Destination India...? China? Russia?

If there is one topic no group of experts can seem to agree on, it has to be the future of the IT field, especially those with degrees in computer science. I have read articles upon articles arguing both sides, IT will never go away, to the most recent one I read on CNN stating that the market will shrink by 30%.

Gartner researchers say most people affiliated with corporate information technology departments will assume "business-facing" roles, focused not so much on gadgets and algorithms but corporate strategy, personnel and financial analysis.

However, this projection along with what “Joel on Software” goes on to talk about puts me as a prime candidate to land a good job with management tracking, that is until I can get Alan Greenspan’s job as Chairman of the Federal Reserve. I am going to have to work on my government contacts, and maybe even get a friend elected as president before that happens though, but why not?

So back to the argument – IT jobs growing or shrinking? Are they all going to India, Russia, and China? Will I have to become fluent in Cantonese or Russian to get a job as a translator to these people so the company I may or may not ever work for can speak to their hired guns? That is what Stanford seems to think – learn that foreign language, and not Spanish, French or Italian – no.

Companies are increasing their reliability on software, computers and gadgets. These IT Geeks are going to have to be around to fix other peoples problems, or prepare programs for these CEOs who don’t know how to open an excel spreadsheet or complete a simple attachment to an email. Furthermore there are going to be government contracts which the US is not going to want to outsource, can you imagine the disaster that would be – the country that developed the technology we are going to use to attack them actually succeed at doing so? I don’t think so – especially with all the anti-terrorism talk going about.

The current situation is getting back to the '70s and '80s, where IT workers were the basement cubicle geeks and they weren't very well off," said Matthew Moran, author of the six-month-old book "Information Technology Career Builder's Toolkit: A Complete Guide to Building Your Information Technology Career in Any Economy

The bottom line really could be, that, compared with the availability of jobs during the dot com boom there is a steady systematic decline of jobs. The off shoring is also contributing to part of the job loss, but that can really be said for just about anything. So for those people that want to live in a dark office, wired on mountain dew, with little to no human contact, and do nothing but pound out line after line of C, C++, C#, or Java code may be very few and far between.

Truth be told I have no idea what I am talking about. I am unhappy where I am right now, and I will be testing the job market very soon – yes looking for a programmer position with more responsibility than just pounding out algorithms and god forbid report generation from some damn database. So here here to the underappreciated people who make computers go.