be fair, Agile is not about leveraging mediocre developers - it's about enabling a handful of your best, most experienced hackers and architects (the fabled "two-pizzas team") to work under the best possible conditions, because the proponents of Agile had internalized the lesson that trying to scale up large teams of mediocre devs is a fool's errand.
    - raducu 5y ago
      Agile is what managers make it to be. To A LOT OF THEM it is about not doing any planning, writing zero specifications, using vague language for requirements, comparing performance of apples and oranges, "self-help"/motivational, justification to pressure those below and not bother with those above and so on and on. But to most, it is just putting lipstick on the same old pig. Did I mention the whole training, coaches and lango flinging industry?
    - Chris2048 5y ago
      Agile in it's original form - yes. Many everyday biz versions of agile et al - No. Fundamentally, dev is something to negotiate with, cooperatively, versus commanding "do what I say"-style. Many businesses are unable or unwilling to do away with this top-down hierarchy, hence agile will never succeed there. The agile they practise instead is "Agile, but without actually relinquishing top-down control". TBH, I think what we are really missing is for the development team to be a contract team (ala Accenture) that can implement agile via official mediums e.g. pushback via contractually negotiation, backlog prioritisation via contract pricing ("we can do that, but this is what it'll cost").
ayngg 5y ago
I went to university a couple years after that and also felt a similar sentiment that it was basically too late to get in on a good career before the industry got outsourced. Of course then social media happened and everyone and their grandma needed developers so it didn't matter that people were flooding in because there simply wasn't enough labor to go around.
- heurisko 5y ago
  I think there are also qualitative reasons why outsourcing didn't prove as successful as many companies thought. One being, that business requirements are often complex, and contain ambiguity, which requires communication between developers and the business, which is hampered by differences in timezones and culture.
rob74 5y ago
Plus, there's also the "pork cycle" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pork_cycle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pork_cycle) aspect to consider: few CS graduates -> better employment chances/higher salaries for developers -> more people study CS -> (after a few years) more people graduate (if you're unlucky, coinciding with a recession) -> worse employment chances -> fewer people study CS and so on...
Negitivefrags 5y ago
I had the exact same thing when I arrived at university in 2004. There was a big Compsci building that had been completed a year or two before I arrived (started being built before the dotcom crash). It was scoped for the massive growth in students that they were expecting in computing. By the time I arrived the thing was practically a ghost town. Student enrollment had cratered. I remember the huge fields of desktop computers available for students on multiple floors, and it was basically empty the whole time.
momento 5y ago
My father was very strongly against my decision to get into web development (2012) and he echoed this sentiment heavily. I distinctly remember him yelling at me as a teenager; "you'll be living under a bridge in 5 years if you do this! India has this market!". He eventually kicked me out for not listening, forcing me to to borrow money from a friend to pay tuition in my final semester. Needless to say he was completely wrong. I was out-earning him within 2 years of entering the market and I have probably the greatest job security in my immediate friendship circle. Despite my efforts, he refuses to talk to me to this day. The man does not like being wrong nor disobeyed. A shame really.
- fridif 5y ago
  This is a good reason for why I don't strongly hold on to any of my opinions lol
  - hughrr 5y ago
    I know you made the point in jest but you’re right. To be adaptable you need to embrace change and opinion is the hardest to change. I’ve seen people die holding an opinion which has been thoroughly disproven. Embrace change!
    - fridif 5y ago
      Agreed. Some people would rather burn bridges than admit they were wrong
- conjectures 5y ago
  Wow, sounds both harsh and an ineffectual way to go at life.
- irjustin 5y ago
  Wow there's so much to unpack there. While professionally sounds like you're doing just fine, I hope you're doing okay personally.
  - 5y ago
stepbeek 5y ago
That's why I studied maths at university. It was beaten into my head in school that IT was on the decline.
Cthulhu_ 5y ago
Weird, around that time (a few years earlier actually) I was warned by the IT school we went to that they might try and pick us up to work for them before graduation. Didn't work out like that though, and plenty of my classmates couldn't find a job in IT and had to go for something else or move on to college. I went on to college anyway because I wanted to do software development. Most of my classmates that joined didn't make it, or needed more time. A friend of mine ended up working in garbage collection and construction (remote crane operator) for a while, but he landed a job at a shipyard, and now a very cushy one at a generic IT supplier, traveling the country sometimes to go to jobs.
tppiotrowski 5y ago
I remember a national best seller around that time was "The World is Flat" [1]. It talked about globalisation and made convincing arguments about outsourcing. Maybe your advisors were influenced by it. [1] https://www.amazon.com/World-Flat-History-Twenty-first-Century/dp/0374292884 https://www.amazon.com/World-Flat-History-Twenty-first-Centu...
xenihn 5y ago
My own father was a software engineer and he gave me and my siblings the same (bad) advice!
themdonuts 5y ago
I went to uni in 2004 and always had a crush for civil engineering. A few days before signing up my dad told me: I feel construction is stalling, I think you should go for Electrical Engineering. Best advice ever. By the time I finished construction was indeed dead and there were too many programming jobs. Similarly to other users here from Europe, in 2010 the market was actually starting to take off. My dad was such a visionary... or I just had a total lack of it!
- thorin 5y ago
  I graduated Electronic Eng in the UK in 1998, my best friend did Civil. I went into computers, he could only find low paid jobs in the UK so went to Hong Kong where construction was booming and now owns a significant part of a multimillion dollar company with hundreds of employees. I haven't really followed the money at all, so I'm not too sad.
Al-Khwarizmi 5y ago
I started university in 2000 in Spain, and I remember at that particular point in time studying computer science wasn't seen as desirable. When people had that interest, parents typically pushed them children to study telecommunications engineering instead. It was the fad at the time: they were all employed, had a strong lobby and made a lot of money. It didn't last much, by the time I graduated from computer science everyone in computer science had a decent job (not paying a lot, but enough for a living) while telecommunications engineers were out of job in their specific field and mostly taking second picks in the CS job market. And to my knowledge, it has been mostly like that since then.
laxmin 5y ago
The lesson is that there is always place for everybody, whole of India included in Computer Science.. Once AI matures to a level where it can write programs, we will have to create newer pastures however.
- JohnL4 5y ago
  Pretty sure AI, like fusion, is the technology of the future and always will be. When we solve the halting problem, AI can write software. Until then, it's Intelligence Augmentation, not AI, and humans will remain in the loop.
- mbrodersen 5y ago
  Wait a few hundred years and perhaps AI will be mature by then. I personally don’t worry one bit.
robinduckett 5y ago
My parents to this day ask me when I will be getting a *real* job. I make three times what my dad makes in a year.
- cableshaft 5y ago
  Surprised you don't say right back, "When are you getting a real job?"
  - robinduckett 5y ago
    Because I don't want to catch la chancla :P
    - Roybot 5y ago
      haha I hear that.
arp242 5y ago
Actually, I was trying to find out the number of programmers world-wide the other day, and many US-based analysis were saying the same thing: "programmer jobs in the US will drop in the next 10 years as jobs move abroad". For example [1], but many more with the same gist. https://www.careerexplorer.com/careers/computer-programmer/job-market/ https://www.careerexplorer.com/careers/computer-programmer/j...
- topkai22 5y ago
  That site looks like it’s just repurposing the us government’s occupation data. See https://www.bls.gov/ooh/computer-and-information-technology/mobile/home.htm https://www.bls.gov/ooh/computer-and-information-technology/... The BLS statistics have us based “programmer” jobs declining by 9% but “software developer” jobs expanding by 23% on a higher base. The job description is largely the same, although software developers have more design responsibility.
plif 5y ago
I had a very similar experience around the same timeframe. I was also heavily discouraged by relatives in the field. How wrong they ended up being...
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ideamotor 5y ago
Yes and this thinking still pervades the engineers that came of age in that era and did avoid programming. One of my coworkers is obsessed with outsourcing and thinks of any programming task as being something that should be done in India. He asks why I should do something when we should hire a team in India, which is a ridiculous thing to say for so many reasons.
api 5y ago
The failure of software outsourcing is really quite interesting, especially since telework is working decently well. That seems to eliminate the “remote work doesn’t work” objection. It was not for lack of trying. The management class pushed it very hard. There are still many firms trying but it’s not really panning out. From what I have seen the answer is that good software engineers are globally scarce and the good ones in India or Eastern Europe make enough that outsourcing isn’t that profitable once all overhead is included. “Insourcing” is becoming a bit of a thing. You can get some salary benefits outsourcing to lower cost domestic places like Nebraska or Kentucky and not dealing with language, time zone, international currency exchange, legal differences, or other headaches. These folks can also travel to your office for an in person meeting in hours not days. Oh and their power grid and broadband are reliable too. The jobs that have been most successfully outsourced are low to moderate skill manual jobs where basically what is needed is huge numbers of cheap hands.
- cableshaft 5y ago
  Also a lot of the good software engineers in India end up relocating elsewhere, like the US, to get better pay. I've worked with a lot of really talented Indian software engineers, and some really terrible Indian developers (I hesitate to call them engineers). All of the talented ones had relocated and were living in the US. I'm sure there are some talented software engineers that stay in India also, I just never end up working with them (probably because the companies I worked for were trying to save a few bucks by outsourcing to begin with, and went with the lowest bidder).
- mbrodersen 5y ago
  It is obvious why: the great developers in India start their own companies or immigrate. The bad ones work for outsourcing companies.
kls 5y ago
It really was the prevailing wisdom of the time. I entered the job market in 92, a few months after CERN released their browser. I knew what was coming when I saw the web for the first time, but the only jobs at the time where custom desktop software for businesses. It was the same after the .com bust which is right around where you picked up. 04 and 05 where really bad years to be in the industry, as the only jobs left in the industry where internal corporate software gigs. Which meant most of the employment opportunities where not, out in CA, but rather in sporadic areas around the country. As well, there was a waves of offshoring, so again the common wisdom was do not go into computing. With that being said, I hade the fortune of working with a company that was early to mobile, and was working with Palm on mobile web apps around 2000, so when the crash came, though I lost that job due to the company closing, I knew mobile was right around the corner and went back to grinding out internal corporate software for a few years. The offshore projects started to fail to deliver and then Steve came back and launched the iPhone. My experience is software is a boom bust economy. It's been more robust this run and everyone learned that outsourcing was not the win-win they thought it was going to be. In the meantime software ate the world so there is not enough hands to do the work that is out there and to your point, a whole generation was discouraged from entering the market. If there is any market that has a bad track record of employment forecast software dev has to be top of the heap.

by donatj 5y ago

deleted 5y ago

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yojo 5y ago

I experienced the exact same thing (graduating in 2005) to the extent that it dissuaded me from getting a CS degree at all. Outsourcing was supposed to be the end of programming jobs in America. My career took a 6 year detour until I finally made my way to programming professionally. I wish I’d had your conviction - the jobs I did in between weren’t half as fun and my career started that much later.

jasonkester 5y ago

To be fair, 2002-2003 would have been a pretty rough time to graduate as a developer. The industry hadn’t yet recovered from the whole dot com thing and there were still a million “converted business major” developers on the market who hadn’t yet got the hint that they should go to law school. The advice you got might not have applied to you on the way in. But it certainly applied to all the students those professors had just seen graduate. It probably took them a few years to notice the tide coming back in. Incidentally, the jobs had all been “going to India” for a long time by then. I’ve personally heard about them going there for at least 30 years now and I don’t doubt they will continue to do so in the future. At this point I’m not overly convinced they will all make it.

donatj 5y ago
> The industry hadn’t yet recovered from the whole dot com thing You are completely right about that and that slipped my mind. Either way it was kind of nice how easy it was to get a job back then. Getting my foot in the door was a little difficult actually, but once I had some thing on my résumé I got an interview for basically every job I applied to. My résumé is much more impressive these days, and it may be in part ageism or higher salary expectations, but it’s much rare to hear back from a job application.
- hellbannedguy 5y ago
  It's ageism. Sorry for being so blunt, but I know to many people who were just uninteresting to human resourses after hitting 45-50. I know more than a few homeless people in my life, and over half were once Programmers. It makes me sick. I do know this, if you are in tech, save up that money. (I have never understood this industry's way of hiring. Long drawn out interviews, and candidates whom are just average that get jobs. Why not hire a guy for two weeks. See how they do. And of course, be upfront. Tell them this is probationary. You don't sent a guy to relocate, just to be let go in a few weeks. There are some really great older workers that some company will scoop up when hiring is upgraded to this decade. Sorry about the sentence fragments. Too lazy to fix.)
  - sersi 5y ago
    As someone who's been in charge of recruitment, I've made an effort in hiring people who are less likely to get a chance at other places (minorities, older candidates) One thing that stood out to me though is that a lot of the older candidates I interviewed that had been struggling had deep knowledge of a technology that's no longer used and had had very little interest during their career in learning new things outside their job. So once the thing they were expert in was no longer fashionable, they had a hard time catching back up. I know it's unfashionable to say this and I know that a lot of people have full time jobs and don't want to have side project additionally to their full time job but if you want to keep a career as a software developer past 40 without going into management then you need to do side projects,you need to keep up to date with some of the latest fad (even if some of those fads are cyclical and recycle concepts from 20 years ago). Doing a job well and becoming an expert in an obsolete technology is no path to career growth.

ajuc 5y ago

Interesting. I was just starting CS course at university in 2003 in Poland and it was obvious to everybody it's the future and there will be enough jobs for everybody. There were 20 candidates for each place in the course so you had to pass the entry exams really well (and it wasn't the best university in Poland, far from it). I guess that's the difference between being the outsourcing source and destination :)

KronisLV 5y ago
> I guess that's the difference between being the outsourcing source and destination :) Personally i'd agree that this is good for individual employment prospects, but not necessarily good for the country itself. For example, here in Latvia i've heard that there's a shortage of developers and hence many government projects can't be fully staffed easily, because they're having problems being competitive in regards to wages, when compared to outsourcing companies, like Accenture. Of course, there's no reason for why any developer should work against their interests in regards to being able to save and earn money, but it does seem interesting - maybe i'm wrong and it's just a regional thing?
- ajuc 5y ago
  I think for almost all countries the taxes developers working for foreign companies pay outweight the higher costs of hiring some of them for building software for the government. Let's say government hires 1% of the developers in the country, foreign companies pay them 3 times more and if not for outsourcing 50% of these people would have to emigrate. If X is base salary ignoring outsourcing then the country would earn 0.5 * X * tax_rate - 0.01 * X without outsourcing and 3 * X * tax_rate - 0.01 * 3 * X with outsourcing So the change is (3 - 0.5) * X * tax_rate - 0.01 * X * (3-1) = 2.5 * X * tax_rate - 0.02 * X = X * (2.5 * tax_rate - 0.02) So in this simplistic example for the country to benefit from outsourcing it suffices that tax_rate > 0.008 which is pretty much always true. Let's say government hires 10% of developers, nobody would migrate and the salary difference would be 500%. Even with such unrealistic assumptions the tax_rate would just need to be higher than 10% for the country to benefit from outsourcing. tax_rate > (5-1) * 0.1 / (5-1) = 0.1 If you want to play with it it's: tax_rate > ((salary_foreign - salary_domestic) * percent_hired_by_government) / (salary_foreign - (salary_domestic* forced_migration))

cm2187 5y ago

In all fairness, where I work (large european financial institution), all the dev jobs have been moved to India.

Aeolun 5y ago
But is it working out? Or is everything now an infinite shitstorm?
- cm2187 5y ago
  The latter. But I can’t say that it was a lot more functional before.

Semaphor 5y ago

That’s strange, I started studying in 2005 and had planned to go into Comp. Sci. for at least 2 years, yet I had never heard similar sentiment expressed. Germany.

deleted 5y ago
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manmal 5y ago
Same here (2005), but in Austria. I think Europe still had to catch up to the US‘ pre-2000 level of „digitalisation“ such that the bubble burst didn’t do that much to our industries.
- Semaphor 5y ago
  Good point. I guess the language barrier was another issue, with English obviously being more popular than German, so "Indians in India taking our IT jobs" wasn’t really a thing.
  - ChuckNorris89 5y ago
    Except that Germany and Austria have an obsession to outsource, or more accurately nearshore everything to Poland, Romania, Hungary, Ukraine, Czech Republic, etc. so dev wages there hold no candle to the ones in the US or even UK and the only path to decent pay is going into management.

snapetom 5y ago

Yep. And everyone was afraid of all these drag and drop tools that generated Java code. "You just have to know UML!" was the promise. I'm reminded of that today in the rare instance when I run into the decision makers that are convinced GUI data engineering tools are the future.

chii 5y ago
> the decision makers that are convinced GUI data engineering tools are the future. The same train of thought leads to the idea that you can produce good software with mediocre developers by using processes, coding rules and checklists and "development methodology" like agile.
- zozbot234 5y ago
  To be fair, Agile is not about leveraging mediocre developers - it's about enabling a handful of your best, most experienced hackers and architects (the fabled "two-pizzas team") to work under the best possible conditions, because the proponents of Agile had internalized the lesson that trying to scale up large teams of mediocre devs is a fool's errand.
  - raducu 5y ago
    Agile is what managers make it to be. To A LOT OF THEM it is about not doing any planning, writing zero specifications, using vague language for requirements, comparing performance of apples and oranges, "self-help"/motivational, justification to pressure those below and not bother with those above and so on and on. But to most, it is just putting lipstick on the same old pig. Did I mention the whole training, coaches and lango flinging industry?
  - Chris2048 5y ago
    Agile in it's original form - yes. Many everyday biz versions of agile et al - No. Fundamentally, dev is something to negotiate with, cooperatively, versus commanding "do what I say"-style. Many businesses are unable or unwilling to do away with this top-down hierarchy, hence agile will never succeed there. The agile they practise instead is "Agile, but without actually relinquishing top-down control". TBH, I think what we are really missing is for the development team to be a contract team (ala Accenture) that can implement agile via official mediums e.g. pushback via contractually negotiation, backlog prioritisation via contract pricing ("we can do that, but this is what it'll cost").

ayngg 5y ago

I went to university a couple years after that and also felt a similar sentiment that it was basically too late to get in on a good career before the industry got outsourced. Of course then social media happened and everyone and their grandma needed developers so it didn't matter that people were flooding in because there simply wasn't enough labor to go around.

heurisko 5y ago
I think there are also qualitative reasons why outsourcing didn't prove as successful as many companies thought. One being, that business requirements are often complex, and contain ambiguity, which requires communication between developers and the business, which is hampered by differences in timezones and culture.

rob74 5y ago

Plus, there's also the "pork cycle" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pork_cycle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pork_cycle) aspect to consider: few CS graduates -> better employment chances/higher salaries for developers -> more people study CS -> (after a few years) more people graduate (if you're unlucky, coinciding with a recession) -> worse employment chances -> fewer people study CS and so on...

Negitivefrags 5y ago

I had the exact same thing when I arrived at university in 2004. There was a big Compsci building that had been completed a year or two before I arrived (started being built before the dotcom crash). It was scoped for the massive growth in students that they were expecting in computing. By the time I arrived the thing was practically a ghost town. Student enrollment had cratered. I remember the huge fields of desktop computers available for students on multiple floors, and it was basically empty the whole time.

momento 5y ago

My father was very strongly against my decision to get into web development (2012) and he echoed this sentiment heavily. I distinctly remember him yelling at me as a teenager; "you'll be living under a bridge in 5 years if you do this! India has this market!". He eventually kicked me out for not listening, forcing me to to borrow money from a friend to pay tuition in my final semester. Needless to say he was completely wrong. I was out-earning him within 2 years of entering the market and I have probably the greatest job security in my immediate friendship circle. Despite my efforts, he refuses to talk to me to this day. The man does not like being wrong nor disobeyed. A shame really.

fridif 5y ago
This is a good reason for why I don't strongly hold on to any of my opinions lol
- hughrr 5y ago
  I know you made the point in jest but you’re right. To be adaptable you need to embrace change and opinion is the hardest to change. I’ve seen people die holding an opinion which has been thoroughly disproven. Embrace change!
  - fridif 5y ago
    Agreed. Some people would rather burn bridges than admit they were wrong
conjectures 5y ago
Wow, sounds both harsh and an ineffectual way to go at life.
irjustin 5y ago
Wow there's so much to unpack there. While professionally sounds like you're doing just fine, I hope you're doing okay personally.
- 5y ago

stepbeek 5y ago

That's why I studied maths at university. It was beaten into my head in school that IT was on the decline.

Cthulhu_ 5y ago

Weird, around that time (a few years earlier actually) I was warned by the IT school we went to that they might try and pick us up to work for them before graduation. Didn't work out like that though, and plenty of my classmates couldn't find a job in IT and had to go for something else or move on to college. I went on to college anyway because I wanted to do software development. Most of my classmates that joined didn't make it, or needed more time. A friend of mine ended up working in garbage collection and construction (remote crane operator) for a while, but he landed a job at a shipyard, and now a very cushy one at a generic IT supplier, traveling the country sometimes to go to jobs.

tppiotrowski 5y ago

I remember a national best seller around that time was "The World is Flat" [1]. It talked about globalisation and made convincing arguments about outsourcing. Maybe your advisors were influenced by it. [1] https://www.amazon.com/World-Flat-History-Twenty-first-Century/dp/0374292884 https://www.amazon.com/World-Flat-History-Twenty-first-Centu...

xenihn 5y ago

My own father was a software engineer and he gave me and my siblings the same (bad) advice!

themdonuts 5y ago

I went to uni in 2004 and always had a crush for civil engineering. A few days before signing up my dad told me: I feel construction is stalling, I think you should go for Electrical Engineering. Best advice ever. By the time I finished construction was indeed dead and there were too many programming jobs. Similarly to other users here from Europe, in 2010 the market was actually starting to take off. My dad was such a visionary... or I just had a total lack of it!

thorin 5y ago
I graduated Electronic Eng in the UK in 1998, my best friend did Civil. I went into computers, he could only find low paid jobs in the UK so went to Hong Kong where construction was booming and now owns a significant part of a multimillion dollar company with hundreds of employees. I haven't really followed the money at all, so I'm not too sad.

Al-Khwarizmi 5y ago

I started university in 2000 in Spain, and I remember at that particular point in time studying computer science wasn't seen as desirable. When people had that interest, parents typically pushed them children to study telecommunications engineering instead. It was the fad at the time: they were all employed, had a strong lobby and made a lot of money. It didn't last much, by the time I graduated from computer science everyone in computer science had a decent job (not paying a lot, but enough for a living) while telecommunications engineers were out of job in their specific field and mostly taking second picks in the CS job market. And to my knowledge, it has been mostly like that since then.

laxmin 5y ago

The lesson is that there is always place for everybody, whole of India included in Computer Science.. Once AI matures to a level where it can write programs, we will have to create newer pastures however.

JohnL4 5y ago
Pretty sure AI, like fusion, is the technology of the future and always will be. When we solve the halting problem, AI can write software. Until then, it's Intelligence Augmentation, not AI, and humans will remain in the loop.
mbrodersen 5y ago
Wait a few hundred years and perhaps AI will be mature by then. I personally don’t worry one bit.

robinduckett 5y ago

My parents to this day ask me when I will be getting a *real* job. I make three times what my dad makes in a year.

cableshaft 5y ago
Surprised you don't say right back, "When are you getting a real job?"
- robinduckett 5y ago
  Because I don't want to catch la chancla :P
  - Roybot 5y ago
    haha I hear that.

arp242 5y ago

Actually, I was trying to find out the number of programmers world-wide the other day, and many US-based analysis were saying the same thing: "programmer jobs in the US will drop in the next 10 years as jobs move abroad". For example [1], but many more with the same gist. https://www.careerexplorer.com/careers/computer-programmer/job-market/ https://www.careerexplorer.com/careers/computer-programmer/j...

topkai22 5y ago
That site looks like it’s just repurposing the us government’s occupation data. See https://www.bls.gov/ooh/computer-and-information-technology/mobile/home.htm https://www.bls.gov/ooh/computer-and-information-technology/... The BLS statistics have us based “programmer” jobs declining by 9% but “software developer” jobs expanding by 23% on a higher base. The job description is largely the same, although software developers have more design responsibility.

plif 5y ago

I had a very similar experience around the same timeframe. I was also heavily discouraged by relatives in the field. How wrong they ended up being...

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ideamotor 5y ago

Yes and this thinking still pervades the engineers that came of age in that era and did avoid programming. One of my coworkers is obsessed with outsourcing and thinks of any programming task as being something that should be done in India. He asks why I should do something when we should hire a team in India, which is a ridiculous thing to say for so many reasons.

api 5y ago

The failure of software outsourcing is really quite interesting, especially since telework is working decently well. That seems to eliminate the “remote work doesn’t work” objection. It was not for lack of trying. The management class pushed it very hard. There are still many firms trying but it’s not really panning out. From what I have seen the answer is that good software engineers are globally scarce and the good ones in India or Eastern Europe make enough that outsourcing isn’t that profitable once all overhead is included. “Insourcing” is becoming a bit of a thing. You can get some salary benefits outsourcing to lower cost domestic places like Nebraska or Kentucky and not dealing with language, time zone, international currency exchange, legal differences, or other headaches. These folks can also travel to your office for an in person meeting in hours not days. Oh and their power grid and broadband are reliable too. The jobs that have been most successfully outsourced are low to moderate skill manual jobs where basically what is needed is huge numbers of cheap hands.

cableshaft 5y ago
Also a lot of the good software engineers in India end up relocating elsewhere, like the US, to get better pay. I've worked with a lot of really talented Indian software engineers, and some really terrible Indian developers (I hesitate to call them engineers). All of the talented ones had relocated and were living in the US. I'm sure there are some talented software engineers that stay in India also, I just never end up working with them (probably because the companies I worked for were trying to save a few bucks by outsourcing to begin with, and went with the lowest bidder).
mbrodersen 5y ago
It is obvious why: the great developers in India start their own companies or immigrate. The bad ones work for outsourcing companies.

kls 5y ago

It really was the prevailing wisdom of the time. I entered the job market in 92, a few months after CERN released their browser. I knew what was coming when I saw the web for the first time, but the only jobs at the time where custom desktop software for businesses. It was the same after the .com bust which is right around where you picked up. 04 and 05 where really bad years to be in the industry, as the only jobs left in the industry where internal corporate software gigs. Which meant most of the employment opportunities where not, out in CA, but rather in sporadic areas around the country. As well, there was a waves of offshoring, so again the common wisdom was do not go into computing. With that being said, I hade the fortune of working with a company that was early to mobile, and was working with Palm on mobile web apps around 2000, so when the crash came, though I lost that job due to the company closing, I knew mobile was right around the corner and went back to grinding out internal corporate software for a few years. The offshore projects started to fail to deliver and then Steve came back and launched the iPhone. My experience is software is a boom bust economy. It's been more robust this run and everyone learned that outsourcing was not the win-win they thought it was going to be. In the meantime software ate the world so there is not enough hands to do the work that is out there and to your point, a whole generation was discouraged from entering the market. If there is any market that has a bad track record of employment forecast software dev has to be top of the heap.