Software developers becoming scarce | Hacker News Reader

Software developers becoming scarce

sdtimes.com

24 pointsdlnovell22 comments

Burd speculated that one factor behind the increase he sees is the greater adoption of mobile devices and consumer electronics. Mobile devices are putting computers in the forefront of people’s lives the same way that PCs did in the 1980s, he said.

So kids want to be computer scientists so they can build iPhone apps... Colleges are going to have to start teaching Objective C now?

I don't know... I used to think teaching that low level stuff like assembly and verilog were bad ideas, but the more I think about it, the more I realize it really shapes the mind into a programming machine. Learning the high level stuff is pretty easy once the low level foundations are instilled in the mind.

Kids coming out of college today don't understand linked lists or binary trees or sort algorithms. You don't have to be able to code all of them from scratch, but understanding those concepts expands the mind and actually makes "real world" programming easier because you can understand the ramifications of your decisions.

I'm sure back in the MS-DOS era someone said the same things about college students needing to learn vacuum tubes and punch cards before moving on to high level languages such as BASIC.

The issue is "skill development" vs "mind development" BASIC, or any particular language is a skill.

I had to teach a new college grad (comp sci) working in my office what DOS was. He didn't like to fiddle with 'computer stuff'.

As I was walking him through 'CD' and 'mkdir' I almost had him type 'format c:' just to see what would happen.

So, some basics should be taught.

I agree with you about needing to teach low level things like data structures and algorithms, but I don't see why teaching Objective-C would be a bad idea. If anything it's lower level than Java in that you can still teach people about pointers and memory allocation, etc.

I don't think it's a bad idea. I suppose I did imply that with my tone. My thoughts were more inline with it being a fad and very narrowly focused more than it being bad.

It'll be critical to get kids interested in programming and if they have an iPhone and can get excited about producing apps that run on them and make their lives better, there's nothing wrong with it. It's just not quite as generic as C++ or something like that.

Very like getting engineering apprentices to make a 1 inch steel cube using only files. Serves no direct purpose, but you gain a lot of understanding of the materials and tools.

Edit: Or these for machinists: http://i20.photobucket.com/albums/b201/michael0100/reducedtu...

Well, I went to college in the '80s and they did teach us assembly and algorithms. And we had to program in BASIC for one of our labs. And then Pascal for another lab, and another in Prolog, C, functional programming, etc.

They surely can teach CS the same way today, no? Replace Pascal or BASIC with Objective-C and/or JavaScript, and it's more or less the same thing.

actually they should be able to code all of them from scratch. They don't have to know all the details by heart or be able to come up with the concept from nothing, but if given Wikipedia as a reference, any developer worth anything should be able to implement these basic data structures and basic algorithms without much trouble.

This article talks about the supply side of the developer job market. The next logical question is "what is the state of the demand side of the developer job market"?

If demand is the same as it was before, then this is good for existing developers.

Scarce? I'm right here! And I need a new job!

But there aren't very many of you! I mean, we've all spent some time looking for jobs, right? Even the best of us.

What are you doing in your free time? (Off-topic, but I don't know how to private contact him.)

I think what's happening is not just "spending situation".

One of the paradoxes of this industry is that same work within the same time frame can be done by a group of 30 developers or by a small group of 3-4 developers. Same work, same time frame. There is a number of reasons for this, obvious or not, but the paradox I'm talking about is not why this is true, but rather why bloated companies still exist.

So I think what's happening is the laws of free market have just started fixing this situation gradually. Smaller companies will be winning more often, as well as languages and tools that suit rapid, focused development in small groups.

(P.S. Edit: I can't believe I said "rapid, focused", sounds like a cheap press release.)

Good software developers have always been scarce.

True, but by increased scarceity they mean slower growth.

research pointing to a decline in software developers. In its 2009 Global Developer Population and Demographics Study, released in May, Evans Data revised downward its prior forecasts of developer growth for several major industrial regions, including North America, Western Europe and Japan.

Now bad ones will be scarce, too.

I can't read the article.

"Server Error in '/' Application. Runtime Error Description: An application error occurred on the server."

sigh

You can copy and paste the link into google and try "cached". This link worked for me:

http://74.125.153.132/search?q=cache:3eeGFk9AvA8J:www.sdtime...

“The major driver to the decrease in the forecast is the whole communications and IT spending situation,” Andrews said. “That comes as no surprise to anyone.”

Indeed, I guess the website needs a sysadmin. The web server is down :)

The server is up, but the asp.net code is throwing an error.

Google cache: http://74.125.77.132/search?q=cache:3eeGFk9AvA8J:www.sdtimes...

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