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Software Career Paradox

A report from today indicates that software engineers have "the best jobs in America," as determined by a Money Magazine survey. Factors leading to this enviable designation included strong career growth prospects, high average salary, and potential for creativity.

Other factors used in tabulating results, which reflected online surveys of 26,000 people, were stress levels, flexibility, and ease of entry/advancement.

While I'd certainly agree that developers have good earning potential and creative opportunities, I find the other results to be, frankly, shocking. I can't think of any career facing as much pressure from the domestic and offshore outsourcing trend. Time and again we hear that what companies are offshoring in particular is programming work. I think of U.S.-based software engineering jobs as being at a crossroads.

Even the most skilled developers must be thinking hard about how to reinvent themselves, develop new skills, and find other ways to maximize their value to an organization, lest they become another statistic in the outsourcing wave. For the moment, software development not only isn't the best job out there, but it's one of the most endangered.

And there's data to suggest that the outsourcing trend is only growing stronger. AT&T subsidiary Sterling Commerce had 80 employees in India in 2004; since then it has added 300 software engineers and will hire another 200 this year. Meantime, the total value of all outsourcing contracts worth more than $50 million signed in the first quarter of this year increased 173% year-over-year to $22.6 billion.

There's growing awareness, however, that outsourcing a project or an entire job function isn't quite as easy and painless as some outsourcing proponents would have you believe. The same report on the value of outsourcing contracts increasing so sharply also indicates that a goodly chunk of anticipated savings evaporates as a result of outsourcing's overhead.

I'm definitively not in the camp of IT career doomsayers. I view software development as a highly strategic, creative job function that's necessary for companies in all industries to automate functions, create new products, and innovate.

The current stampede toward outsourcing will ultimately level off as companies get a better handle on the aforementioned overhead issues and recognize that some outsourcing makes sense, but they also need to keep some of the best and brightest software developers in-house. I just hope the current outsourcing frenzy doesn't drive away so many talented people and future engineers that our country can't compete in this field over the long haul.

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