Do Computer Programmers (and Programming) Get Disproportionate Attention in Discussion of the Labor Market?

According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) in May 2022 the U.S. had some 133,000 computer programmers at work.

This is out of some 158.3 million employed people that very month--which means that computer programmers comprise a mere 0.084 percent of total American employment, fewer than one in eleven hundred of those persons employed in this country actually a "computer programmer."

One would never guess that from the sheer amount of time spent talking about coders and coding.

Of course, computer programmers are just one of a wider range of jobs in the computer field (with some of which programmers may be synonymous in the minds of those not too meticulous in their use of the terminology). Still, as the BLS statistics show, the full range of computer science-related jobs comes to some 5 million nationally--with this, again, working out to not much more than 3 percent of the work force.

Again it is a rather smaller proportion of the work force than one would suppose from the time spent gabbing about them, to say nothing of such fashionable nonsense as coding being the "new literacy"--or the notion that people losing their other jobs could, in line with the inane sneer of the conventional wisdom-abiding, simply "learn to code," precisely because it is inconceivable that there would be enough work to go around for all of them even if they all excelled at it, with the category of "truck driver" exemplary. We have over 3.2 million drivers of light, heavy and tractor-trailer trucks--which is to say 24 times as many truck drivers as we do coders, and some three-fifths as many truck drivers as we do people employed across the whole computer field (again, something we would never guess from how people conventionally discuss these matters).

All of this is before we get to the matter of whether or not coding is itself going into decline as a profession in the wake of advances in artificial intelligence, as suggested by one working programmer whose remarks I read this week. As is so often the case with the essays in his increasingly unfortunate chosen forum (sufficiently unfortunate that it seems to me undeserving of a link that would bring it more readers) he meanders quite a bit and never really makes a point worth making, and subjects the reader to a great many stupid conventionalities as he does so (like the whole coding as the new literacy idiocy). All the same, it does provide some interesting anecdotal evidence of the new chatbots increasingly taking over the task, in large part because they are increasingly able to outdo humans at this very practical function the way they have recently outdone them at functions that were less necessary to the "structures of everyday life" (as with mastery of games like chess and Go).

Taking such claims at face value it seems to me that, while it is not inconceivable that more people will be involved in software development in one way or another, those who actually code as we have known it--and do so as trained, paid, full-time professionals--will probably become fewer rather than more numerous within the years ahead, making the disconnect between the occupational realities and the media-promulgated perceptions about coders discussed here even wider than it is now.