Saturday, November 29, 2008

Software Development and the Global Economic Downturn

There appears to be plenty of software development work around at the moment.

A manager at a large company that I have been doing some work for recently commented that when a business looks to contract, the demands on IT increase.

I agree.

The reason for this is automation; something that the business should always strive for of course. The point is that they don't. Large companies would rather throw multitudes of people at a problem than optimise operational tasks... until external pressures such as world economic downturns occur. I have friends that work for some other large companies that are typically regarded as being innovative. One of the common threads is how, from an operational perspective, they always automate the mundane tasks as much as possible.

So for me at least, as a small software developer, there appears to be plenty of work around and a great deal is focused on automation.