/biz/ - Business & Finance

Reconsider going into programming for the following reasons:

1. Programming/software development/software "engineering" (if you will) compared to other disciplines like medicine, law, engineering or finance/accounting is a place where knowledge capital (the knowledge you acquire through formal education and work experience) deteriorates much more quickly than the aforementioned fields. Lawyers can benefit immensely from studying 17th century documents, medicine depends on centuries old knowledge about anatomy, finance people can still refer to books from the 1970's and benefit greatly. Can the same be said about IT but more specifically software development? What use is a 50 year old book to a programmer besides teaching you outdated stuff?

2. This is true for literally any white collar job but programming can be outsourced and is being outsourced the difference is there are legal requirements that demand that certain jobs be done here for medicine, law, engineering and finance/accounting. Unlike software development which is completely un-unionized. You have programmers making 70k a year while they net the companies millions in revenue.

Yes companies aren't outsourcing all their work to India en masse but it still does happen. Microsoft and bunch of other companies have offices there. But still companies are going to Eastern Europe, and when push comes to shove they're importing workers from overseas to drive down wages (see Indians, Chinese, Russians in SF).