Comment by Vula_Design

I don't write code myself but my startup partner is a programmer in London who has been struggling to make ends meet for a while now. There are certainly jobs to be had, most of which pay fairly equivalent wages to most starting salaries for graduates from what I can tell. However, what he tells me is that increasingly the core programming staff of a company will often be much smaller, with most of their gruntwork done by outsourced code writers in China/India. In this sense then, not only have programmers slipped into the working class, but their jobs have been outsourced with the rest of the manufacturing industry to South East Asia in the name of globalised capitalism. I think if you are looking into the shift of gruntwork programming down the career ladder as it has become such an integral part of the global production economy, then you must look into the growth of outsourced programming.