letters to the editor
DOI: 10.1145/1400181.1400184
Prep students for irreversible software trends
STEPHEN J. ANDRIOLE and
Eric Roberts debated how
to educate the next generation of technology professionals in the Viewpoint
Point/Counterpoint “Technology Curriculum for the Early 21st Century”
(July 2008). Here, they offer their final
words on each other’s thoughts, beginning with Andriole.
The assumption that the number of
“programming” jobs will increase over
time or that the location or nature of
programming work will not change
challenges every assumption about
the trajectory of change in the industry. Could Eric Roberts actually believe,
as he said in his “Counterpoint” (July
2008) that the video gaming industry
will create enough new programming
jobs to offset the loss of opportunities in U.S. and global corporations
that long ago yielded to the commoditization of software and the relentless march toward software delivery
through installed and hosted packaged
applications? It’s clearly difficult for a
$10 billion industry to replace a $200
billion industry.
Moreover, Roberts did not discuss
my call (in my side of the debate) for
greater emphasis on integration, interoperability, applications architecture, communications architecture,
and data architecture. I was calling
for innovation and design, not implementation. It appears that as programming continues to commoditize, even
as it standardizes on quasi-open standards, the demand for architectural
services will be huge. There is also
demand for optimization and metrics identification and management
that represents even more opportunities for computing professionals. I
am talking about the relative need for
software applications, design, development, and support, all of which are
changing as a result of technological
and market forces.
I have never advocated abandoning software engineering or declared
programming “irrelevant.” (I feel like
a political candidate misquoted for the
purposes of the opposing candidate’s
argument.) “Programming” must tilt
toward architecture and design and
stop assuming jobs will be available
for professionals writing nonstandard,
proprietary-extreme applications and
that these jobs will yield to commoditization, standardization, and alternative software-delivery models.
Will there be a shortage of computing professionals? Yes, but why?
Perhaps it will be the result of the
mismatch between what we teach and
what employers need. The data we’ve
collected reflects the shortage of professionals who understand design, architecture, integration, interoperability, open standards, ERP/CRM/NSM
implementation and support, and the
ability to optimize standards and architectures for business value.
In July, I said that the world is
changing and we owe it to our students that we change with it in the
right directions. Here’s a simple test:
Gartner Group recently identified 14
alternative technology-delivery models, including business-process utilities, capacity-on-demand, commu-nications-as-a-service, community
source, grid computing, infrastructure
utility, remote-management services,
software-as-a-service, software streaming, software-based appliances, stor-age-as-a-service, user-owned devices,
utility computing, and Web platforms.
Are we educating our students in these
areas? Do academic programs support
these delivery models? We must be
more relevant to the changing world
off-campus.
My work as a consultant and venture
capitalist has exposed me to software
design and development in many industries, including niche markets like
video gaming. But corporate computing across all vertical industries—and
its providers—represents professional
opportunities for our students who later go to work for, say, Accenture, Cisco
Systems, CSC, Deloitte, EMC, IBM, Intel, Hitachi, HP/EDS, Microsoft, Oracle,
PWC, SAP, and Sun Microsystems. As
the number of developers and providers shrinks through consolidation and
commoditization (EDS is today part
of HP; all major business-intelligence
vendors have been acquired; and the
number of hardware vendors continues to decline), opportunities for our
students are changing dramatically.
We need to prepare them, not stubbornly cling to the way things were.
stephen J. andriole, villanova, PA
Roberts responds:
Stephen J. Andriole’s “Viewpoint” (July
2008) began by saying “the assumption
that the number of ‘programming’ jobs
will increase over time…challenges every assumption about the trajectory of
change in the industry.” While this view
may indeed challenge his assumptions,
it does not contradict the available evidence. As I said in my “Counterpoint,”
the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics is
projecting a dramatic increase in pro-gramming-intensive jobs from 2006 to
2016, to the point that two of the top
five fastest-growing job categories over
that time are “network systems and
data communications analyst” and
“computer software engineers, applications,” both of which require significant programming expertise.
Andriole also said I misrepresented
his arguments, in particular that he
“never advocated abandoning software engineering.” But he did precisely that, explicitly proposing the reduction of the five academic disciplines
identified by the Joint ACM/IEEE-CS
Task Force on Computing Curricula—computer engineering, computer
science, information systems, information technology, and software engineering—to “three flavors: computer
engineering, computer science, and
information systems.” Software engineering is conspicuously absent. He
also said he never deemed programming “irrelevant.” Despite the fact
that the word he quoted—irrelevant—
never appeared in my “Counterpoint,”
it is important to look at what he did
say. Reading the paragraph that asks