Computers are powerful but it doesn’t mean that the computer industry generates fulfilling, highly paid, and secure long-term careers for the employees. If you hear about a plastic surgeon getting rich it isn’t exciting because getting an MD and completing a residency is a long and arduous process. The problem with this analysis is survivorship bias. You look at the wealth of all the middle managers and C coders at Microsoft without reflecting on the thousands of other software companies that were started in the same year and that are dead now. Virtually 100 percent of plastic surgeons are rich whereas the average fate of a software company employee is unappealing indeed.

If you just love working with computers then probably you’ll be happy in the software industry because you’ll be getting paid for doing what you love. The software industry does not have a good reputation with ustomers.The small vendors go out of business and the big vendors charge different prices.    A further problem with working for software companies that the innovative ones tend to be fairly young organizationally. Thus they don’t have a lot of good metrics in place for evaluating employee performance. Promotions may be random or based on who is sucking up to the senior executives rather than on achievement.

Moreover, the number of software engineers being produced in these western countries are not enough so companies have to eventually transfer their work to India. Most Indian software professionals are ardworking and are able to devote more time to work than their western counterparts. Job placements in most engineering colleges is very good with many companies like Wipro, Infosys, Satyam and several multinationals competing to hire good students. Even the starting salaries which are offered to Indian software professionals are usually much more than the highest salary a regular government employee has ever received in his 30 years career.

But the fact which many are missing is that software industry (like other industries) is also about supply and demand, the demand of engineers being high as of now and jobs are everywhere. These days almost every student in India after completing his 10th class board exam starts to prepare for engineering entrance exams so that he/she can eventually become a software engineer. Every year hundreds of new engineering colleges are opening up all over India and there are over 5 lakh engineers graduating every year and the number will continue to increase. Even people from Civil and Mechanical engineering are entering software. There are additionally lakhs of MCA, BSC Computer Science and others from NIIT/Aptech etc comming out but all are at good jobs.

Due to our high population, there is competition in almost every field in India. With more and more educated people in India, there will be even more engineers in the future, and software competition will be on a rise. ” Software Industry situation is just like when the stock market goes up, everyone thinks this is the best way to make money, but when it comes down everyone loses.”