Scott Kirsner is the author of @Large, a weekly tech column for the Boston Globe. In this week's column he suggests that a substantial portion of the technical and programming jobs currently performed in the United States will be outsourced to India and Russia over the next 15 - 20 years. This would leave mostly management and project management positions here in the states. Good news for those English-speaking progammers abroad, not so good for those of us here....
This cheery news brings to mind a long-standing question that I have: Most of the perl programmers that I know work for someone else. A few work for themselves as consultants / trainers, but I don't know anyone who uses Perl to run a non-technical business for themselves.* I mean, do any techies (for example) start bike shops and then use Perl to automate everything and allow order fulfillment over the web? I have the impression that techies tend not to be entrepreneurs -- is that impression correct? If yes, why? Are the talent sets required for entrepreneurs simply at odds with technical talent sets?
* Hmmm. Actually, that's not quite right. I met a guy at YAPC this year whose primary source of income came from a running a skate-boarding website.
