Today in India a very large number of students are chasing careers in software industry. They all seem to have a rather narrow view of the opportunities; they all think as if they are going to write a new operating system, DBMS or network protocol. While a handful of them might get the opportunty, there are many opportunities that are equally challenging!
As with other industries software industry is maturing too. While one can always improve on existing core software the billions of users will not accept anything new unless it is dramatically better. That is one reason very few of todays students will get to write one more operating system.
With software entering every facet of human activity - banking, manufacturing, telecom, education, healthcare, hospitality, travel or government - there are much larger opportunities in the application area.
With core software companies like Microsoft and Oracle having to support a very large number of platforms and environments there are opportunities to add functionality, supply tools, improve performance and to maintain the huge base of software that has been created.
To support so much activity a mammoth IT infrastructure has been created - servers, storage and networks. You need significant software expertise to manage this IT infrastructure.
Many other activities including engineering design, media and publishing are finding software to be central to their function; all of these activities are software enabled. There are plenty of opportunities in these areas as well.
In a nutshell, software industry offers a huge opportunity; do not limit it by your own short-sighted thinking.
Remember there are a very large number of temples for Lord Vishnu, smaller number for Lord Siva and a handful for vLord Brahma. So is software. Very large number of jobs in maintenance but very few jobs in new software creation!
Sometime back I wrote a piece on "Let thousand flowers bloom in the software garden" in Times of India. Do take a look if you are interested.
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Good and thought provoking article. I may be wrong, but my prediction is that software is not going to be an independent discipline in future. It has to go with other engineering disciplines/domains such as Mechanical, Civil ...etc for products and also should correlate with finance, insurance ...etc for applications. Today many of the software products are produced without those domain knowledge which is one of the main reasons for quality issues. Prof is very thoughtful in saying new software is not created often (that is why less temples for Lord Brahma) and it is important to maintain and reuse them. Please don't forget the need for repeated testing requirements in maintaining those software. I agree with this perspective completely and thanks for this wonderful blog.
ReplyDeleteDear Prof. Sadagopan,
ReplyDeleteAfter all these that we are talking about 'the Software Garden', if we look at our nation, India, we are still talking about a fraction of 10% of the economy that is organized. The rest of the economy, the unorganized sector offers huge opportunities. It is very unfortunate that our education system is only delivering slaves, mostly desperate job seekers (without any skills) and rarely job creators.
Over the last two decades, IT and ITES has seen a great deal of entrepreneurial activities, a few in other related areas like bio-tech etc, but as a nation we need to infuse this spirit across the sectors. Yes there are a few sparks (wonderful stories in a recent outlook business issue that spoke about 50 young social entreprenuers http://business.outlookindia.com/content.aspx?site=2&issue=5021). I think we need to push to open the flood gates in this direction.
rgds,
Sreeni