For those of you who may not know, I write about jobs for some national publications. My most recent article is about where the job growth will be for 2008, and the foreseeable future. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, and other sources, the market for IT professionals, on the whole, will continue to grow BUT the demand for what career experts call "routine coders" or "code monkeys" is actually expected to shrink. 

While this may sound like bad news for some of you, it's excellent news for the rest. Why? Because the "code configurators", as one of my readers calls them, who may have been driving your salaries and hourly rates down, will disappear, or at least become a less significant part of the Western economy.

What matters in the interim, I think, is that we re-establish what a "developer" actually is and does. As someone who has spent more than two decades interviewing and placing a large number of individuals who earn at least part of their living writing code, I want to start, or chime in on the conversation, if it has already begun. Bear with me, and contribute, if you wish; this will take more than a single post.

Future-thinker Dan Pink says that soon our workforce will be affected by the three A's- Automation, Asia, and Abundance. He suggests that workers can determine if their occupations will endure by asking themselves three questions: "Can someone overseas do it cheaper? Can a computer do it faster? Am I offering something that satisfies the nonmaterial, transcendent desires of an abundant age?"

I take the first two questions and test them against what I consider to be a "code-configurator's" and a developer's role.

I argue that someone overseas can't, wouldn't want to, or wouldn't need to, do a real developer's job (independent of location) for less than the best market rate.

I also argue that many of the tasks of a "routine coder" will be automated in the not-so-distant future. After all, if you can write instructions for a process, then you can automate it, can't you?

"That won't affect me!", I can hear some of the folks I interviewed last week screaming. Don't be so sure, I say. After all, how much value does a so-called developer add if his first instinct in writing a program is googling for code.

First a disclaimer, I may be old. That's what two of the folks I interviewed told me. "In today's world, you go to a Documentum or Java forum and see if anyone has solved the problem, or something like it before. When you find it, you copy and paste, make the necessary changes, and implement."

Oh, I said. I thought of how I used to have to write Fortran programs to solve calculus programs when I was a college freshman. There was no Internet, no cutting and pasting; I had to punch cards and wait hours to find out if I gave the computer the right instructions to arrive at an answer. And I wasn't even a Computer Science major, this was part of my calculus course.

So is having access to the best forums what makes you a good developer, I had to ask. "You have to know who the best contributors to the forum are," was the answer I got.

"But there is a star-rating system," the other said. Then I remembered, there is something similar on LinkedIn.

"And you have to know how to tell what well-written code is," both of them argued, " so you know what to take and what to fix."

Wouldn't the star-rating system take care of that? I almost bought into their logic.

I wanted to ask these guys what the difference is between code cut-and-pasters and true developers. Then I told myself that maybe I misunderstood how collaborative a collaborative world really is.

I then thought again- how much would I, or my customers, be willing to pay someone who cuts and pastes? What's the value-add? And can't a program be written (though even that terminology seems wrong) by a super-user who knows exactly what he or she wants?

-VMB

(To be continued)

Technorati Tags: Automation, Coding, Developer, Documentum, JAVA, Bureau of Labor Statistics