As I See It: Declining Fortunes

by Victor Rozek

As a career path, has programming lost its snob appeal? Is high tech suffering from low luster? It certainly happens in other professions. At one time, being an airline pilot was thought to be glamorous work. But bankrupt airlines, falling salaries, looted pension funds, the threat of hijacking, the grind of globe hopping, and a life of chronic jet lag and bad food have made the profession much less romantic and desirable than it once was. The more common air travel became, the more pilots were viewed as glorified airborne taxi drivers.

And after a while, their employers started treating them as such.

So far, IT has experienced two heydays, and currently seems to be in decline. The first was back in the glass house days when IT was DP, computers were mysterious, manuals arrived by the pallet load, and programmers wore lab coats. Blinking lights were important then--the more the better--because they indicated mystifying work was going on. Legend has it that IBM engineers once created a computer without flashing lights and the marketing people asked them to re-engineer the product because, try as they might, they just couldn't sell a blank box. If it didn't blink, customers didn't believe it was working.

Newness and mystery lent a gravity to the profession. Business machines were substantial and imposing with large, standing tape drives and disc drives like post-war suburban housing, arranged in rows and all identical. It was a man-bites-dog profession: We already had machines that talked to people (radios and televisions), but now people were talking to machines. And they spoke to them in an alien language (machine language, they even called it) that could make machines do fantastic things. That was news. And the people entrusted with those huge capital investments were well compensated and well respected. They were modern day shamans who knew things others didn't and could intercede on behalf of mere mortals who wished to gain favor with blinking machines.

But over time, computers became just another commodity and some of the mystery and luster rubbed off. Common everyday items such as alarm clocks and coffee makers made use of chip technology and home computing was spreading like pollen. But one of the results of making computing technology more accessible is that many more uses for it were discovered. So although programming skills became somewhat prosaic, they were still urgently sought after and well compensated. The lab coat, however, gave way to the suit.

The second heyday came with the advent of the Internet, which was to computing what steroids were to baseball. Overnight, the small bulked up and became strong. New skills, new languages, new possibilities. Tens of millions of Web sites, backed by servers, routers, browsers, e-mail, open source. It was a youth movement, an infusion of new ideas and fresh technologies. The suit gave way to the T-shirt, having brains was cool again; Nerds-R-Us. Like a land grab, money was to be made just by staking out a territory. At its frenetic peak, companies with no sales and no products were making millions. But as with steroids, the benefits were temporary and illusional. When the dot-com bubble burst, there was (intended or not) a backlash against the industry. It was the start of widespread outsourcing.

When the industry began to move offshore, it was a sign that corporate America no longer viewed IT functions as important. At least not important enough to do here, and certainly not for American wages. The work of IT, the captains of industry discovered, can be done by "those people," "over there," who are more desperate and will therefore do it more cheaply. But there is an embedded judgment in that discovery, coming as it does from a society in which human value is largely measured by the accumulation of dollars. If foreigners will do something for $15 an hour that Americans are paid $60 an hour to do, then clearly we must be superior. I suspect that CEOs think of the vast Asian and Indian labor markets as the electronic incarnation of Hispanic farm labor. There is no small degree of economic colonialism at work here, and perhaps even racism, a fact that is apparently not lost on the current crop of college graduates when it comes to choosing a career path.

Rachel Konrad, an AP technology writer, sees a subtle but profound shift in the way IT is viewed by the new generation of job seekers. "As tens of thousands of engineering jobs migrate to developing countries, many new entrants into the U.S. work force see info tech jobs as monotonous, uncreative and easily farmed out--the equivalent of 1980s manufacturing jobs." An interesting equivalence: twenty five years ago, manufacturing jobs were an honorable staple of a middle class existence, today they are dismissed as menial. Yet the jobs themselves haven't changed much, just the people who do them.

A Stanford computer science graduate who Konrad interviewed described his summer programming internships as "too focused or localized, even meaningless." Why, the kid isn't even planning to work for a high tech firm or, God forbid, to churn out code. He's decided to become a management consultant. Better to plot the outsourcing of others than to be outsourced yourself. So, if one Stanford grad is any indication (and Stanford probably graduates more snobs than the average university), IT is starting to look as menial as manufacturing, not because the work has changed, but because the workers have.

That may, in part, account for the decline in science and engineering degrees granted in the U.S. Konrad cites data from the National Science Foundation for the year 2000. Of the world's 2.8 million degrees in science and engineering, 1.2 million were earned by Asian students abroad, "with only 400,000 granted in the United States." Many of the most talented Asian and Indian students who once aspired to attend American universities and work in this country, now prefer to graduate from institutions in their own homeland because that's where the job opportunities reside. One man's menial job is another's dream career.

Konrad also cites some disturbing numbers that support the decline of the domestic IT industry. Gartner, the research and predictions firm thinks, that "15 percent of tech workers will drop out of the profession by 2010." But even that degree of voluntary attrition may not be enough because in the same breath Gartner predicts that the "worldwide demand for technology developers . . . is forecast to shrink by 30 percent."

OK, so the IT image is a little tarnished and the rest of the world is anxious to scoop up our discards. Like donating designer clothes to a thrift shop, once you see them worn by a stranger you no longer see them as haute couture, only as second-hand clothes. It's arrogant and short sighted and it doesn't help those 7,000 IT workers who lost their jobs in the first quarter of this year, but it may help the next generation feel superior when choosing an alternate career.

We've gone from lab coats, to suits, to T-shirts, and have no further clothing to remove. The harsh reality is that the first man with the knowledge to build a fire was a god, but by the time everybody began sporting a Zippo, fire just didn't equate to grandness or command the same respect.

The pundits would have us believe that even though you have a degree in a hideously complex subject it means nothing, unless the subject is fashionable. Well, "fashion," Oscar Wilde once said, "is a form of ugliness so intolerable that we have to alter it every six months." So hold on to those lab coats, suits, and T-shirts because whether the next fashion is biomedical or health care or alternative energy or genetic manipulation, the IT skills that have supported economic expansion in all sectors will most certainly come back into fashion.

Of course we'll have to call it something else so we can continue to feel superior.