The article seems oriented towards services related companies that supply warm bodies to big companies - hardly surprising given the target audience of Computerworld. What is rather surprising is that it seems to take everybody who makes a computer do something for a living and groups them all together - as if there is no differentiation between the skillsets of data-entry personnel and the folks who wrote Hadoop for example.
What is even more surprising is that it views better software and the resulting automation as a great way of reducing (labour) costs while systematically ignoring the processes and people that created the better software in the first place. It seems the same article could have been written by the same people forty years ago lamenting the decline of jobs for punch-card clerks because keyboards were allowing programmers to enter their own programs faster and still ignoring the improvements that would come from this.
But those were lots of "warm bodies" that paid good wages and consulting rates. Within an hour drive of my home, in previous employment gigs alone, I can tally thousands of application developer jobs outsourced or staffed now by imported non-immigrant visa workers. Sure, lots were COBOL (yes, is still a lot of COBOL and old school DBMS like DB2 and gasp IMS running on the backend of major functions like reservations, claims adjudication, utility company billing and metering, charge card transactions and billing, etc.…) positions but a lot of Java and new fangled client/web application too.
The entrepreneurial startups create jobs, but mostly in one-off fashion, in contrast to the bulk of positions (and "IT" is not the sole category for such a metamorphisis) that big corporate Fortune 500 style companies had on the payroll (or funneling of funds to domestic consulting firms).
Yes, the world changes, and it is incumbent for knowledge workers to reequip, refresh and retool their skill set.
What is even more surprising is that it views better software and the resulting automation as a great way of reducing (labour) costs while systematically ignoring the processes and people that created the better software in the first place. It seems the same article could have been written by the same people forty years ago lamenting the decline of jobs for punch-card clerks because keyboards were allowing programmers to enter their own programs faster and still ignoring the improvements that would come from this.