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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."
~nt~
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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).
They don't know either, the survey was outsourced to India.
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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.
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
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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.
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It isn't unique to India. Never said that. But it does become a problem from my end (the US) because India is pretty much the out-sourcing capital so if/when my company decides to shift some development and testing over there, I have to deal with their sub-par work.
That's exactly what the people of Detroit said about Japanese car manufacturers way back in the 1970s.
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").
That's exactly what the people of Detroit said about Japanese car manufacturers way back in the 1970s.
No, it isn't. What American car manufacturers said (actually more in the 60's and than 70's) is that the Japanese and VW imports were small low-powered cars that would only appeal to a small (and not very profitable) segment of the American market. They generally did not disparage the design or manufacture, just that they wouldn't appeal to many Americans (toy cars). By the mid to late 70's that was obviously nonsense, with the Japanese market share increasing and the Japanese going up-market. The increasing price of gas in the 70's also made small cars much more attractive.
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.
Dismissing legitimate economic concerns as "xenophobia" is either a false assumption on your part, or a common but cheap trick. Sorry, ain't buying it.
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.
True only to a certain extent. Being on-site, meeting face-to-face, and understanding more about a customer and a culture so that you can be more than a code monkey, are still useful.
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.
Of course "their low cost allows them to make mistakes while still being more affordable than Americans". It's the very fact that they do make so many mistakes that's part of why they're so affordable! If what you meant was that some people will always buy cheap crap, then that's an obvious truism. Whether or not that's penny wise and pound foolish is another story.
As for "foreigners not only keep improving", or more accurately the quality of foreign sourced work keeps improving, I've found just the opposite to be true. I don't know why, or even why the foreign sourced work is often of such poor quality, and I have little interest in debating theories about why. What I do know is that it's true.
would rather to have that people live, contribute and keep most the industry in your country
No, not if it means sacrificing my job for that. Save the "it's good for the country as a whole" garbage for the congressional hearings. Bonus points for honesty if you say "for the good of the American economy we must screw American programmers, IT people and engineers". Really, go ahead and say it, because it won't matter. The hearings are a formality and congress will just vote however the people that bribe them want congress to vote.
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.
I used to see rates in the $100/hr+ in the SF bayarea. When I consulted in the dot com bubble, it was expected that consulting rates would be double a full-time salary. Not any more.
Recently, I've seen rates in the $50/hr to $60/hr range. But my 27 year-old friend has a full-time bayarea job that pays $180k so it makes no sense to take a $50/hr contract without benefits, vacation, etc.
The connection to 'Indian programmer' is that most of the recruiters I run into are indian and state strongly that a $100/hr+ rate is unrealistic. I suspect that is the case given the number of Indian programmers who are happy with $50/hr.
(I am consulting now but my long-term employer lets me work overseas so I travel a lot and I am willing to accept a lower rate in exchange for that perk).
It's not racism. It's resentment and entirely justified. From my experience, here's how it grows:
1) Bids and proposals are submitted to American client 2) Middle management of said American client decides to go with lowest bidder (typically from India) 3) Lowest bidder can't satisfy contract due to incompetence 4) 1 year later, project still can't satisfy requirements. 5) American client back peddles to find American developers to fix and complete project 6) American developers review the code... it's a steaming pile of shit. 7) If American developers have sense, they decline the project and quote the client for the whole project
Now, if you're working in-house, the same thing happens except that you can't politely decline the project and are forced to deliver on a steaming pile of shit and you have to have your name attached to garbage.
It's not racism. Developers are objective; if it were good, quality code there wouldn't be any pushback or resentment.
There has been a war on the white male since the signing of Hart Celler by LBJ in 1965.
As a white American man who has been around since the civil rights era, I must say I've never noticed that. If they're waging war against me, they're sure doing a lousy job.
The deeper question is "Why is it OK for the rest of the world to be xenophobic when the same is disallowed for the Anglosphere?"
There is no such deeper question because xenophobia, by or against whomever, has nothing to do with this subject. It's about economics. It's the H-1B proponents who frame it as a xenophobia issue, and thus try to distract from what's really at stake.
BTW, it's not clear how excessive guest workers in a particular field targets white males. It targets Americans in the 99%. Last time I checked though, not all Americans are white, and they're not all male. Get your categories straight.
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.
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.
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.