Frankly Speaking: See the future

[ Frankly Speaking for March 10, 2008 ]

I can see the future. You can too. Just look at the numbers released this month by the Computing Research Association. CRA's annual Taulbee Survey tracks the number of U.S. college students with computer science degrees. It also tracks the number of newly declared CS majors and college CS enrollments.

Surprise! Those graphs are identical — just shifted in time.

It's true. Check the data yourself at www.cra.org/wp/index.php?p=139. You'll see that the number of newly declared CS majors peaked in 2000, just before the dot-com bust. Undergrad CS enrollments peaked in 2002. CS bachelor's degrees peaked in 2004. Print out those three graphs and hold them up to the light, and they line up almost perfectly.

Four years after the dot-com bust in 2000, four-year CS degrees fell off a cliff. Gee, who'd have guessed that would happen?

And it turns out that four-year pattern has been consistent for decades — ever since PCs made an IT career look like a gold mine. Which means we really can see the future. Based on the number of freshman CS majors, we know that the number of CS graduates will drop for one more year, then flatten out after the class of 2009 to roughly the levels before the dot-com boom and bust.

So forget the gloom-and-doom headlines about plummeting interest in IT. No, kids haven't abandoned careers with us en masse. We've merely lost the huge influx of students who got dollar signs in their eyes when the Internet craze hit. In another year or so, we'll be back to normal — or, anyhow, pre-dot-com normal.

(How predictable was all this? I wrote about it a year ago — and I was right. The future must be blazingly obvious.)

But now that you can see the future, what are you going to do about it?

After all, it's a different IT world now than in the early 1990s. Today, IT permeates business in ways we could barely imagine back when Windows 3.1 was hot stuff. Our challenges range from e-commerce, packaged applications and software-as-a-service to security, training and integration for users who think they can do it all themselves.

We need more IT people with stronger and sharper IT skills than ever before. An IT worker pool at pre-dot-com levels won't be enough.

Then again, the skills we need aren't necessarily the ones that come attached to a CS degree.

We've replaced big legacy mainframe apps with ERP systems. We've got Web applications, mobile applications, customer-facing applications. Pre-dot-com anything won't cut it.

Yes, we'll need some people who can develop complex database schemas and architect well-engineered applications. But we'll need a lot more who can whip out mashups and glue code, chase after security threats and cross-network glitches, and handle any harebrained ideas users have for applying the newest gadgets to their jobs.

Now that you know we'll have a stable supply of well-schooled CS grads for the next few years, it's time to start thinking about how many you'll need in the next few years. They can be part of the plan for your staffing mix, along with outsourcing, power users and homegrown talent.

And by watching the CRA's annual numbers, you can get years of advance warning before the next CS-grad crunch.

What else in IT do we have that offers such predictability?

There are enough surprises in IT. This time, you can see the future. Take advantage of it.