Much has changed in a short period of time in three areas: (1) the way we build software today in industry is very different than it was even 5 years ago, (2) the dynamics of open source have changed, (3) the average developer has drastically changed.

Using data I’ve collected from government statistics, and from various surveys and interviews, I’ll make the point that perhaps a traditional computer science degree might be overkill for average application developer jobs out there: a lot of jobs predominantly involve gluing together open source components rather than having to write components from scratch. I’ll also show that if you’ve been working for 5+ years in industry, then you are in a tiny minority of veteran programmers because there is a literal onslaught of entry-level developers entering the market, at a rate unseen before.

These data points are interesting because it affects all of us – both Academic and Industry.