If you look at the data and apply faulty logic, then you come up with faulty conclusions.

For example:

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According to the employment website MyVisa.com, which provides visa statistics based on information compiled from U.S. government agencies, “Microsoft Corporation has filed 33,934 labor condition applications for H1B visa and 10,918 labor certifications for green card since 2001, ranked 1 among all visa sponsors.”

Ironically, Microsoft’s foreign recruitment came on the heels of the dot-com bust that threw huge numbers of American computer professionals out of work shortly after the new millennium.

Just because an American IT professional lost his job at a dot-com doesn't mean he's a candidate for a job at Microsoft. Nearly 2/3rds of all websites are built on a variant of Unix.

http://w3techs.com/technologies/overview/operating_system/all

This is like saying there can't be a shortage of cardiac surgeons, because there have been major job losses among pediatricians.

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The simultaneous drop in demand and high levels of foreign recruitment almost assuredly contributed to a subsequent decrease in the number of students choosing computer science as a major. In 2004, there were 59,488 bachelor’s degrees in computer science, according to NSF statistics. Those graduates had entered college just before the dot.com crisis of 2001. But five years later, in 2009, the number of graduates in computer science fell to 37,994. It is not too much of a stretch to assume that much of the decline was due to students recognizing that the opportunities in computer science were becoming more limited.

Had there been a shortage of computer professionals instead, the trend would likely have been reversed.

Sorry, this is just absurd. Since when does a college student have their finger on the pulse of their chosen industry? They're KIDS. They have no practical experience to draw on, so all they can go on is hearsay and media reports. What was the media saying about the IT job market from 2001-2005?

If students had access to hard info about their chosen professional job market, things like this wouldn't happen: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/44393771/ns/us_news-life/t/culinary-school-grads-claim-they-were-ripped/

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Another supposed boom sector is the software industry—it projects a 30 percent increase in “software developer” jobs between 2010 and 2020 (and 22 percent in “systems analyst” jobs).

Yet is hard to see why. Although many important decision-makers still view the high-tech sector as something new with unlimited potential for growth, it is instead a mature industry that has been contracting for over a decade. The Internet is 20 years old; the Microsoft Office software suite is 22. Young people already spend vast amounts of time networking, downloading, and playing video games—how much more can they play in the future? Cloud computing, which moves software off of individual computers and onto the Internet, will account for some increase in jobs, for a while. While there will always be some demand for new software, most software projects today and in the future will be enhancements to or revisions of existing programs, or for small modifications of new hardware and equipment—not the sort of breakthroughs that require massive hiring.

ROFL. What's even funnier is that if you click on the author's name, you'll find that he was briefly a software engineer at CSC.

Here are just a few fast-evolving technologies that will require lots of software development:

- Tablets/smart phones - this is a relatively new technology that is still evolving from a hardware perspective, which naturally leads to ongoing software changes. As these are now in the hands of nearly everyone, new ways to exploit them are coming about.

- Web services - A major change to how large enterprises integrate disparate systems, evolving since approx. 2001, but change comes slowly in the enterprise arena.

- Remember all those really cool sci-fi movies where the computer is operated by hand gestures? The device is nearly here, and the driver is open source, so all it needs is exploitation: http://news.cnet.com/8301-11386_3-57437404-76/leap-motion-3d-hands-free-motion-control-unbound/