THE PROGRAMME'S FUTURE

摘要

Coding software has been a good living for a half million or more―sometimes far more-Americans during the last decade. Now it's the IT job category that bears the highest unemployment rate, at 7.1% this year Low-cost global competition and changing technologies have dimmed the career prospects of many programmers in this country and cast the role's future into doubt. To programmers like Kevin Mueller and Garrison Hoffman, these grand economic changes are as personal as a paychechek. Hoffman had it made. In the late '90s, he pulled in $80,000 a year programming at a consulting firm that developed systems for pharmaceutical companies. But the paycheck didn't begin to explain the allure of writing code. "It's like working on puzzles for eight, 10 hours a day," Hoffman says. "You're constantly learning, finding new challenges, new rid-dies. And I got paid for that." Not anymore. Hoffman hasn't had steady IT work in two years. He gets by with temporary jobs as a systems administrator and photographer and re-cently moved from fashionable Park Slope in Brooklyn, N.Y., to nearby Bay Ridge, the more solidly middle-class neighborhood featured in the John Travolta film "Saturday Night Fever"