idealpeople blog

There’s a really interesting article on The Register this week.

The general gist it seems is that a variety of surveys suggest that there is some doom and gloom spreading into the IT jobs marketplace. Job numbers are down, and salaries seem to be moving nowhere - particularly amongst software development roles.

Also, there has been a huge shift away from companies seeking specialist skills and towards more generalist skills - it’s now a good idea to be able to program in C++, Java and C rather than be an evangelist of just one.

This news is topped off with some interesting comments which depict even more doom and gloom, and some interesting insights into the role of recruiters.

Well, not wanting to miss out, we want to make a somewhat bold and possibly even more doom-and-gloom statement: there’s a possibility that by 2013 there will hardly be ANY roles in Software Development in the UK - and that people working in Software Development could do far worse than to build on skills in Business Analysis, Solutions/Technical Architecture, Pre-Sales, Product Management, Consulting, Professional Services, Database Administration and other technical functions to safeguard against any future risk.

Before you all tell us we’re wrong, here’s why - off-shoring.

Everything within the market is pointing towards a significant amount of development work going overseas. And when we say everything, we mean…

1) There isn’t enough talent being produced by the UK universities and it’s too late for that to change. IT just isn’t attractive to undergraduates at the moment. Although this creates a skills shortage, the net effect is that the few good coders (and rising cost of living in the UK) means that all the good ones become disproportionately expensive, or go contracting, resulting in the offshoring option being more attractive on the basis of cost. This issue isn’t helped at all by tightening immigration.

2) Offshore is getting cheaper. 1 million are expected to Graduate in the next twelve months in IT in India alone, 5 million in China and a large number of them are Electronics and IT undergraduates. These places don’t have talent shortages, and salaries are kept much more affordable as more graduates seek to enter the industry. The supply/demand shift is totally different.

3) Open source: as the open-source movement grows, will this have a positive effect on the job market or a negative effect? OK, so lots of development companies can sell products to run on open source, but even if part of the market becomes free, this is likely to have an impact on the amount of positions available.

4) Finally, and this is sheer futurethinking on our part - in the future we will be able to build software without knowing a single language. All software will be rapidly built and deployed leveraging Software Development Kits and so the only remaining coders will be the ones building SDK’s and Tools. It’s possible to make Social Networks using Ning in five minutes now - try thinking how tough that would have been for you even 2-3 years ago in raw HTML. Check out Microsoft’s Game Creation SDK for a glimpse of the future. If you didn’t know C/Assembler just a few years back you had no chance of being able to ‘make’ a game.

Yes, these tools will create work for companies looking to take advantage of these tools, but the more the market goes in this direction, the quicker and easier software engineering becomes, and demand for specialist skills will go down.

Controversial? Maybe. Outsourcing as a development strategy still has its critics and its problems, but if even 25% of development jobs were to go overseas (particularly over the next couple of years when credit will be increasingly hard to get hold of and cost becomes even more of a factor in decision-making) the market will inevitably suffer….

Of course, feel free to come back in five years’ time and tell us we were wrong - but the declining numbers of development jobs available and the increase in demand in other technical functions is already evident.

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