Where are all the programmers?

I was at a conference Wednesday that covered an awful lot of ground. There were some good sandwiches, too, and the cookies were first-rate. One thing that stuck out in my mind, though, aside from the deserts, was one companies inability to hire good programmers domestically. This company pays well, has a relaxed, yet highly-motivated corporate culture, and just happens to be in one of the educational hubs of the universe (they don't call Boston the Hub for nothing).

But they can't hire any programmers. They've posted on Monster, CareerBuilder, the Boston Globe, gone to college job fairs...you name it. Yet they have had programming openings for several months and were told at a recent recruiting session at Northeastern University that the 65 computer science students were basically already spoken for when they graduated.

First of all, 65 students? At Northeastern? Secondly, as the really big names (Oracle, Microsoft, Google, etc.) snap up the cream of the crop from top universities, it does leave one wondering, where did all the programmers go?

Obviously a downturn in tech sectors and a move toward off-shoring wasn't a terribly strong recruiting tool for university CS programs a few years back. However, the majority of the responses to this company's ads have come from former Soviet republics and India. In fact, the company has decided to create a satellite office in Beijing because highly qualified programmers are not only plentiful but cheap in China. The president of the company noted that looking to China for programmers wasn't an economic decision, though; it was simply driven by supply.

So where are all the programmers? It's time to beef up our high school exposure to programming, explore partnerships with universities and industry, and start cranking out highly-qualified CS graduates again in this country. I'm not sure if anyone has noticed, but we rely on computers for a lot of stuff, folks. Ideally, we'd be able to create, innovate, and leverage computer technology effectively in this country and it won't be the MySpace set that does it; it will be the next generation of computer scientists, if there are any to be found.