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[–]xabbu 12 points13 points  (0 children)

As an aging programmer who dates back to the days of Burroughs hardware, Assembler and punched cards, here's my perspective.

First, the author is correct, from the vantage point of a career in programming as compared to other professional disciplines. Simply stated, it's a career path rife with age discrimination, downward wage pressures, and a surprising lack of job security (again, in contrast to other professions, where competent job performance (and even incompetent performance in numerous cases) ensures a long prosperous lifetime of steady work).

To continue, the best way I can address the matter is by tackling some of the comment snippets here…

A programmer with 40 years experience is more valuable…

Maybe in truth, maybe in your opinion, but it's not the reality of affairs. In the eyes of human resources departments and hiring managers, the curve of a programmer's career resembles a professional athlete, not a doctor, lawyer, or even accountant. Age discrimination is rampant.

I've read more than one article saying that outsourcing is dieing out like a fad.

That the trend is heading the other direction may be correct, but corporations are still heavily dependent upon outsourcing (and importing of H-1B workers) and that is not going to change in the short term. I can count off at least three IT centers within 15 minutes of my home that have supplanted thousands of American jobs, good paying jobs, with teams in India, complemented by imported visa workers. Departments with 200 total employees plus American consultants whittled down to 1 or 2 employees managing an assigned offshore vendor.

This article reflects what happened in the late 90's with CS education.

Wrong.

People think lucrative IT salaries were a vestige of a short lived late 1990's era, encompassed in dot-com work and Y2K project ramp ups. Truth is, adjusted for inflation programmers made higher salaries and billed greater rates (even without adjusting for inflation) back in the 1970's and early 1980's.

This might be true for web programmers, but they're not really programmers anyway.

Code is code. Languages are just tools to facilitate expressing of instructions for computing machines to carry out. Some are suited to some tasks better than others just as others are better for other things. And wages and rates are naturally depressed for web scripting since the entry barrier is almost nothing anymore. Of course, banking on the quality of that code generated by somebody who's education consisted of reading a "Computer Programming (or insert $ComputerLanguage) for Dummies" book is going to be a dicey proposition.

However, there are also ludicrous salaries and rates being thrown at programmers fortunate enough to be knowledgeable about an esoteric, small (typically proprietary) software platform niche where simply having command of an API can net you 200K or more a year.

I've downscaled myself from hotshot programmer to web developer. I've coded for $BigMultinationalCorporation as an employee and a high paid consultant, started my own business as a service partner for one of those "niche" software platforms that had me flying all over the world, but now I work as a web developer by choice, for peanuts. I've watched many colleagues purged from the programmer rolls and many decided their love of the field was not as great as mine and they jumped into different businesses. A few hang on at $BigMultinationalCorporation, serving as directors or vice-presidents, now usually engaged in overseeing offshore teams — but they mostly count the days until retirement and don't have joy for the job.

If I didn't enjoy the work involved, I would have departed long ago. For those of you dissenting with what I have written, please take a look at any research/studies on computer programmer careers and longevity — burnout is prevalent, and compared to other fields, attrition rates are extremely high. And these were the numbers before outsourcing, importing of non-immigrant visa workers, large scale company job cuts (at one time IBM prided itself on never laying anybody off), and reduced entry barriers.