Really great comp science or engineering students won’t ever have a problem, but I fully expect the short-length, autodidact or mediocre students to be entering a saturated market within the next five years.
That is the dirty little secret of our industry. You need to do your day job AND on your own time, keep your skills up to date, and/or work on open source and/or write a blog or something. There was a post on there the other day on how keeping up to date with k8s is a full-time job in and of itself, well you need to do that - and a bunch of others - in your free time, in the full knowledge that what's hot today might turn out to be worthless in a year or two.
People on the outside, even those aspiring to get in, I don't think fully realize the commitment of those making the headline salaries in this field. Just as you won't make it as a banker unless you LOVE making deals, so much that you'd even do it for free...
It's the expectation that you need to demonstrate it at all, is the problem. How many lawyers sue people for fun so they can blog about it, how many doctors do surgery at home and stream "live cutting"?
We have created a treadmill that we can't step off
"software developer," as a label, doesn't signal that kind of credentialing (although something like advanced degree might), so our labor to differentiate ourselves goes elsewhere. i don't want to imply that this isn't a problem for our profession, but the amount of "wow we software engineers have it so difficult" sentiment in this thread seems high
A degree from a well-known school and a few years at one or more prestigious companies is an equivalent. Let's imagine a hypothetical developer who graduated from MIT then spent 3 years at Google. He or she would be as "credentialled" in the sense of the piece of paper opening doors as someone who'd gone the law school route and passed the Bar. That person will pass every resume-screen and get invited to an interview for the rest of their careers with just those two names listed.
Not just that! Don't forget about attending a dozen conferences a year, doing talks, and local meetups.
You don't really need any of that.
Ultimately, you just need to pass the interview.
Sure conferences and tech talks might help give your resume some more visibility and likeliness of getting hired. Similar to having a couple toy projects, but many top tier companies adhere to a set of standards in their hiring process where they won't let you bypass their DS&A interview because you gave a tech talk.
That cuts against every labor demand projection.
Frankly, even mediocre programming jobs are a great option for most people. The lower mode is still much more than most entry-level jobs pay.
I would definitely advice people to learn programming, but not necessarily to aim to become programmers.
What I found really interesting was going one step further and using programming to solve "higher order" problems, such as data science or artificial intelligence related problems. I'm not talking about implementing something in Tensorflow. That again is just programming. I'm talking about implementing something in Tensorflow to solve a specific problem and seeing the result of that. The programming part is beside the point, it is a means to an end.
I think you really need to dig deep and ask yourself why you are writing code at all. The act of writing software itself is not that intellectually stimulating once you've mastered it well enough. It is just one layer of abstraction. Think about what is the next layer of abstraction you can build on top of your programming layer.
I'm glad I did not treat it seriously.
The last position I put up for a regular .net, jboss and sharepoint position had over 300 applicants, several vastly overqualified.
I work in the public sector, so it’s not exactly because we offer what most developers consider “dream positions” and we certainly don’t offer a good salary.
Interesting how this contrasts with the widely-held perception that there is a programmer shortage.
Readers who just deleted emacs in despair should keep in mind that parent is hiring for Danish government position, not exactly the hotbed of software development or skills demand.
However, those of us living outside that handful of cities have a totally different experience, regardless of how good we are or how much experience we have. There just are far, far fewer jobs outside that handful of American cities.
And many of us are unable to just up and move due to a personal situation (sick relative, illness, spouse's job, etc.). It's just worth bearing in mind that your experience as a developer is somewhat the exception in the US, not the rule. At best, it's a 50/50 split between devs in the cities I mentioned above and the rest of us.