2.4.1 Employment Trends in Software Development

Employment Trends In Software Development

Employment in the area of software development remain encouraging. After a large increase of employment in the area from 1995 to 2000, the employment continues to grow, but at a slower rate.

see follow recent articles:

In the past employment was mostly based on experience. Currently a tertiary qualification is needed to gain employment in most software development jobs. This is to meet the demand of jobs in the industry.


  • IT Environment is getting more complex

    • Multiple Hardware Platforms - large list and getting larger

      • Mobile Devices

      • Diverse S/W Devt environments

      • Vast array of Desktop Packages

      • Complex multi-vendor systems

      • Internet and Web-based deployment

    • Software Applications environment recent trend changes

      • Web  - Cloud Computing

      • Mobile Technologies - App Development

    • Harder for IT departments to keep up to date with all the changes

    • Harder to find Experts on a diverse range of S/W products and the hardware they run on


Outsourcing

Recently, businesses specialising in particular areas of software development have emerged. It is now quite rare for businesses to write their own applications in-house, instead they contract the services of a specialist software developer, ‘Outsourcing’.

Outsourcing can be used for almost any task a business undertakes, but it is most prevalent in the information technology industry.

Software companies will also outsource work to specialists if they do not have the expertise or resources internally. Most large software packages will often acknowledge the work of other software developers as a part of the product’s development, often found on the ‘Help’ menu under ‘About’.

Why Outsource???

  • to reduce and control costs
  • higher quality results from specialists
  • to free internal resources for other purposes
  • resources not available internally
  • access to new technology
  • faster development times
  • specialists respond better to change

Outsourcing is used by both small and large businesses. Many businesses do not have an information technology department at all, and outsource their entire technology operation.

Contract Programmers

Many positions of employment are short-term contracts to write particular software products. It is common for analysts and programmers to change employer often as they seek new contracts. Contracts can be with companies that are writing software for their own, internal use or with software development companies who are writing software for external customers.

Websites have been set up to connect programmers with customers requiring software development work. Some of these sites utilise auctions whereby contract programmers compete to obtain project work.

From the customer’s perspective it is difficult to determine the expertise of individual programmers bidding for their project. To combat the problem, many sites now have developed rating systems based on quality and timeliness of previous projects.

Working at Google


Life At Google: Inside Google's Lair


Subpages (1): Student Activity
Comments