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by dion.
Original Post: Open Source and Jobs
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Oleg Dulin has an interesting view point in: The New Methodology: Agile can take advantage of open-source.
The rise of open-source commoditized components freely available on the Internet minimizes the construction cost by effectively automating it. The job of the “programmer", especially of the low-skilled variety, becomes a dying kind, but this gives rise to the trade of software engineer.
Five years ago I knew a lot of people whose main job was to do builds and to unit test applications. Now there are automated build and unit-testing tools freely available in open-source form.
Four years ago I was on a project where at least half of the development effort was spent on writing Java objects that map onto an XML Schema and can marshall/unmarshall themselves from and to XML. Now we are using Castor from Jakarta Commons at the Apache Project, a free open-source tool that does in 15 seconds what used to take a programmer a month.
Surely this is only a good thing? Do we want to artificially hold ourselves back to allow for more jobs at the low end? I think with everything, we should be trying to optimise as much as possible, allowing us to do a lot more with our time. Then, the "lower" end that Oleg is talking about needs to move up. This is what education is all about!
Now we just need to pry a few bucs from the Dept of Defense, and move it over to the Dept of Education ;)
Interestingly this report just came out:
According to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics 160,000 IT jobs have disappeared and the unemployment rate has doubled for IT employment since 2000. "The IT labor force--those who consider themselves IT professionals, whether employed or unemployed--fell to 3.4 million during the first half of 2004, down from a five-year peak of nearly 3.6 million in 2001. That represents a 4.5% decline in the IT labor force. At the apex, Americans employed in IT approached 3.5 million; this year, that number fell to 3.2 million, a decline of nearly 7% in three years." Meanwhile the number of IT managers has skyrocketed.
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