Downsourcing

= the movement of programming from a job description to a more widely practiced skill.

Description

From Clay Shirky at http://www.shirky.com/writings/situated_software.html :

“Gartner recently caused a stir by saying there would be 235,000 fewer programmers in the US ten years from now. This would have been like predicting in the 80s, that there would be fewer typists in the US by 2004. Such a prediction would be true in one sense -- the office typing pool has disappeared, and much data entry work has moved overseas. But actual typing, fingers hitting the keyboard, has not disappeared, it has spread everywhere. So with programming; though all the attention is going to outsourcing, there's also a lot of downsourcing going on, the movement of programming from a job description to a more widely practiced skill. If by programmer we mean "people who write code" instead of "people who are paid to write code", the number of programmers is going to go up, way up, by 2015, even though many of the people using perl and JavaScript and Flash don't think of themselves as programmers. “ (http://www.shirky.com/writings/situated_software.html)