Economy and Programming Jobs

Question

Programming is considered by many to be a recession proof job but with the recent downturn in the economy and how severe it's been, will this still hold true for this recession?

Are people seeing their salaries go down?

Answer 1

Programming recession-proof? News to me.

Salaries don't tend to go down, even in a recession. Raises go down, or disappear, and when that's not enough you see layoffs. I've seen all three happen at my company.

Answer 2

[Rather than force people to publicly state salary information, I offer this answer for people to vote on if it applies to them.]

Yes, my salary has recently been reduced. I believe it is because of the economy.

Answer 3

[Rather than force people to publicly state salary information, I offer this answer for people to vote on if it applies to them.]

No, my salary continues to increase. I don't believe it has been affected by the economy.

Answer 4

[Rather than force people to publicly state salary information, I offer this answer for people to vote on if it applies to them.]

My salary hasn't gone down, but it hasn't gone up as much as I expected. I believe it has been affected by the economy.

Answer 5

The financial sector is a big employer of programmers. That means that talented people are currently loosing their jobs as their employers fold. Expect the competition for open positions to stiffen. A deeper pool of applicants will likely reduce your ability to negotiate a higher starting wage in a new position.

Answer 6

What are you programming for? It all depends which industry relies on your software. As an engineer in the television industry, I have not seen much decline, since this year has been very broadcast-television intensive (Olympics, elections, economy collapsing, etc).

Answer 7

Software isn't recession-proof, but many other industries seem to take harder blows in employment during an economic downturn. The software industry is absolutely affected by the economy in some degree, but excellent programmers tend to keep work, despite the flux. On the other side of the coin, the software industry tends to be pretty lush in a good economy.

If a developer is very capable and efficient, s/he might be even more highly valued when times are tight.

Answer 8

Software is not recession proof by far. But since most industries use software there are many software jobs. You could be working for a drug company, a bank, a game development house, a custom software house.

Either way the reality is that in a recession companies cut costs across the board. IT is a huge money pit and managers will review unnecessary IT projects and cut them when necessary. Once the work is cut excess staff are the next to go.

I remember 2002 when I was a senior at college and none of the companies there were interested in hiring programmers. They were hiring sales people and even hardware engineers but not software engineers at all... It took me almost a year to find a first job. And my friend who graduated a year later also took like 9 months to find her first job, and it wasn't even software related, she finally gave up looking for that....

Answer 9

Normally in the software industry, consulting still works great. The only thing is that there is less investement in building brand new stuff to increase the sale but more to improve processes to save money.

That way, they can keep the costs down while still trying to survive the recession. I don't think that consulting company goes down unless most of the market goes down. Computing is the brand new "necessity".

However, if you are in a small company that just started to build a new product... you might not be in for some safety. :)

Cheers

Answer 10

Recessions or depressions are corrections of malinvestments on a large scale. The reason programming jobs were hard to come by after the tech bubble crash is that people who were not good needed to be removed from the market. They were and now fewer people get into CS in college for fear of another such crash. That's good news for those who are working as programmers now-at least until you have too much work to do and no one to work with.

Right now it's hard to find good people and probably always will be. Most organizations would do anything to hold onto their best people even in a bad economy. They would also be less likely to cut your salary because they want you to stay after the economy recovers and hiring returns to normal. There is a huge demand in my area for programmers and while that may soften it's still probably pretty good out there if you're good at what you do.

I realize that my fortunes may change at any time but I'm more concerned about other people right now than I am about myself.