– Charles Duell, Commissioner of the United States Patent Office, speaking in 1899

Amazing what a hundred years can do, isn’t it?

Lex forwarded to me this column by Virginia Postrel, which makes related points and also points out that govt job stats lag economic reality significantly.

If you need some motivational reading, try out the one-two punch of :Decline and Fall of the American Programmer” and “Rise and Ressurection of the American Programmer.”

Software development may be a new trade, but it’s been around long enough that we’ve been through this cycle before. In the 70′s and 80′s, programmers were distraught that their trade, once an almost exclusively American profession, was being taken up by foreign labor who were at best providing downward pressure on wages and at worst simply taking American jobs. In the first book, the author (Yourdon?) predicted that the simplification of software development would lead to an increasing trend toward what we’d now call outsourcing. His conclusion was that programming would eventually become un-Americanized, and that the American programmer was an endangered species. In the second book, Yourdon realized his mistake – established technology can and will move, but cutting edge technologies will not. The skill of American developers, and their ability to demand high wages, depends not on their command of tried and true technologies, but on their innovation. Thus, as AS400 programming jobs fled for cheaper pastures, microcomputer development and later, internet technologies replaced them as the bread-and-butter technologies of American programmers. In between the two times, there is a lull – the early adopters of whatever the new technology happens to be have high risk/reward, and they will define the technology that will come to dominate the American scene, at least until it, too, becomes a commodity technology.

Its an Ebay for outsourcing (its also owned by Ebay) and damn is it good (from personal experience). Good luck, gentlemen! I feel like we need an Elance evangelist website to get the whiners to stop whining and start doing cool stuff instead.

Nice piece, ken.

But how are “us programmers” supposed to get through the next couple of years?