The Federal Reserve of New York notes that recent college graduates with Computer Sciences major have a higher rate of unemployment than many other fields of study. There are a number of reasons for that including uncertainty, coding being done by artificial intelligence (or the expectation that it will), offshore outsourcing, and just plain saturation. Believe it or not it’s actually worse than journalism. There have been quite a number of layoffs in the last few years.
Note, too, in the graphic above that the net growth in employment in healthcare and social services very nearly exceeds that of all other sectors combined.
Having learned to program in the early ‘60’s on an IBM 1620 using punch cards for input, I have say that “coding” requires a very high degree of logical ability and attention to detail. The vast majority of people simply cannot do it.
Coding is a niche career.
From personal observation; the leading reason is offshore outsourcing. The high US dollar has the nominal US developer being about twice the cost of a developer in Europe, never mind locales like India or Latin America; zoom/teams and improving English proficiency in developers in other countries removed two other traditional barriers to outsourcing.
But it’s still a truism; you get what you pay for.
Medium term, software has a lot of opportunities. The software content in every industry (cars, manufacturing, health care, education, government) is still increasing. And for at least the next few years, AI is improving developer productivity by helping people write ‘drudgery’ code like tests faster. That’s going to enable a lot of demand for software that would be too expensive to justify otherwise.
I’ve had development teams in which the members were located in the United Kingdom, Portugal, Pakistan, Philippines, Mexico, and the United States. Try organizing a group meeting to fit those schedules!
More recently I’ve had development teams in Serbia, Ukraine, India, Mexico, and the United States.
Sadly, management frequently does not see it that way—they’re focused too narrowly on hourly rates and there are outsourcing companies whose revenues depend on management seeing it just that way. The reality is that human beings are not interchangeable parts. The challenge for me was ensuring that the right tasks were assigned to the right individuals. Some developers simply will not do certain things or, at least, will not do them well.
What I have also observed is that at this point there are outsourcing companies double or even triple billing individual workers. That means a company contracts with an individual and then the company contracts with another company which contracts with another company ad nauseam. They’re chiffering down the wages of the individual worker to make a small margin. That’s causing the entire labor market to break down.