Washington, July 31: Microsoft and other US firms may be sending work overseas to cut costs, but the market for software developer jobs in the US remains strong and needs more qualified candidates, Microsoft chairman Bill Gates has said. Addressing Microsoft's fourth annual Faculty Research Summit, Gates told researchers from 115 universities that fewer students were seeking computer science degrees. Even scholarships designed to attract minority students to computer sciences were drawing fewer and fewer applicants, he as quoted as saying by USA Today.
US firms might be outsourcing some jobs, such as customer service call centers, he said, but pointed out that it was not the driving force turning away prospective computer science engineers. He noted that there had been widespread pessimism about technological advances ever since the Internet 'boom' of the late 1990s and 2000 fizzled out.
Bureau Report