Stanford Today Edition: July/August, 1997 Section: On Campus: Wanted: Software Saviors WWW: Wanted: Software Saviors
A SHORTAGE OF COMPUTER PROGRAMMERS IS ABOUT TO HIT THE WORLD
By Kathleen O'Toole
A new car features millions of lines of computer code embedded deep in its controls and systems. An airliner contains tens of millions. A cellular phone has 300,000 such lines. Thousands of millions more are needed to run supermarket registers or microwave ovens or to track Fed Ex packages.
Now picture this: There is a global shortage of computer programmers and software professionals to write and maintain all those complex sequences of instructions. To that add the computer crisis announced for the year 2000, when computers installed in the '60s and '70s threaten to turn into pumpkins like Cinderella's stagecoach at the stroke of midnight on Dec. 31, 1999. Billions of lines of code will have to be reviewed so that the old machines can cope with dates beginning the new century. Among the potential implications predicted in the media: widespread chaos and a global financial crash, hospital life support systems shutting down, satellites falling from the sky, the stock market paralyzed.
But there are less somber although not very comforting predictions from a group of experts at the Stanford Computer Industry Project: The shortage will provoke a slowdown in the maintenance of a multitude of products and in the introduction of new goods and services (competitive advantages U.S. industry has enjoyed in global markets until now), and industries and government alike will have to go through massive adjustments.
None of this, unfortunately, falls into the realm of science fiction. If there has been some millennial doomsday hype around, the shortage of software workers is a fact that has been aggravated by a huge temporary demand caused by the year 2000 problem. There are nearly 190,000 software positions unfilled today in the United States. According to the Stanford study, many companies will be hurt soon. "Business thinking about software will undergo radical change in the next few years. Some companies may go out of business simply because their competitors adjusted better to the labor conditions," warn Avron Barr and Shirley Tessler, software company consultants, and William Miller, a professor at the Graduate School of Business and director of the Stanford Computer Industry Project.
Companies whose main product is software are already reacting to the labor crunch. Like major league baseball team owners, they are offering seven-figure signing bonuses, stock options and higher salaries to lure the most talented programmers, managers and engineers. "We predict that salaries for good software people will ramp up rapidly in coming months, causing people to change jobs more frequently, which in turn will cause project delays as replacements take longer to find," the researchers wrote in their report. Those likely to be hardest hit are government agencies, information systems departments of low-tech industries and non-profit organizations, which are least able to attract and maintain top computer software talent.
Even companies that don't seem vulnerable are affected. "Companies like Citibank and General Motors don't appear to be in the business of making software, yet the products and services they sell are increasingly computer reliant," Barr said. "They haven't seen software development and maintenance as one of their core competencies," Tessler added.
Many of the business people with whom Tessler has met see their current hiring problems as cyclical, fed by unusual and temporary demands. (See Shortage sidebar.) Others believe that "offshore programmers from countries like India and Russia will be a significant resource, perhaps even a threat to U.S. jobs," she said. The Stanford researchers estimate that there are 2 million software professionals in the United States and perhaps 6 million worldwide and that they are not enough. The demand for software talent is far greater than the number of people entering the profession. "The shortage of software talent is global and it will get much worse in coming years," Tessler said.
"Furthermore, we believe that it will be at least 10 years before any other nation becomes a major source of software products and services. China's economy is developing so fast, for example, that it will consume almost all of its software labor resources," Tessler said.
In the long run, as productivity enhancement tools are created, Tessler, Barr and Miller expect software programmers to become much more productive. Professional standards will eventually develop as well as certification for professionals of different levels. Curricula will probably change gradually to make college graduates better meet industry's needs.
"Universities and companies are already doing research in this area [tools development]," Tessler said, "but they should accelerate their efforts and government policies should encourage it." ST
For more information, see http://www-scip.stanford.edu/scip/ on the World Wide Web.