You’ve heard it before: there’s a massive shortage of IT workers in the US (the stats are a few years old, but pick your number: 600,000, 578,711, or 425,000 excess jobs). Whether you’ve read the articles or experienced it first-hand, there is a noticeable lack of qualified programmers in the U.S. According to the US Department of Labor, 8 of the 10 fastest growing occupations between 2000 and 2010 will be computer related.

With programmers making up the single largest category of IT workers (around 21%), and somewhere around 60% of software developers having a bachelor’s degrees, a good way to increase the supply of domestic software developers would be to enroll more Computer Science (CS) students.

Are you with me so far? CS enrollment up = more programmers in four years. Easy enough.

But this is where it gets grim: the number of students listing Computer Science as their probable major while entering college has dropped 60% over the past 4 years (you can see this graphically on the first page of this document).

Can you blame them? In 2000/2001 there were layoffs, offshoring, and decreasing pay scales. The reality is that hundreds of thousands of qualified candidates are still needed, but the temporary downturn in 2000/2001 and the dramatic portrayal by the press has left some people wondering if there will be enough computer jobs in the U.S. in five years. Couple this with the image that programmers are geeks that do nothing but sit at a computer all day and the picture becomes clearer; incoming freshman who might have chosen CS have turned their eyes to other majors.

Why We Should Care
So what? As demand rises and supply dwindles our rates will increase, right? It only makes it better for those of us who do have experience in the field.

To a point, yes. However, companies will not sit idly by and watch their profits dwindle because they are unable to find qualified people. They will turn to other avenues, such as increasing H1-B limits and offshoring development (cue ominous music), that have the potential to damage domestic job prospects in the long run. I don’t believe H1-B visas and offshoring are the force that will unravel the very fabric of reality that some make them out to be. But the bottom line is if companies are unable to find domestic developers, companies will find a way to function with or without them, and functioning without them is not good for any of us.

Secondly, on a selfish note, how many of us would kill to work with ultra-qualified, talented developers instead of whoever we can find that has a pulse and once wrote an Excel macro for a junior high class project? While dropping CS enrollment likely indicates that people entering the field are truly interested in CS, it is going to come full circle; people will eventually get hired, with or without degrees and regardless of how qualified they are, because companies will be desperate. And then we’ll be stuck working with folks who can’t find their text editor with two hands and an issue of Dr. Dobb’s Journal.

Given that we’d like to figure a way out of this mess, a good first step would be to graduate more CS students, which means encouraging more people to enroll as CS students. Here are a few approaches that each of us, as software developers, can take that might encourage incoming college students to entertain the idea of enrolling in Computer Science.