Is programming still a great career choice?

I also asked what skills a programmer had to have. On that point, everybody did agree. Jeff Short put it best: "You have to love it!" The people who make great programmers are the people who love doing it. Although some of the people I interviewed were quick to admit that programming simply frustrated them personally, they generally agreed that if you didn't absolutely love the process of hammering away at a problem until the program finally works, you will never be a great programmer.

Brad Smith, Director of the Computer Institute of the Rockies, said that an accurate assessment of skills is critical. Brad said that even though offshoring programming jobs is a problem, if someone has a passion for it, they will still succeed. And he pointed out that new programming niches keep popping up. There will be programming opportunities tomorrow that we don't have a clue about about today.

In his book, The Road Ahead, Bill Gates agreed. (No ... Bill wasn't at Interop unfortunately.) He wrote that he was only worried about Microsoft being innovative enough to stay ahead of new thinkers in the future. That was written before Google, and their programmer-founders, started to chew up Microsoft in several important markets. I have always had the greatest admiration for Bill's gifted insight.

There was a bigger spread of opinion about whether it was necessary to first be a programmer before you could move "up" the ladder to greater responsibilities.

Craig Kitterman said that business leaders should have some deep programming skills to make great business decisions, "It's hard to innovate without having had the experience of being a programmer to develop the understanding of what programming can do, and how it gets done." He wasn't nearly so clear about how this process takes place. Since so many people thought the traditional "Bill Gates" career path of being a programmer first and a business leader after that didn't seem to be an option anymore, Craig speculated that some kind of "programming boot camp" should be part of the experience of business leaders.

This might be like the career path of Army officers. When I was in the Army, officers had to get their "ticket punched" in a real warfighter role, such as the groundpounding Infantry, before they could expect to get promoted to the upper ranks. Being in an actual shooting war counts double. The Army doesn't let you skip all that and just go in the side door at the Army War College. But the computer software business doesn't always work that way. There are lots of CEO's who think that software comes on DVD's like milk and eggs come in cartons at the grocery store.

To get the view from abroad, I talked to Anne Reynish, Vice President at International Business Wales in the U.K. She said that she thought most of the concerns about offshoring in the U.S. were just media hype. She said the cost savings were not what people thought they would be for programming and there is an element in programming that just can't be exported. Anne said that companies are now learning this and are bringing their programming work back home again. I discovered that a lot of people who came to Interop from overseas thought this way.

Seigfried Borho, CEO of Olivanova, a vendor of an automated programming system from Europe, said that it's necessary for companies to understand that cheap programming is not the solution; quality is.