The death of software

Editor's Note: Whenever InfoWorld addresses the issue of outsourcing, our e-mail inboxes get a workout; in fact, no topic raises readers' hackles quite as predictably. The following letter, from reader Tom LaBelle, so eloquently encapsulates the arguments made by many of our readers that we've decided to reproduce it as a guest column, for everyone to read. Agree, disagree, have other reactions? Send e-mail to letters@infoworld.com and tell us what you think.

InfoWorld recently published an article about offshoring, a sore subject with many people I know. As I read it, I was reminded of an interview Bill Gates gave back on July 18, 2005, in which he wrung his hands over the 60 percent fall-off in computer science graduates during the past five-odd years. While Chairman Bill deplored the lack of talent coming out of our universities and bemoaned his inability to hire enough highly skilled computer science graduates to keep Microsoft's talent pool fully stocked, I can't help but wonder why he isn't turning to the thousands upon thousands of unemployed U.S. programmers who have the very talent and experience he claims to need. Is it any wonder college kids with a lick of sense are running screaming from the software business?

I have been in the software development biz since the mid-1980s, and to tell you the truth, I'd have been better off weaving baskets. My little shop has at times done well; at other times it's done rather poorly -- especially during the Bush II recession that seems to never quite go away. The past four years have been ghastly. And not just been ghastly for me and mine; I have seen enough colleagues to populate a midsize city tossed out of their jobs with unseemly haste so some characters from India, China, or some other benighted country can get the work.

From what I have seen since the year 2000, I would tell any youngster who sought my council that he or she would have to be as crazy as a bedbug to get into the software business today.

In fact, I did tell exactly this to one youngster: my nephew, Larry. But Larry doesn't believe me. Larry comes from a rural area in south central Illinois, and all he ever saw of the software business was the hype and snazz. You know, fatuous TV shows and comic books where a boy genius hacker cracks a 64-character password in 15 seconds on his first try. Convinced his old uncle is all wet, Larry is doing just what Chairman Bill says is good for both Microsoft and the U.S. of A.; Larry is going ahead and getting a computer sciences degree. Poor kid. However, in a last ditch effort to save the lad, I did tell him to at least minor in a useful subject that has a future. Mortuary science, perhaps.

Larry probably wouldn't be making this blunder if he had lived around Seattle or in the Bay Area. But living in the outback, Larry never saw the thousands of people -- programmers and engineers, the very people Gates says he can't find -- given the sack during the Tech Wreck and who haven't cut a line of code since. Larry never saw the men and women who created the best software on earth applying for food stamps. He never saw people he knew having their homes foreclosed and their belongings hauled away. Larry didn't have neighbors who once made 80-odd thousand dollars a year now begging for jobs that pay a third of that. (Hey, ask your friendly Wal-Mart greeter what he or she did for a living back in, say, 2000.)