Yet another sign of the declining software and information technology industry comes today from News.COM where we read that fewer college students are studying computer science. This is exactly the right thing to happen now — the job market was flooded for a while with college CS graduates who were expecting to get rich on the Internet bubble. Now that the industry is bottoming out, it’s time for the labor market to shift also. I’m not suggesting that those of us who are software developers need to get out, but the demand for software engineers is down and adding new college graduates to the mix doesn’t help.

A similar thing happened in the 1980s with lawyers. For a while, that was the profession to pursue, but soon the market was flooded with lawyers. Eventually things corrected themselves and the number of new lawyers out of college experienced a sharp downturn. Today I expect the same sort of thing in the software industry — in a few years things will stabilize and we’ll be at the right production levels for new software engineers.