Serious Shortage of Software Engineers

Engineers complete a variety of difficult, but essential tasks that make a lot of things possible in the world. That is why the education that all kinds of engineers go through is so rigorous and time consuming. Without engineers, buildings wouldn’t get built, roads would never get fixed and computers would never have any decent software and hardware systems.

In the world of software engineering, there is a serious demand for “decent engineers,” according to this article from the San Francisco Chronicle. At first glance, a shortage of software developers seems impossible, seeing as the media world is constantly expanding on a daily basis. According to the article, that is the precise problem: the tech bubble is growing so rapidly that there are not enough software engineers to take crucial positions in companies. Of course, there are software engineers out there, but they simply do not have the skills necessary to fit into these serious positions:

“The most obvious cause of increased software developer demand is that the Internet is still rapidly growing; the tech sector accounts for an ever bigger chunk of the economy. Young companies like Google have created thousands of new programming jobs. More recently, Twitter, Facebook, and Zynga have been throwing money at every engineer they can find.

But the problem is especially bad in the startup community, because of the surge in early stage funding. Getting new consumer web companies off the ground is vastly cheaper today than it was just a few years ago; as a result, venture capitalists and angel investors are increasingly focused on seed stage investments. Since such investments are much smaller than later round ones, that means far more companies are getting funded, and they all need engineers to get them up and running.”

Just imagine if a shortage of civil engineers occurred in the near future, particularly with a lot of stimulus money going towards road development and reconstruction. Engineering is a great skill to learn and if more of us don’t do so, we may be at a loss in the future.