"New Technological Developments - PCs and the Internet"
Thriving Silicon Valley is Running Dry of Computer Programmers
Higher pay may not, by itself, be sufficient to correct the skilled-labor shortage.
Report by Amy Harmon
NEW YORK - Every so often, the co-founder of Carnlian Inc., James Kittock, hears the phones at his Silicon Valley start-up company begin to ring in order, from one cubicle to the next. He knows - everyone in the Valley knows - it is the recruiters, calling to steal away his programmers, often at huge salaries.
Mr. Kittock, 27, cannot really blame them. Carnelian itself has been known to resort to guerrilla tactics in what has become an increasingly desperate scavenger hunt for highly paid digital-age translators who can mediate between mind and machine. Like other employers nationwide these days, Carnelian has found that there is simply riot enough talent to go around at any price.
"For us, it was a choice of lowering our standards or waiting, and we chose to wait," Mr. Kittock said. "But it's tough to see things slipping by and things not moving ahead because of a lack of horsepower." His company, which develops software for Internet publishing, could use twice the dozen programmers it now employs.
Mr. Kittock's lament echoes throughout the world of high technology and beyond. As America relies more heavily on computer software than ever before, the demand for people who can develop and use the tools of the modern age has vastly outstripped the existing supply. And the shortage is expected to get much worse as an estimated 1 million new programming jobs come open in the next nine years.
Help-wanted ads are multiplying for the coders who can write in fashionable computer languages, such as Java, for the testers who find the bugs that the coders invariably leave behind and for the systems analysts who figure out how to make it all work together.
The talent shortage is so pronounced that members of the Clinton administration announced Monday that the government would invest $28 million in new initiatives to encourage training more programmers.
The government's initiatives are driven by concern about the implications of the programmer shortage when information technology, grossing more than $865 billion a year, is the country's largest industry, with the software segment growing more than twice as fast as the overall economy.
Why the shortfall in programmers? For one thing, in Silicon Valley Over tile past two years, hundreds of new companies have opened, all hungry for anyone who can string together lines of computer code.
At the same time, the field has yet to recover from a downturn in the late 1980s and early 1990s, when downsizing by aerospace companies and technology companies, such as International Business Machines Corp. and AT&T Corp., threw many computer scientists out of work and discouraged college students front pursuing computer-careers. Front a peak of 50,000 in 1986, the number of bachelor's and graduate degrees in computer science plummeted to 36,000 in 1995.
Yet, for students, job security is not the only issue when deciding for or against a career in computer science. Some cite its image: The "nerd factor," marked by the pasty pallor known as a "monitor tan," seems to trump a recent "geek chic" trend in a notoriously antisocial profession. And much of the work is tedious.
"We need a large technical class that is well trained, to do work that is mind-numbingly boring," said Eric Roberts, associate director of Stanford University's computer science program.
Over the past two years, the overheated job market has pushed up computer science enrollment, but to nowhere near the level that analysts say will he necessary to meet the industry's needs. Between 1996 and 2006, more than a million new jobs requiring software skills should be created, according to a recent Bureau of Labor Statistics report. That represents a remarkable 6 percent of all new jobs expected to be created in that period ...
If the talent drought continues, the entire national economy may feel the effect of lost wages and slowed innovation. The competitive advantage that the United States has long held in technology may be at risk.
Some economists argue that the work force will naturally swell to meet the demand as salaries for those with software skills climb as much as 20 percent annually compared with the 4 percent annual wage increase of the average American worker. The average programmer earned $58,200 in 1995 and $66,500 in 1996, according to the Information Technology Association of America. But a consensus is growing in industry, academic and government circles that the lure of higher pay may not, by itself, be sufficient to correct the skilled-labor shortage.
"Despite the fact that there are huge salaries to be made, kids don't choose these fields," said Richard Skinner, president of Clayton College and State University in Atlanta, who heads a Commerce Department task force on how schools are responding to the shortage.
A good programmer needs to exist comfortably in the "machine state," writing and meticulously checking and double-checking hundreds of lines of code that are often just a small part of a much larger project. It is a talent that is hard to come by - and one often disparaged in mainstream culture.
There are few role models for computer-related jobs, and even people, such is Bill Gates, chairman of Microsoft Corp., tend to be far better known for their achievements as business moguls than for their skills as software engineers ...
(© THE NEW YORK TIMES; published 14. 1.1998 in International Herald Tribune)