Software Saviors

WANTED: SOFTWARE SAVIORS
A shortage of computer programmers is about to hit the world

By Kathleen O’Toole

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.

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