Are We in the Middle of a Programming Bubble?

Now, "is there a bubble"? Again, no. If we look at those numbers as hard deadlines, then let's see how many students are leaving college with CS degrees? The National Center for Education Statistics reports that only 60,000 bachelor degrees were conferred in 2015 [2]. Enrollment is still at its highest point, but no where near the amount Sargent says we'll be needing by 2026.

I think the biggest concern to a programming bubble is the capacity challenges we face in training these new developers. If you look at historical trends, there is no dot-com crash right now. Maybe people getting scared because of data analytics, but nothing as severe as 2003's web companies over-estimating their worth.

Instead, I think this looks more like the bubble from the 1980's [3,4]. Roberts and Henn try to explain the cause for the drop in enrollment. Henn focuses predominantly on gender representation in the media making females feel like CS was "boy's only". Female enrollment is only now beginning to return. Roberts, on the other hand, looks at how institutes handled the increase in CS enrollment. Since there were only so many qualified instructors, colleges began to make harder and harder qualifying requirements for enrollment. Students, as a whole, got the point and sought out other degrees.

So "is there a bubble?" maybe/maybe not; but it would be because there are not enough qualified instructors to teach the need.

[1] https://fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/R43061.pdf [2] https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d16/tables/dt16_322.10.a... [3] https://cs.stanford.edu/people/eroberts/CSCapacity/ [4] https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2014/10/21/357629765/when...

You can sort of count on most organizations paying something resembling a cost of living salary (though even that is becoming less true), but after that everything, ever-y-thing, always, is market driven.

We get to have our cake and eat it too, not because it is harder to become a software engineer than a doctor, but because it also isn’t trivial to become one AND the demand for our talents keeps outstripping supply every year.

There are still lots of divisions at lots of Fortune 500s that are just now starting their journey in adopting software to solve their problems, and they all create market pressure somewhere in the supply curve.

Look at medicine. Doctors make less than they used to because cost controls (not very effective ones, but still) have been introduced into the system. So even though demand for doctors is high a doctor can only generate so much revenue for a provider.

The demand for a service only roughly correlates to a markets ability to pay for it. There is a ton of demand for services in our economy that go unmet, because the market can’t or won’t bear the cost.

Edit:

Also, the returns software can generate for an organization are simply astronomical in a way that even other engineering fields can’t rival. If an organization is embarking on a software project that they know will either make or save them 10s of millions of dollars they aren’t really going to bat an eyelash at 300k a year.