“The Death of Software” is a great Infoworld article I read a couple of weeks back.
The subheading says:
A developer who’s seen it all believes the U.S. software industry is circling the drain ? and he knows who’s to blame.
It’s an op-ed piece about the ultimate demise of the software industry as a whole – sold out overseas just like every other American produced product that came before it. It talks about Bill Gates wringing his hands over the 60% dropoff in Computer Science grads, and yet he fails to acknowledge thousands and thousands of unemployed U.S. programmers that have the very talent he needs.
here’s a great excerpt:
From what I have seen since the year 2000, I would tell any youngster who sought my council that he or she would have to be as crazy as a bedbug to get into the software business today.
In fact, I did tell exactly this to one youngster: my nephew, Larry. But Larry doesn’t believe me. Larry comes from a rural area in south central Illinois, and all he ever saw of the software business was the hype and snazz. You know, fatuous TV shows and comic books where a boy genius hacker cracks a 64-character password in 15 seconds on his first try. Convinced his old uncle is all wet, Larry is doing just what Chairman Bill says is good for both Microsoft and the U.S. of A.; Larry is going ahead and getting a computer sciences degree. Poor kid. However, in a last ditch effort to save the lad, I did tell him to at least minor in a useful subject that has a future. Mortuary science, perhaps.
Larry probably wouldn’t be making this blunder if he had lived around Seattle or in the Bay Area. But living in the outback, Larry never saw the thousands of people — programmers and engineers, the very people Gates says he can’t find — given the sack during the Tech Wreck and who haven’t cut a line of code since. Larry never saw the men and women who created the best software on earth applying for food stamps. He never saw people he knew having their homes foreclosed and their belongings hauled away. Larry didn’t have neighbors who once made 80-odd thousand dollars a year now begging for jobs that pay a third of that. (Hey, ask your friendly Wal-Mart greeter what he or she did for a living back in, say, 2000.)
Be sure to read the whole article, it’s a good read for those that do any kind of coding for a living.
originally posted: 2005-10-19 23:13:21 -0400
