Summary

Many in the software industry refer to the idea of software as intellectually intensive. The software industry, like all those industries that went before, is not intellectually intensive, it is labor intensive. It does not matter which industry or profession is chosen; the trend is always the same. Carpenters and blacksmiths used to be a highly skilled and highly paid professions. Not anyone could become a blacksmith because it took years of training and apprenticeship. Tools improved to reduce the required skill sets of the blacksmith, and better techniques reduced the required skill set of carpenters. When my house was built in 1836, carpenters had to be able to work with lathe and plaster. The carpenter used square nails and they pounded them into hard wood such as walnut or oak. Since nails were expensive and difficult to use, carpenters developed the technique of tongue and grove. Better materials such as drywall have reduced the required skills of the carpenter. Better tools such a nail gun or an electric saw reduced the required skill set of carpenters. The tools needed to develop software have improved tremendously over the past 30 years. Writing code in assembly is analogous to using square nails. In the old’n days of writing software, the coder had to manually move data into and out of memory registers. Software productivity has greatly improved over the past decades; yet, it trails most other industries.

Like all the previous industries, the software industry started out as a labor-intensive industry. Better tools were developed to help the individual software developer improve productivity and more tools are on the way. Website development went from hand written html to advanced development tools such as Dreamweaver. The skill set shifted from the ability to write code to the ability to design.

As tools and techniques improve, the required skill falls; this means less, less skilled foreign labor can do the same work for a fraction of the cost. This happened in all other industries, and it is happening in software development. Outsourcing to foreign lands (especially Asia) has started and is accelerating.

In the end, software development may not be exactly like every other industry, but it sure does rhyme a lot.

While I started out in Assembler, I was always fond of Fortran. Fortran first appears as a useful programming language in 1966 and received major upgrades by 1977. Believe it or not there was a new release of Fortran in 2003 and another release planned for 2008.