Demand for faculty positions is pretty stable. Demand for programmers much less so.

> Demand for faculty positions is pretty stable.

Well, that's certainly one way of putting it. You could also say, "Academia has the potential to absorb about 10% of PhDs produced annually." That's fine for CS, where most people want to go into industry anyway and industry understands the product. Not so much for, say, physics, where more PhDs would rather stay in academia and you have to explain very quickly why someone should hire a PhD physicist before they slam the door in your face.

There is a huge imbalance in new phd/new tenure-job openings. also, the proportion of faculty jobs with tenure is shrinking. both of these are massive 'caveats' to the use of 'stable'.

I actually meant that the demand for programmers matches and evolves with the supply, and has certainly room to grow for a while, whereas academia has been completely mismatched for years.