Job outlook for computer programmers

by philg

In answering a reader question, I visited the Bureau of Labor Statistics page on computer programming jobs. It contains some seemingly contradictory statements:

  • “Computer software engineers are among the occupations projected to grow the fastest and add the most new jobs over the 2008-18 decade, resulting in excellent job prospects.”
  • “Employment of computer programmers is expected to decline by 3 percent through 2018.”

Can these be reconciled? Digging deeper into the text, it seems that the BLS bureaucrats have come up with a way to distinguish between “software engineers” and “mere programmers”.

10 thoughts on “Job outlook for computer programmers”

  1. Anecdotally, despite the fact that I managed to get an awful lot of programming done in the last decade, I’m getting a lot of,”Oh, no C.S. degree”? when I get feedback on my resume. I think the Dot-Com era got a lot of crappy programmers into development roles and employers are using formal C.S. education to screen them back out. (

  2. How do they distinguish the two? I do full-lifecycle development for a small consulting company. Most of the projects are what I would consider pretty low tech, small to medium sized applications for small to medium sized businesses in .NET and SQL Server, both desktop and Web-enabled, and integration. My skill is that I do it full lifecycle, from concept to design to development to deployment and documentation and training and back again. But the systems themselves aren’t flying F-35s or anything. Just business database applications. Sometimes I don’t feel like an “software engineer” even though I am solving problems because I don’t have (or need) 30 tiers, CORBA, Tuxedo, and ten million dollars of hardware to make my applications work correctly. So am I an “engineer” or just a “programmer”? As long as I stay employed for 2 years I suppose I am in decent shape because at that point the house will be paid off in any case.

  3. There are big differences among ‘programmers’. I guess the Bureau of Labor
    Statistics wanted to distinguish ‘High skill programmers’ and ‘Code monkeys’.

    If all ‘programmers’ were created equal, no programmers/software engineer could
    find a job in the ‘rich world’, because India has so many of them for very cheap.
    But programmers from the ‘rich world’ are still much better:
    http://www.economist.com/businessfinance/displaystory.cfm?story_id=15393732

  5. This reminds me of a stir that happened in 1990 when American Association of Universities announced a “shortage of PhDs” applying for faculty positions. Their definition of “shortage” was subsequently shown to be fewer than two (or more) applicants for every available position, with not a few red faces, since the reality was their percieved loss of bargaining position. Foreign PhDs have filled the gap nicely.

    Using this principle, it’s quite likely that artificially reporting “need” for various positions is a consequence-free way of keeping the applicant pipeline full and the level of wages reduced.

  7. According to the BLS report software engineers do the design and computer programmers code it up. Hm. Can’t visualize it. Has anyone ever worked some place where the work was divided like this?

  8. Software is ART. It is NOT engineering.

    Hard fact: we’re 50+ years into software & there is no commonly used means to measure what we’re doing. Lines of code? Riiiiiiiight.

    Function Points is better… but ask a software engineer & I bet they’ve never heard of FP.

  9. More and more every day I grow to hate my government. The part that got under my skin the most was “programmers will need to update their skills in order to remain competitive.” Competitive with whom? Programmers in India who haven’t updated their skills but work for cheaper? So basically they’re saying “well if you can show you’re good enough you might not lose your job to someone who is not even half as good as you.” I love how bureaucrats sit by and state this drivel so matter-of-factly meanwhile our jobs are being offshored so companies can turn $1.00 into $1.05.

    I wish someone would give politicians some competition and tell them to “update their skills” although I’m not sure how skilled you can really become at taking roll in congress (they spend something like a quarter of what little time they actually spend in session taking attendance). Our tax dollars at work. Maybe I should move to India.

  10. I’ve been in programming since 1976 and have always worked very hard to keep my skills up-to-date. This included taking all the latest greatest languages at the local community colleges over the years in my “free time” (after earning 2 two-year degrees and a four-year degree).

    In the early days, companies would give lots of training, now they provide very, very little. Usually, the only programmers who get on-the-job training are the ones working on the biggest projects and they are generally NOT the ones who maintain the application once it has been installed so most of that training is a waste.

    But the latest thing that happened to me is beyond belief. I was pulled from my .NET position and plopped back on the mainframe (no decision on my part, just management) because they would have to pay a consultant $150,000 to do the job..

    So goes “keeping up with your skills”, why bother.

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