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India To Overtake US On Number of Developers By 2017
dcblogs writes "There are about 18.2 million software developers worldwide, a number that is due to rise to 26.4 million by 2019, a 45% increase, says Evans Data Corp. in its latest Global Developer Population and Demographic Study. Today, the U.S. leads the world in software developers, with about 3.6 million. India has about 2.75 million. But by 2018, India will have 5.2 million developers, a nearly 90% increase, versus 4.5 million in the U.S., a 25% increase though that period, Evans Data projects. India's software development growth rate is attributed, in part, to its population size, 1.2 billion, and relative youth, with about half the population under 25 years of age. Rapid economic growth is fueling interest in development. India's services firms hire, in many cases, thousands of new employees each quarter. Consequently, IT and software work is seen as clear path to the middle class for many of the nation's young. For instance, in one quarter this year, Tata Consultancy Services added more than 17,000 employees, gross, bringing its total headcount to 263,600. In the same quarter of 2010, the company had about 150,000 workers."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=768h3Tz4Qik
~nt~
Your hair look like poop, Bob! - Wanker.
Could part of this be the cost of college here in the States? Also, would be the question, that a decade ago, a position in software development was seen by HS age individuals as strong career move; is that still the case (I think not).
I could call myself a car mechanic. But just because I can change my oil and brakes, doesn't mean I'm doing it efficiently or even properly. So while they can claim there's that many software developers, the percentage of them that are competent is probably quite low.
The article doesnt say how it came about this data.
Could part of this be the cost of college here in the States? Also, would be the question, that a decade ago, a position in software development was http://computersbds.blogspot.com/">please visit it
When one country has a billion more people than another country, what do you expect? A better comparison would be the percentage of the population for each country who are considered developers.
Now that is just funny
I'm a little concerned about the growing "influence" of Indian programmers. First, like all groups, when they are the majority they can become biased against others (i.e. non-indian). Second, they are willing to work for less, so they can push down salaries; just look the consulting rates these days.
To be fair, it has been a pleasure to work with them, for them etc. I don't see any alternative to employing them. I don't want them to go away. But there is a cultural adjustment that I feel is necessary but doesn't happen when they are majority in a software organization.
We need to start training snake charmers, magic carpet makers, sitar players and yogis. That way we can outsource to the outsourcers!
Looking at you, Bethesda.
This is great news! Today's Dilbert is relevant.
Adidas To Bring Back Sneakernet
So that's 2-3 more million "developers" that don't know what they are doing. Seriously, how many of these new so-called developers really know what they are doing and can code with a passion as opposed to those that are in it just to get a paycheck and hope they can CYA wrt to bugs.
As long as they're willing to work for peanuts, regardless of the crap they produce, US CEOs will keep hiring them. I'm watching an outsourcing fiasco in progress at my company. The "smartsourced" apps are blowing up like crazy and executive management screams at the PMs and middle management, neither of which wanted these barely-trained, fundamentally incompetent programmers to begin with.
Not too long ago The Economist noted the lack of new graduates in India to take up the development jobs the outsourcing companies had on offer. Comments from an individual outsourcer seemed to support that...
I'd take this one with a mine of salt, and speculate that by "developer" they mean "someone who wants to be a developer", without consideration of whether they have experience or training.
--dave
davecb@spamcop.net
Our outsourcing "partners" in India cost about .25 of what an average American developer would cost. They earn far less as the outsourcing pimp takes their cut. I don't predict that the amount of developer jobs will grow at the same pace as the amount of developers. Therefore I predict the affect will be that wages are suppressed further, probably resulting in poorer quality of developers.
Every time there is a bit of news about H1Bs or immigration on tech sites, most Americans display their usual xenophobia and blame immigrants for the lack of jobs in the US.
At the same time, every single of them fails to realize that there isn't even a need for foreigners to be in America to take away their jobs.
There are plenty of countries with great universities, which are either free or where students don't have to pay with their life for tuition. India is one of the most extreme examples, but places like eastern Europe or South America are also full of software factories that work for American companies and clients.
The quantity over quality argument is also moot, foreigners not only keep improving but their low cost allows them to make mistakes while still being more affordable than Americans.
So, for the Americans here, the question you should be asking yourself, next time you hear news about H1B and immigration is not whether or not you want your job taken by someone else, but if you would rather to have that people live, contribute and keep most the industry in your country, or not.
Sorry, the educational system over there is little more than a diploma mill.
The quality of developers over there is somewhere between "bad" and "not qualified to sell slurpees".
Yes, as with any group, there's always the exceptions. A few, here and there, with a knack for doing good, solid work.
But that's just what they are. Exceptions.
Anyone can play baseball/football/soccer/hockey.
A much smaller contingent of the population do it well.
An even smaller contingent of that sub-population do it well enough to warrant getting paid to do it.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Well CS is not IT and trades / apprenticeship / tech schools get over looked.
As well loads of fluff and filler classes.
To many people are going to collgle and colleges are turning out people with skills gaps.
in the number of shitty programmers.
Yes as for percentage by population the US would be more than double. Also it can't all be outsource they have to be developing something for their own 1.2 billion possible consumers.
How do you say "Developers! Developers! Developers!" in Hindi or Kannadan?
As I have experenced then we will have a bigger booming software market in usa, that is mostly fixing off-shore shit that don't work.
But, my current experience has been much the same as many here have stated.
Many Indian developers seem to me to lack some critical thinking skills when it comes to working on projects. Perhaps it's a cultural issue that needs to be worked out, but it's like they know how to code.. but there is no thinking going on besides blindly following a written requirement without asking questions or trying to get clarity on something that isn't clear. Instead they code code and code until they are 'done' only to have wasted time coding something that doesn't actually meet the requirement because they didn't ask questions.
But then again.. I am dealing with developers who aren't Indian.. and well they suck too.. but I can't tell if it's their incompetence, their project manager's or just their whole company.
I'm not saying India doesn't have any developers, but I have seen a lot of programming defined as copying and pasting the code of someone else and testing that it "works as required". I couldn't understand why the JavaScript countdown timer we were supplied by an Indian company was written in Spanish until I caught on to how they "fulfilled" their contract obligations. I'm sure a lot of that goes on in every country with programmers (and developers). My point here is that we should be careful how we define developer vs programmer (not to mention the ongoing debates regarding the phrase "software engineer").
then we have nothing to fear from the developers. I am bombarded with "job offers", usually 3-5 a week, always from Indian people/firms who are completely illiterate. Over the past 5 or so years I've gone from politely declining, to ignoring, to insulting, to now intentionally misleading them and stringing them along just like 419 scammers.
I probably use some software with Indian work done on it. But I dont recall anything originated and marketed in India. But I expect soemthing to come sometime.
And databases screeeeeeech to a halt everywhere under the weight of trying to fit object orientated programming methods into a relational data. I am kidding of course, I do realize there are database developers in India that are much better than me, but I'll be dammed if I have met one yet. Maybe they charge to much? Or they might just be to good to work with me... it's possible... ok maybe likely.
We can double the number of developers here in the US right now... problem is half of them are going to f'in horrible at it. The total number doesn't matter but the quality does.
are half of these posts thinly veiled racism? I used to get annoyed when people made broad statements that my countrymen are xenophobic, but if that's the persona we use online maybe we deserve the moniker.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
US developers will ALWAYS have more creativity...that is what counts. Support...India rules. Design/new ideas...USA BABY!
Once you get outside the realm of graduates from the IIT schools, the quality is not very good. Don't believe me? Go ask almost anyone who has worked with an H1-B software engineer when they first arrived? Add to that the incredible inefficiencies and top-down authoritarian environment of most Indian software shops - independent thinking is not even considered.
Mexico just displaced the US as having the most obese population.
Decline and fall of the USA?
Takes 4-5 of them to one of US...
Thats the same thing i was thinking as well. It seems pretty logical that a country with a much larger population is going to have more people working in a certain field, simply because they have more people.
We are cheap labor just like 18th century's Chinese railroad worker ..
Most of the "talent" I have seen from the Indian software shops is anything but talented. It is usually 1 guy who mostly knows what he is doing and 3 - 4 of his friends. To the PHB's it looks like "productivity", man look at that teamwork. Reality is very different.
Not just youth and population size, but companies in the US (and Canada) are *actively* outsourcing jobs to India. Banks in Canada have had entire divisions handed to 'onshore' companies, and locals train their half-pay onshore coworkers. Then, after about 5 years, the contract is no longer 'onshore' but 'offshore'. The coworkers return to their families in Bangalore, and the assume corporate offices there. They have 'foreign worker' experience, and are considered executive material. North Americans who trained them need not apply. Rinse, repeat. All the national banks in Canada have done this. I've heard (way too many) stories like this from Americans I know. This story isn't news about mere observation, this is a story about outsourcing, offshoring, and the willful destruction of an industry.
99% are pure crap
No, I am not a dumb ass. H1B visas is what drives Americans out of of this profession. If they are good enough to get an H1B visa, they are good enough to have an unconditional Green Card. No, this is not a security threat. Physical presence of person in a place is what constitutes or doesn't constitute a security threat -- not the papers they hold. As long as a companies can hire people who work under threat of deportation rather than under threat of getting fired, those companies are not hiring employees. They are hiring indentured servants. In fact, if there were a test case, it would have a pretty chance of SCOTUS saying the same thing. And as long as Americans have to compete with indentured servants on work conditions (never mind on salary), they will not want to work in this profession. Give them Green Cards so that they have the option of saying "no" to 14 hour work days. Then Americans will want to do the same work.
Any guest worker system is indistinguishable from indentured servitude.
Generally, India's money should be at about 30 rupees to the dollar. It is now over 65. that is because they are directly manipulating against the dollar.
This has gotten old.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
I'll explain in more detail how all this happens in the real world.
I reside in South America. The big American companies opened up shop here a long, long time ago. IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, Citrix, Cisco, Capgemini, KPMG, etc. Every single of them is here and own several skyscrapers. There is a good education level here and university is often free or cheap, so there is a large pool of potential hires. By the time most americans heard about outsourcing, there was already a huge outsourcing industry in place here.
They started by bringing managers from other regions with experience and hire entire local teams. The teams are cheaper to hire, (or the governments offer tax exceptions in exchange of know how transfer) here are trained and put to work. The work done is pretty much the same that they do at the headquarters, except outsourcing allows them to scale. Sometimes they work for other local clients, sometimes they work for American clients. A plane ticket is cheap anyway.
Teams started with little experience, and are allowed to do a few mistakes, but quickly gained experience and become competitive with other regions.
Once the team is experienced enough, the leaders are sent to new, nearby regions to start over while the company expands. It's the same in Asia, probably an order of magnitude worse.
So, for the companies, this is really profitable of course. For the American jobs this is devastating, but you guys can't see what you don't know, and keep believing your lack of jobs is due to the tiny amount of foreigners on H1B. H1Bs don't even compare! Outsourcing worldwide is in the order of millions while H1Bs are in the order of thousands.
So, yes, It's true. To all Americans reading this, I'm out there and I see every day how outsourcing steals your jobs much more dramatically than immigrants, but you are free to believe your own self-comforting lies, and keep thinking that outsourcing was just about hiring a bunch of retarded indians that are so stupid that it's impossible they will do code right, so your jobs must be safe because at this point everyone in the industry must have realized how retarded foreigners are.
Our jobs aren't safe because American management is as bad at their jobs as 3rd world labor is at software development.
It's easy to earn my respect. Just produce quality software.
I've seen lots of offshore code and 100% was terrible.
I've rewritten the work of shitty offshore software developers at least 3 times in my career.
But don't worry, America's shittiest management teams will keep hiring you to fuck up, and then ask me to fix their mistake.
I'm tired of saving your fuckups so don't count on me next time.
+1 I wish I had mod points. American management is at the worst I've ever seen. Even worse, failure is rewarded. How many CEO's get the golden parachute? It's crazy.
Are there still developers in the US?
Myriads of low-wage workers slaving away at giant pyramids. Big is beautiful. A culture in which the automatically generated interface doc (Javadoc and Doxygen should be called illiterate programming) is bigger than the whole implementation should be -- if one had the time to actually *think* about the overall design.
Mind you: I'm not saying that all those people are idiots. Actually, I'd wager that half of them (at least!) are smarter than me. It's that they aren't given the chance.
...doubtful.
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Rotate the pod, please, HAL....
I am from India. I have worked both in India and US on Software Projects for major/minor/start up's and what not. As a group Indian software developers are as competent or incompetent as anyone else. Any generalization is only lazy stereotyping.
The antagonism US developers/engineers show towards Indians should STOP. Period. At some level we are all brothers. The Indian H1Bs who got Green Cards and settled in US - thinking that will be better future - will be seriously unhappy when they know after they hit their forties the best career progression for a majority of them will be flipping burgers. So some of them move back to India.
The suits - in US and India - are extremely happy to see this division between the Americans and Indians. We Indians have seen this strategy before - 'Divide and rule' was perfected by the British.
So, relax, and try to look into how some of the pain of the inevitable developments can be reduced, and work arm in arm. Else, we are all doomed.
As far as a I am concerned...I have skill sets other than software programming which should keep me busy till my sixties.
Tat Tvam Asi
Why is it that with all the software developers in India, that we don't see any open source or any software freely available from India ?
I am an Indian Programmer/developer/IT guy. I can contribute my story and hope its relevant. The beginning of my career is typical. I am bachelors in Electrical Engineering. I always 'liked' electricity. I did not have a computer till I was 20 something. I did have lots of broken electronics though and used to make little hobby circuits. I did not design the circuits but copied them from magazines/books. I kind of understood why they worked but not really. I always wanted to 'get it'. My questions which were not explained in the text books in school remained unanswered. Teachers did not seem to know the answers. Abstract concepts were pushed down my throat as hard reality with no other possibilities. Accepting them was the only way to get 'good marks'. I had no access to internet (or a computer during school) but my dad bought me as much books as he could afford. I used to like Maths in beginning and was good at it but got stuck on square root of 2: irrationals, their importance etc. and other higher level abstractions in school. The access to the books I had or the Teachers did not clear things up. I always knew inside I was an idiot. I was achieving decent scores/grades and was considered an excellent student because I realised the only path given to me was to memorize tons of information in stupidly written text books . The examination questions are from the same text books, even patterns of the Math problems. So to really apply myself to 'succeed' was never really needed. Its hard to keep my tone normal and objective because the truth is the Education system is horrible. It like turning human beings into .. anything really, just dreamt of joining companies like TCS, Infosys etc and kept
'hard disks' and not critically thinking/questioning conscious beings. Indians I feel are not genetically predisposed to being idiots but the Education system is designed
to leave no other option. I do not know exactly how this came to be, but probably it was modelled on accepting West to be the creators and us the consumers of knowledge. No questions asked. Then I got into an engineering college and took up Electrical Engineering for four years. In a nutshell,a joke: The teachers, the books,
the labs: everything from the middle ages and that when my college is considered internally and even internationally to be a good one! It was the same script as school: spend most time eating rubbish books for breakfast, lunch and dinner. I was amazed all the time how students, teachers all around me had no problems with this. My dad advised to go trough this mill to have a degree to get a Job then find your own way. If you don’t have a degree, you are ffed. So that is what I did instead of dropping out.
I found majority of my fellow students did not care about physics, maths, computers
cramming their previous interview questions sheets etc as we approached end of our Engineering degree. Only care seems to be about Getting a job, cars, home, the girl/guy to settle down with, going f..kin 'onsite' is the dream. Political, intellectually shallow players built for corporate. I couldn’t compete with them and still have a job in India on my own terms. When the software companies started coming in to college, I was selected by the first one and shipped to Chennai. They did not mind at all that I was an Electrical engineer and potentially knew nothing about computers. They asked me nothing about computers in the interview, just some logic questions. What mattered was that I just awesomely happy about the peanuts they were offering me in return. But peanuts they are in hindsight, At that moment I remember I was the happiest man alive. It was amazing, wow, superman moment, I forgot that I was an idiot. I thought I was kewl.
This company put me straight in to Cobol,DB2 based project for a major US client. I hated Cobol , did not know the business,did know Cobol! but that seemed not to matter! I managed
somehow and kept pushing my managers to get me into some Java project. All around me were absolute
As a Romanian developer, I've fixed things after Indian developers in 2 projects so far. And I've collaborated with one on an ongoing project once. :)
I'm afraid I can't think of enough expletives to describe their code quality.
I would worry more about Eastern Europe and Russia if i were you
Indians are the worst ever coders. There are some good ones >1% but they already are in USA. The vast majority are usable only to write basic modules and stuff that is very easy but time consuming. They are very poor in integrating or designing a complex software system.
As long as firms hire these clowns, there will always be demand for competent developers to fix their shitty code.
I have the proof written down here on an envelop , let me see if I can find it now...
Yeah, 5 million software developers capable of coding a "Hello World!" program.
Sounds like a tremendous opportunity for US devs. The more crapware that comes out of India, the more cleanup that needs to happen, and as a result, the more opportunities for US devs to make a living doing work that may otherwise not have been available.
Yeah, there is the question of whether that time and effort could have been productively used or not. But the argument here would be similar to the ones that have been run about Windows in the past. Due to all the bugs in Windows, as well as malware, you have an entire industry segment dedicated to just that. Guys like Symantec, McAfee, Kaspersky, ESET and so on, who do just that, and little else. Just like Y2K was a godsend for devs in 1998-99, similarly, this plethora of crappy software could turn out to be a gold mine for US programmers.
Similarly, I foresee a huge software industry that would be dedicated to just cleaning up Indian code. Could better use have been made of these guys? Perhaps, but it's not known whether there'd have been a market for their work, given how so much of startup cash has dried up, or otherwise tightened. So just take the cynical attitude, and dedicate yourselves to becoming rich by cleaning up Indian code.
Yeah, that would make all US programmers as well as Eastern European programmers busy, working overtime. Finally, companies like Mahindra Satyam, iGate, et al would outsource all the bug fixing to the US, and lobby the Indian government to allow plenty of Americans to move to India to work locally on their code.
Praise Dawkins' Moral Zeitgeist. Hail Kali! Destroy Creation With Morbidity! Invasive Species Über Alles!
Seastead this.
I am an Indian and I work for a very large European company in India. Now our manager who is a Swede told us that the amount they have to spend to get one guy in Europe they can get 7 in India. They still continue to reduce the median salary and the average exp of the team to save more money. Now I am the brightest of the Indians but I am still a fast learner and know more than enough to do my job and do it well enough. That being said I can't say the same for all the people working in my company. Most of them don't know anything or barely anything and depend on my team to get their jobs done properly. (we don't have an option to refuse because of our bosses). But saying that all Indians besides the one from IITs are incompetent or can't code is as far away from the truth as it can be. The reason why most Indians are incompetent at least during the initial years is because of most of them (including me) aren't from the computer science background but it's just where the money is. But we are good enough to eat your jobs. My last company was a US giant and the more work they could outsource they did, laying off as many US people as they could and they didn't keep one guy in the US to clean up what Indians did but just so that they could work on projects that can't be outsourced due to govt. regulations. Don't be surprised by the greed of the companies they treat most of us like shit and would part ways rather than pay enough money even to a few competent people here in India. We aren't responsible for shit code or crashing apps. It's the corporate greed.