American programmers are under siege.
Such labor cost differences are causing many American firms to outsource programming tasks to contract programming companies in other parts of the world. Downsizing - that is, the movement of applications that were traditionally run on mainframes to smaller hardware platforms such as local area networks is another source of stress for American programmers. During the 1990s, the number of mainframes used in the U.S. has steadily declined, and the number of computer programmers employed in the U.S. has also fallen. And, they are becoming very competitive. Many of the programmers are physicists, mathematicians, or geologists first and software developers second.