Too Old to Write Code?
The software industry's labor shortage may be a myth
Even as the software industry anguishes about narrowly defined or temporary shortages, it may be creating a more serious problem, Weinstein warns, by turning the programming field into one with a life expectancy rivaling that of pro football. Because careers tend to be short, he argues, even the spectacular-seeming salaries of Silicon Valley stars aren't nearly as impressive as they appear. These issues, which have yet to figure very much in the thinking of college students choosing a field to major in, tend to hit some programmers with a jolt soon after they make the transition into the work world. "As a student on the outside looking in, you hear the rumors of big bucks," says a 27-year-old Hewlett-Packard engineer. "What they don't talk about is how long you get them for." A few years down the road, he predicts only half-jokingly, there will be programmers out on the street carrying signs that read "Will Code for Food."
Special exception. One thing that spurred the Hewlett-Packard programmer to think along these lines was a job interview in which, two years after getting his master's degree in computer science, he was told that a special exception would have to be made to hire him, because the position had been slotted for a recent college graduate. The advent of the $800 computer, and the expectation of many consumers that software will come bundled in, have created "obscene price pressures that roll downhill to the worker," he says. "We're all scared."
The skill cycles are worrisome to people with jobs as well as those without them. "First there's a shortage--then people respond, and you get kind of a glut with the particular skill," the Hewlett-Packard programmer says. "And then a newer technology comes along and takes its place. The new skill may not be that hard to learn, but the perception of the industry is that you can't learn it. There's a whole marketing mantra that goes with it, even if it's not really that new." Thus, even for someone with a good job, a programming career becomes "like musical chairs. When the song stops, the objective is to make sure you're sitting on your seat."
Critics of the computer industry's labor practices suggest that they can be traced, in part, to the archetype of the obsessed geek working night and day in the garage, or grabbing a few z's in a sleeping bag on the laboratory floor. Students of this theory find a cause for hope in Gates's widely publicized reveries about marriage and fatherhood. It is only a matter of years, Computer World editor Johnson says, before the industry discovers that a programmer who needs to leave work at 5 to pick up a child from soccer practice just might have something to contribute.
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