The American programmer won't go extinct, but they won't (and already don't) hold the same sort of manic worship they did in 98.
Too many people got into the field in the 90s. CS and CIS programs at four year colleges in the US were stuffed, and community college and "technical school" programs cropped up everywhere. Look in a community paper, you'll see ads from extortionate, damn near fraudulent, "technical schools" promising the Moon to graduates in "programming". Add the certifications racket, and you have a lot of people that thought they were buying into the gravy train. Getting $60-80k/yr job offers before they even graduate. That fantasy balloon got popped. Good riddance. It's the oil and gas engineer market correction of the 80s. The excess dead weight got cut.
I don't know much about software engineering processes, wasn't my corner. But from what I understand, the Americans will do the logic, and the Indians will do the sweat work, at least for the near term. Software coding is dull, laborous, and mind-numbing, from what little of it I've done. The easy part is writing. The hard part is the decision logic.
Based on what the Dean of Admissions told me, the last two years have been the largest law school applicant pools in decades. And amongst the smartest. Lots of engineers in the 2007 class, flooding out of IT into law and med school. Average age of my class - 28. Lots of experienced people.
Derek |
