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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."
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 ...."
This is actually an insightful comment. The industry started going downhill when we stopped having Software Engineers and Programmers and started calling everyone a "developer." Now any idiot can create a github account and start programming, with no idea how to design systems, call themselves a "developer", and get hired by a clueless "hiring manager" who granted the interview because his resume had the right buzz words on it.
The vast majority of people writing code these days don't have a clue about methodologies, processes, or even the difference between strongly and loosely typed languages. They choose a language not because it is the right tool for the right job, but because it is cool and the latest and what everyone is using with no idea why the language works the way it does, or why they are using the wrong tool to solve a problem they never even defined, nevermind took the time to understand properly. They choose the wrong language for the wrong reason and throw together garbage rooted in incompetence, and lo and behold, you have an industry that was once awesome and has degraded into a clusterfuck of Agile weenies complaining that git is horrible because it works correctly.
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
Not that I think you're wrong, but is this really so different to the Visual Basic or PHP "developers" of yesteryear? Maybe JS is just the latest language that everyone automatically has on their computers and where it's easy to find beginner tutorials (good, bad or otherwise) online.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
> 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.