"Seismic Software Shifts" summary

I read this article, titled "Seismic Software Shifts," in the March 2004 edition of BusinessWeek.

The U.S. programming job market is drying up. Many jobs are moving overseas to places like India. Currently, many of the jobs moving overseas are production-line, easy stuff. Now, many Indian students are thinking bigger, shooting for cutting-edge, entrepenurial jobs.

The answer for American programmers isn't easy. First of all, they need to learn more people-skills. Programmers who can also interface with other programmers, customers, etc. are far more valuable and are hard to outsource. Architect and Project Management jobs are not yet at risk and are, in fact, on the rise in the U.S.

Another, more important answer is that American software companies must innovate. They must come up with new business models, markets, and programming models. Things like UML and eXtreme Programming are going to become increasingly important. Americans have always been the ones to come up with things like the dot-com boom, and they are best poised to take advantage of these new markets.