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."

Comments

Re:Quanity over Quality? ~nt~

[Anonymous Coward]

This exactly. What are all these developers doing? I don't see an explosion of Indian-made software that matches these numbers.

Re:How was this data calculated?

[ArcadeMan]

They don't know either, the survey was outsourced to India.

Re:Quanity over Quality? ~nt~

[aardvarkjoe]

What are all these developers doing?

In my experience, they're ensuring that U.S. developers have poorly-designed software to fix.

Re:Quanity over Quality? ~nt~

[TWiTfan]

This is much incorrect! Indian designers are most making with excellent design and superiorest documentation! Their English is excellent handsome!

Re:Quanity over Quality? ~nt~

[Rob Y.]

It's worse that just the offshoring aspect.

When my company decided to outsource, they fired pretty much all the local developers except for one 'business analyst' who knows the code and how it works. That wasn't me, but they also kept me on as a 'consultant' to the outsourcers so something still gets done and the whole project can be viewed as something other than a total failure. The Indian devs were not great, but I figured that at least they'd be captive. Prior to outsourcing the company had taken to hiring (cheap) young programmers, and (surprise!) had a retention problem. But Indian programmers are 'happy just to have a job', right? Wrong - if anything, they're more mobile than their American counterparts, because the big outsourcing firms want it that way. They're constantly moving people off of our project, and bringing in new people to learn it all on our dime.

So the one expected productivity benefit is not there - but it's even worse. Since these guys don't hang around, there is no next generation coming up with the in-depth knowledge of these products to become the 'business analysts' and senior devs to replace us. So when I and the other guy who are still sustaining the whole contraption retire (and we're both older than 55), the whole thing sinks. Prior to outsourcing, there were other dev's with seniority that could've stepped in to take our places.

In today's world of perverse incentives, though, this isn't a 'problem'. The company is owned by a private equity firm that expects to dump it long before that final crash. But if I were a private equity firm looking to buy a piece of crap like this, I'd certainly ask what plans exist to produce the next generation of senior techs to keep the place going. As it is, it's musical chairs, at some point a buyer will get stuck with no chairs left.