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Are There More Developers Than We Think? (redmonk.com)
JavaScript's npm package manager reports 4 million users, doubling every year, leading to an interesting question from tech industry analyst James Governor:
Just how many developers are there out there? GitHub is very well placed to know, given it's where (so much) of that development happens today. It has telemetry-based numbers, with their own skew of course, but based on usage rather than surveys or estimates. According to GitHub CEO Chris Wanstrath, "We see 20 million professional devs in the world as an estimate, from research companies. Well we have 21 million [active] users -- we can't have more users than the entire industry"...
If Github has 21 million active users, Wanstrath is right that current estimates of the size of the developer population must be far too low... Are we under-counting China, for example, given its firewalls? India continues to crank out developers at an astonishing rate. Meanwhile Africa is set for crazy growth too... You certainly can't just count computer science graduates or software industry employees anymore. These days you can't even be an astronomer without learning code, and that's going to be true of all scientific disciplines.
The analyst attributes the increasing number of developers to "the availability, accessibility and affordability of tools and learning," adding "It's pretty amazing to think that GitHub hit 5 million users in 2012, and is now at 20 million." As for the total number of all developers, he offers his own estimate at the end of the essay. "My wild assed guess would be more like 35 million."
If Github has 21 million active users, Wanstrath is right that current estimates of the size of the developer population must be far too low... Are we under-counting China, for example, given its firewalls? India continues to crank out developers at an astonishing rate. Meanwhile Africa is set for crazy growth too... You certainly can't just count computer science graduates or software industry employees anymore. These days you can't even be an astronomer without learning code, and that's going to be true of all scientific disciplines.
The analyst attributes the increasing number of developers to "the availability, accessibility and affordability of tools and learning," adding "It's pretty amazing to think that GitHub hit 5 million users in 2012, and is now at 20 million." As for the total number of all developers, he offers his own estimate at the end of the essay. "My wild assed guess would be more like 35 million."
only if you call all js-monkeys as developers
Jobs aren't always available though.
These days you can't even be an astronomer without learning code, and that's going to be true of all scientific disciplines.
My cousin has to develop a lot of customized software as an economist.
Here's something else - historians.
Historians have been using modern imaging and are digitizing old documents. For example English church records. And using "big data" techniques they have been discovering new things about history.
Although, people like my cousin find the coding a tedious chore that they have to do to solve their problems and dreams of the day when we have computers like on Star Trek: "Computer, what is the relationship between ...."
Well we have 21 million [active] users -- we can't have more users than the entire industry
It's impossible for a single user to register multiple accounts. Impossible, I tell you!!!
Usage statistics, that's what you should call it. It has nothing to do with the bullshit Microsoft is doing.
In case of the article a developer is anybody who writes code. In that context, 20 mio is far too low. However, in case you want to count only people who actually write code for a living then these number would go down. Still I think 20 mio is a little low on that, as we have 7000 mio people on the planet.
You mean in the US you get a debt and get outsourced to India. Well in, for example Germany, you usually have not a big debt after university, because you get state subsidies and do not have to pay a lot of money to the university. Also you earn 35 to 50 k€ a year (before taxes and social security stuff) or 18 to 25 k€ after all taxes and fees which include healthcare and retirement funds. Good enough to have a comfortable life.
If I doodle am I an artist?
If I put air in my tires am I a mechanic?
If I floss an I a dentist?
If I buy plants am I a horticulturist?
It seems if merely downloading some code makes one a developer... we have a serious respectability problem as a profession.
Cwm, fjord-bank glyphs vext quiz
There is a typical logical disconnect in this summary. A lot of GitHub accounts are for students and people who are just hobbyists. Therefore a GitHub account doesn't equate to a professional developer. Also, multiple GitHub accounts per person is not abnormal.
The researchers indicate that there are 20 million professional developers. In other words, not including students and hobbyists.
Therefore the GitHub CEO is a moron, or his statement is out of context or is mis-quoted. Or the submitter/story writer is just making stuff up.
20 million professional developers globally seems a reasonable estimate. Somewhere above 40 million people globally who code regularly is not unrealistic.
There are state universities in the US as well, but some kids insist on going to the private ones. The real problem is that the easy availability of student loans (even for trash degrees) has caused universities in general to get greedy and raise their costs to support a much larger administrative population.
> we can't have more users than the entire industry
Sure you can. I personally have 3 different github accounts created with different email addresses. You?
I went to ITT to gets me my edumikation cause I wants to be a developer. I saw Balmer say developers developers developers developers developers, and I believed I could have a future and afford as much drugs as he be taking. Now eyes so poor do to student debt, so I just steel from other bitches, cause I be hungray.
And certainly not all users are coders (depending on quite how you term "developer")
Yes, I am a developer, but amongst the activities I use GitHub for, I host a website. Not all of the contributors (who have user accounts and have submitted pull requests), are developers.
What about people just uploading data sets to GitHub for sharing?
What about people that contribute just to the artwork or documentation of a project (where those files are in GitHub)?
What about users who have an account solely to open issues in the issue tracker? Or contribute to wikis?
And then there are students, or even just hobbyist coders, never in the industry but just doing it for fun?
Saying that you can't have more users than the industry is pretty dumb, and suggests that the CEO doesn't understand his own product.
No, you do not get to go to university without paying a lot of money. You pay, every year, as part of that 50% tax rate. And after 30 years of work, when people in the US have long since paid off their debt, you are still paying.
And what you call your 'comfortable life', the US calls 'lower middle class'.
Astronomers, scientists, (non-software) engineers, mathematicians, academics, etc. may know enough about coding to have a GitHub account and read/write some code every now and then, but they are not professional developers. It's fine to include those people in an estimate but it's misleading to think of them as "professional developers". I frequently prepare documents, make presentations, straighten up my office and e-mail but I don't consider myself to be a professional technical writer, orator, interior decorator or marketer. Twenty million developers seems low for the whole world, but perhaps it could be even lower if you exclude IT and quality/test functions that don't primarily write code.
I was talking with my cousin over the weekend and he thought programming was just sitting at a computer inputing data from spreadsheets.
The hard truth is, developers are sitting in front of a computer making things happen. It can't be that hard cause they're just sitting in front of a computer, right?
AMIRITE?!
I tend to rant.
> And what you call your 'comfortable life', the US calls 'lower middle class'.
Median wealth per adult is in fact $5000 more in Germany than the USA. That represents how much the average joe is able to save. It's a meaningful measure of how well people are doing *after* all taxes and costs are deducted.
I personally have 3 different github accounts created with different email addresses.
Why?
Is it for bookkeeping purposes or something? Like, there a question to My_datamining_module@yahoo.com and you know it's a correspondence regarding that module?
Ya, this is the most obvious counter-example. Seems pretty elementary to assume that many users have multiple accounts, perhaps at least one for work and one for personal use. Also really obvious that people who aren't developers can & do have accounts (whether you count hobbyists or not) and that tons of professional developers don't use GitHub.
Even if you can somehow remove people from the GitHub pool who aren't developers...
I have five GitHub accounts, three of which are "Active": one that is mine, one that is my company's with my name associated to it, and one that simply belongs to my company (I'm the tech lead).
I would guess that this pattern is similar for others, so we would expect GitHub's accounts to be about a factor of two above the actual number of people who use it.
YMMV.
You mean in the US you get a debt and get outsourced to India. Well in, for example Germany, you usually have not a big debt after university, because you get state subsidies and do not have to pay a lot of money to the university. Also you earn 35 to 50 k€ a year (before taxes and social security stuff) or 18 to 25 k€ after all taxes and fees which include healthcare and retirement funds. Good enough to have a comfortable life.
Just to put this in perspective..
I received state funding/loan for studies, with more or less zero support from parents (because they had no money to actually support me). The loan kept me afloat until I finished my studies (MSc in a STEM field). Subsequently I managed to do a PhD.
I paid of the loan in less than 2-3 years, after the PhD.
So would I have been able to do all that without this generous loan? Maybe.. but I'd be more broke.. or other my siblings.
Thanks german education system!
an astonishing rate."
Of which 95% are not fit to take up software development jobs.
https://news.slashdot.org/story/17/04/20/128224/95-engineers-in-india-unfit-for-software-development-jobs-report
Its the wrong question. The right question is are there too many developers.
Are the purposefully writing to enforce Betteridge's law?
love is just extroverted narcissism
Dude, even I don't pay 50% tax and I'm in the upper 10% of the country. If you exaggerate, at least do it at a sensible level.
The main difference is that you actually get something out of your taxes over here in Europe. My taxes pay well for my safety, not because we have tons of police, more because simply everyone here has enough to lose to not mug you for the maybe 20 bucks in your wallet. And for my healthcare, my retirement, my potential unemployment, accidents that might happen...
In other words, that spending money that I have left over at the end of the month IS actually spending money. Because everything you either try to find an affordable insurance for or have to stash money away for eventualities I have already covered.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
It's because I don't want customers of my customer relationship software to know that I also create firmware for flesh colored fake assholes that have a sucking mechanic.
I mean, that's what I could imagine HIS reason is...
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
India has the Best Tech Schools in the world. People are fighting to get in. What have we got? Nothing.. http://indianexpress.com/artic...
I bet a huge percentage of accounts are end users. These people want to download free software, but don't want to write any code.
Off those 20 million users, how many commit code to github? That would give a more accurate picture of the number of developers.
I'm a professional developer. But I have two active GitHub accounts. One for work, and one for personal stuff.
Too bad all the Muslims are taking over in the name of globalism. Markell is laughing all the way to the bank.
No way!... ;)
And what you call your 'comfortable life', the US calls 'lower middle class'.
Does your lower middle class enjoy fewer worries about medical emergencies or about getting shot by a cop at a traffic stop like the German one does? By the way, purely financially, what are you complaining about anyway?
And after 30 years of work, when people in the US have long since paid off their debt, you are still paying
Someone already mentioned that the median wealth figure doesn't quite support this claim.
Ezekiel 23:20
In addition to the true observation that not everyone with an active GitHub account is a qualified software developer, it ought to be pointed out that the promotion paths most companies have discourage developers. When people get good at it, they tend to have the option of having a stagnating salary or moving into management. Other developers move sideways to get more lucrative positions in sales-related jobs. Both of these work to pull qualified developers out of the pool. Many of these former developers still continue coding as a hobby.
I fucking hate these asinine headlines!
If you spend your days on sites like stackoverflow, you're a junior developer at best
I've written 100s of thousands of lines of code,
but I don't consider myself a developer or even a "coder".
I don't know C, or Java or perl or python or ruby or any of the current modern languages.
I refuse to do OOP or have anything to do with it.
I've done programming for over 40 years, but...
There are whole aspects to coding or dev work which I never learned because I never needed them.
like socket code, or even some other things.
Don't need it, don't care.
I've gotten this far without out, it's highly unlikely I'll need it now...
I use the language I use because it's easy to use, it's elegant and it's flexible.
I can bang out a template in minutes.
I could probably do it with my eyes closed.
Can I do everything I need with my language? Nope.
So I resort to awk, grep, and expect to cover the rest.
There are still gaps, but I can cover most of it using a combination of things.
Sometimes the combinations can be really ugly.
PS: freepascal ftw :)
With node/js there is little evidence of any 'professional' developers being involved at all. Professional developers will gravitate to languages and toolchains that allow writing of maintainable software, using competent practices and techniques. This is simply impossible on the mentioned software stack. Even with the slightly less awful 'transpiled' languages like typescript, the node/javascript world is still a sewer of all of the worst technologies ever hacked together (css, javascript, html) badly combined into a rancid sludge, then used for completely inappropriate purposes. Hopefully web asm will save us from this mess, and from whoever these people are, who are deploying the craplets from npm.
Are, at large, unfortunately even worse than their Indian counterparts. That's nof a racist comment, it's just stating a fact.
"Africa is set for crazy growth too..."
Africa is obviously set to become a technological powerhouse given that the average IQ for the continent is 70 which is also the threshold for mental retardation. Ignore the fact that Sub-Saharan Africans never invented the wheel or written language, nor have they ever demonstrated the ability to create or sustain civilization even though they've been on earth longer than anyone else. Just give them the benefit of the doubt because... "social justice".
This depends on what we define as "developers".
Are we talking about people who have had formal comp sci education? Or people who read an html tutorial once and thought, "Oh yeah this is easy! I am a developer now!"
The number of people I've run into who think they are gods gift to software development, but don't actually know WTF they're doing, is staggering. Worse is when these guys have just enough charisma and knowledge to bullshit their way through interviews with people who don't actually know better, and your project ends up on http://thedailywtf.com/ cause it's so bad.
Just because someone knows how to copy code out of a tutorial or a stackoverflow post, doesn't mean they are actually qualified for the job.
between those who willingly look at any code at all, and those who won't.
Yes there are a lot of bad or unprofessional programmers, but in terms of general thinking ability the bar goes so much lower.
Go ahead and count them.
How can any stats at GitHub give you a clue about the total number of developers, unless you just happen to be the one person in the entire world who, magically, has a vague idea of what fraction of developers use GitHub?
What fraction of developers use GitHub? 0.1%? 1%? 10%? 31.6%? If you pull 20% out of your ass (and that's exactly where you would be finding this number) and just to play contrarian, I say "No, you're wrong, it's only 10%" or "you idiot, it's more like 40%" can you explain how closer to right?
You don't have a clue. And the only reason we can't have a good fight about how amazingly wrong your estimate is, is that nobody knows the right answer. We might as well be arguing religion. BTW, the correct answer is 4%. Just kidding, it's 9%. Ha, fooled you again! It's actually only 0.8%.
Not a single one of those number is even slightly unbelievable.
Next up: sneaker sales used to estimate number of insurance claim adjudicators.
"Believe me!" -- Donald Trump
Median wealth has a huge cultural bias too.
Americans aren't savers. People from east Asian cultures tend to be savers. Europe ... probably somewhere in the middle.
We Americans make all sorts of bad choices, from living beyond our means to just being fat and unhealthy.
There are a lot of confounding factors. You can't just say hat Germans on average have higher savings and attribute hat to the tax system.
Counting the same user multiple times when he comes in from another device or temp IP from a VPN etc. I account for at least 200 users and I hardly use github, which can only represent a small fraction of actual developers since most companies won't touch it.
I also have 3 Visual Studio accounts, one for this job, one for my previous job (each had it's own MSDN sub), and my personal one. Possibly I had another one that was linked to my student ID or is dreamspark separate?
So I could count as 6 developers?
One for personal use
Another one for work
I have 5 million GitHub accounts and at least 3 million on Stackoverflow. I have a phobia about doing more than one commit or pull request with the same account, and I have to do all my question asking, answering, and voting with all different accounts. So the original estimates are correct, there's just a few people like me.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headlines