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."

Comments

no

[Anonymous Coward]

only if you call all js-monkeys as developers

Re:no

[Zero__Kelvin]

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.

Re:no

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

If there were 5 million in 2012 and 20 million in 2017, that's probably only a million JS programmers, they just created new names for everything every few months...

Re:no

[TheRaven64]

More seriously, there are lots of reasons to have multiple GitHub accounts. There are quite a few people at Microsoft, for example, who have an account with MSFT in their name for open source work-related stuff and another account for private stuff. Additionally, GitHub uses a horrible ACL mechanism, rather than a simple capability mechanism, for authorising applications, which means that the easiest way of granting rights to monitor a repository to something like Travis-CI or Coverity or similar is to create a new account that has access only to that repository and create an OAuth token for that user. It's not surprising that the number would quadruple when there are lots of good reasons for people to have 2-3 accounts...

Re:no

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

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.

Re:no

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

I always wondered about this. Unless something changed, I thought that GitHub's official policy was that one person is only allowed one (non-paid) account, possibly with some exceptions for things like well-known projects. But IME there are mostly only two kinds of developer: those who don't really use GitHub much other than anonymously pulling from the repos, and those who are really into it and often do seem to have several different accounts they use.

Re: no

[Zero__Kelvin]

The industry started going downhill around then ... I was not implying the industry started going downhill recently.

Re: no

[Zero__Kelvin]

If I thought everyone should be a software engineer I wouldn't have mentioned programmers.

Re:no

[mark-t]

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.

... And then get themselves fired within only a few weeks of starting as soon as the CTO and programmer lead on that person's team quickly realize that the guy doesn't know jack shit. I've seen it happen. Obviously there's some cost to the company for doing this, not to mention the expense of continuing to evaluate others for the position, but the cost will be MUCH greater if an incompetent person is allowed to remain.

Re:no

[mccalli]

This is rose-tinted thinking. We didn't have a clue about methodologies and processes in the 80s either, when I taught myself to code in BASIC. Version control? I'd tell you I'd heard of it but I hadn't. Early 90s I did - I copied directories to different names. rcs etc.

There's irony in putting that in an article praising GitHub, i.e. git, written by a guy who resisted source control for so long and then claimed it was because every system was rubbish except his. He knew nothing about process either.

Re:no

[Anonymous Coward]

At least they are using the lesser title of "developer". I don't equate developers with programmers.

"Software engineer" is just a ridiculous, overcompensating title which tells me that the person using it is probably clueless, but wants to make themself look like an expert.

Re:no

[Anubis IV]

You're right to say "no", but for other reasons. For instance, many apps require that their users create Github accounts in order to submit bug reports and feature requests. If you look through issues on user-facing apps, particularly smaller ones with no other channels for submitting feedback, it's usually pretty evident that the majority of people have no background in programming.

Then there are the students and hobbyists who create an account to work on things on a rare basis. They may be in the pool of potential professional developers, but calling them professionals, suggesting they're currently employed in the field, would likely be a gross overstatement .

And that's before we even consider the huge number of students who are forced to create an account for intro courses they are required to take as part of their school's curriculum. Most of them never pursue programming any further and will never enter the field's professional workforce, yet they'd still count towards those 21M accounts.

Finally, there's the question of what that 21M is actually measuring. The provided quote says "[active] users", but I can't find the original quote to confirm that it really was active users, and not just users in general. If it wasn't, and that 21M is really for ALL users, then it's safe to say that 21M is an inflated number.

Re:no

[minstrelmike]

Same old same old. There were a bunch of kewl video games written in the 1980s Busing basic. And there were a shitload of piss-poor games written in Basic in the 1980s but no one remembers those.

I've heard folks complain about the current writing skills of Americans saying Thomas Jefferson was a good writer but folks today aren't. Well TJ was one of the best writers of his generation. Most any luser here on slashdot can write better than the average human of 1760.

90% of everything is crap.

Re: no

[__aaclcg7560]

Sometimes you need virtual ditch diggers to clean up the mess when the latest version goes kaput.

Re:no

[phantomfive]

It's always been that way. 45 years ago it was a bunch of COBOL programmers who couldn't write a linked-list to save their life. There have always been a core of a few programmers who are really good, with a huge mass who spend their lives implementing business logic, and never learn anything else. Even in the 50s when you had to stick wires into plugboards, there were a lot of people who didn't know what they were doing.

(Implementing business logic in itself isn't necessarily bad, it pays the bills).

Re:no

[phantomfive]

I admit I personally have two accounts.

Re:no

[Zero__Kelvin]

You mean you didn't have a clue about methodologies and processes in the 80s. We certainly did.

Re:no

[Zero__Kelvin]

""Software engineer" is just a ridiculous, overcompensating title which tells me that the person using it is probably clueless, but wants to make themself look like an expert.

Whenever people say this it is a glaring red flag that the person is beyond a shadow of a doubt clueless, and doesn't know that in order to design software properly you need to educate yourself in a way that makes you an engineer, not a programmer.

Re: no

[Zero__Kelvin]

You should probably explain that not only to me, but also to Bjarne ;-)

(I know, ... Bjarne who? ROTFLMAO)

Re:no

[Zero__Kelvin]

Just because your code compiles doesn't mean it isn't bug ridden trash.

Re:no

[Zero__Kelvin]

COBOL programmers actually couldn't write linked lists 45 years ago, because COBOL didn't have pointers at the time. It certainly has not always been like this by any stretch of the imagination. Back then simply being able to write software meant you were much smarter than average. Today the boy and girl scouts literally have teenagers thinking anyone can do it (for example.)

Re:no

[phantomfive]

simply being able to write software meant you were much smarter than average.

That's definitely not true. IBM tried at one time to hire programmers based on chess ability, but that was definitely not widespread. When Knuth wrote AoCP some of his readers were shocked at the idea that they could write their own data structures and algorithms for common things, instead of using the vendor supplied packages.

Re:no

[phantomfive]

It reminds me of when Windows Phone 7 came out. Instead of releasing sales numbers, Microsoft released the number of downloads of its SDK, which was around 10million IIRC. At that time, I had already personally downloaded the SDK two or three times for work.

In the end, I think there were more SDK downloads than phones sold. Again, that is certainly true in my own case, I didn't buy a single one.

Re: no

[Zero__Kelvin]

Chess ability is no indication of ability to program, and I'm sorry to break it to you but there were no people of average intelligence allowed anywhere near a computer originally.

Re: no

[phantomfive]

there were no people of average intelligence allowed anywhere near a computer originally.

Why do you even think that? Do you have some kind of research to demonstrate it? We're talking about the late 50s and 60s btw, not when the only computers in existence were at the Institute for Advanced Study or something. Despite what you may believe, not everyone in those days was like Mel.

Seriously, look at this code and tell me that it was good. I've seen ugly Javascript but never that bad.

Re:no

[sound vision]

I think the difference is in degree. We are in the middle of a groundswell in the number of coders, both in the US and worldwide. The lure of being the next Gates or Jobs (and they probably think he was a developer) has been sinking into society for a couple decades now. Add to that all the pushes to put disinterested kids into coding courses, or even to make it a mandatory course. All this is going to decrease the skill of the average coder, as people start getting into it for the wrong reasons.
More low-skilled coders isn't necessarily a bad thing, in terms of getting work done - if the people doing the hiring/firing are competent. Often, they aren't. And the most basic tool of their credential analysis, the college degree, is being slowly devalued as well.

Re:no

[globaljustin]

only if you call all js-monkeys as developers

I mean, I'd never have typed that comment, but it's what I was thinking.

I know way too many js people.

Re:no

[Zero__Kelvin]

It might surprise you to know that you can learn everything they teach you at a University by reading the books yourself and asking other people who know their shit when you have a question. Well, you can't, but smart people can.

Re:no

[Zero__Kelvin]

The problem in your case isn't that the guy was incompetent, but that whoever interviewed him was.

Re:no

[Zero__Kelvin]

I agree. Your post does sound like that.

Re:no

[pixelpusher220]

While I agree with most of your premise...the one crack in its foundation is that coding isn't required for non IT jobs. Many many many engineering and scientific jobs are going to need passable coding skills to be competent.

Even within the IT world, the 'tester' is fast becoming their own flavor of a programmer. It's no longer viable to manually plod through an application as a human. You need repeatable testing 'scripts' that exercise that application. That's programming as well.

Re:no

[pixelpusher220]

You can learn everything you need to be a lawyer from books too. Doesn't make one a lawyer.

Re:no

[Zero__Kelvin]

Of course it does. It just means you aren't a lawyer that can represent others and charge a fee for it. Also, nice straw man.

Re:no

[pixelpusher220]

I've implemented linked lists in DOS BASIC. If you think it requires pointers....you are what this article is about.

Re:no

[murdocj]

Sadly, JS is far, far worse than Visual Basic... at least VB 6, which I programmed in many years ago. That language actually let you build reasonably structured programs, despite having the "VB" moniker. JS is just an invitation to disaster.

Re:no

[Zero__Kelvin]

There is no such thing as DOS BASIC idiot. Now once again, off you go little turd ...

Re:no

[pixelpusher220]

Such a troll. not even a good one....lol
Me: Doesn't make one a lawyer
You: Of course it does. It just means you aren't a lawyer that can represent others and charge for it

so....not a lawyer

Re:no

[pixelpusher220]

you're still the one who thinks you need pointers to implement a linked list.

Re:no

[synaptik]

Being an engineer isn't just about knowledge. It's also about competency (apprenticeship) and licensure (testing & certification by the state.) No one is going to let you build the Golden Gate bridge just because you read a book.

Re:no

[Zero__Kelvin]

You truly are a moron. It just means you aren't a lawyer that can represent others and charge for it . Go implement a linked list in "DOS BASIC" dumbfuck.

Re:no

[Zero__Kelvin]

And one last point to show what a true moron you are: Your whole argument is that you need a degree to be a lawyer (and conversely that having a degree makes you one.) You absolutely do not need a degree to be a lawyer, and in fact having a degree does not allow you to represent others for a fee. You have to pass the BAR Exam to represent others for a fee as a lawyer, regardless of if you have a degree or not. So you see you fucking half wit, you proved my point while trying to seem intelligent. The fact that you haven't figured out how stupid you are just makes you that much more of an idiot.

Re:no

[Zero__Kelvin]

You have to be the dumbest motherfucker on Slashdot today. Linked Lists involve pointers. If the language doesn't have a built in facility to accommodate pointers then you have to use built in facilities to implement them, which is slow and phenomenally stupid. In short, you can do almost anything with a Turning complete language, except implement a Linked List without pointers. Now just shut the fuck up. Every time you post you make yourself look more and more stupid.

Re:no

[Zero__Kelvin]

I guess you never heard of Buckminster Fuller.

Re:no

[pixelpusher220]

your the one who said simply reading books would allow you call yourself an engineer. Now you're claiming that additionally you need to go pass certification exams. Sorta minor detail you left out.

Re:no

[Zero__Kelvin]

I said no such thing idiot. You set up a straw man and tried to say I said lawyers and engineers were the same thing. They aren't. I have no doubt you are too stupid to figure that out though. The point is that your straw man backfired anyway.

Re:no

[pixelpusher220]

A 'pointer' is whatever construct you use to point to the next record in the list.

From your link:

It is a data structure consisting of a group of nodes which together represent a sequence. Under the simplest form, each node is composed of data and a reference (in other words, a link) to the next node in the sequence.

Data and a reference. If your data record contains a record number of the NEXT record in the sequence. That's a linked list.

[[ a ][ 1 ]] [[ b ][ 4 ]] [[ c ][ ]] [[ d ][ 3 ]] [[ e ][ 5 ]]

Gives you A -> B -> D -> E -> C

Re: no

[Zero__Kelvin]

Hey you finally learned something today dumbfuck!

Re:no

[HornWumpus]

That had to leave a mark.

Re: no

[pixelpusher220]

makes one of us. you don't even know when you're being smacked upside the head with actual knowledge.

Re:no

[Xest]

Not to mention the IT ops side of devops usually have accounts nowadays because they often get involved in building and deploying such software even if they never write a single line of code, and with most large companies now going the devops route, you're probably looking at anything from hundreds of thousands to a few million users there alone.

I actually typically have 3 accounts for this sort of thing - day job account, personal account, and an account for the startup I'm helping in my spare time, so not everyone stops at 2 either for what it's worth.

Re:no

[kriston]

Sad but true.

There aren't 35 million npmjs developers. There are 35 million npmjs uploaders. That's all. This is a non-story.

Re:no

[Marxist Hacker 42]

Directories?!!?!? My version control in the early 1980s was a set of numbered cassette tapes. Directories were for the rich people who could afford floppy drives.

Re:no

[Marxist Hacker 42]

I went to school for six years to gain that ridiculous, overcompensating title.

Re:no

[Marxist Hacker 42]

Which one? MS-DOS Basic, Applesoft PowerDOS basic, Atari DOS Basic, TI DOS Basic, or some other flavor?

I can't call Commodore's Basic a DOS Basic. DOS on the Commodore was a hardware chip in the 1541 floppy drive, which was a computer in and of itself.

Of the above, I've implemented linked lists in 3 out of the 4 by using multi-dimensional arrays. I tried in Atari DOS Basic, but the limitation to single dimension arrays made the math just too strange.

Re:no

[Marxist Hacker 42]

I use Agile, and I tend to agree. Continuous integration leads to continuous bugs, and customer-driven development is constantly suffering from the iceberg problem.

Re:no

[Marxist Hacker 42]

Agile only works for projects that have less than an 18 month lifespan. Beyond that, it suffers from Mythical Man Month Syndrome.

Re:no

[Marxist Hacker 42]

You can implement linked lists in arrays. You don't NEED pointers.

Re: no

[Zero__Kelvin]

Well you are half an idiot savant aren't you? The first half. Go back and read the thread to see why.

Re: no

[Zero__Kelvin]

You used pointers idiot. You didn't use built in language facilities that support them, so you used the built in facilities to create them. ALL linked lists use pointers. It is LITERALLY the definition of a linked list.

Re: no

[Marxist Hacker 42]

And thus, you can implement a linked list in COBOL, can't you?

Reminds me of the Advanced C class I took with the following problem:

Const char[] strIn="Find the comma, and change it to a period please";

My methodology- grab the pointer to strIn, increment it until I found the comma, and change it to a period (I leave it as an exercise for the reader to implement).

Everybody else used a strcpy first, because after all, it was a constant.

My score? -5, scribbled out, and a note "I tried it, it worked".

What I knew and nobody else did: Borland C had no memory protection.

Re: no

[Zero__Kelvin]

You failed and you are too stupid to know it.

Re:no

[barbariccow]

git, written by a guy who resisted source control for so long and then claimed it was because every system was rubbish except his

You mean, Linus Torvalds wrote it after bitkeeper stopped providing free hosting for the linux kernel.

Re:no

[barbariccow]

Chess is far too boring for me. Reversi: Now there's a game!

Re:no

[phantomfive]

I can tell from that comment alone, you would be an excellent programmer!

Re:no

[synaptik]

Outliers are anecdotal at best. Write back when you find a governmental entity in the U.S. that is willing to let you erect a structure that millions of people every week will trust with their lives, having only read a book on the subject.
I'm not belittling your autodidactic joie de vivre; to the contrary, I share it. But, know that book knowledge is just one leg of a 3-legged stool, where engineering is concerned.

Re:no

[sound vision]

Of course people have been doing that, broadly. What we are looking at here is one specific industry, and really just a couple of different jobs within that industry.

Humanities too

[Anonymous Coward]

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 ...."

Re:Humanities too

[jandersen]

I think we should be more critical about what we call developers. This is not to belittle the many, very competent, non-professional coders, but saying that everybody who downloads a toolset and writes code is a developer is a bit like calling everybody who has bought an electric powersaw a carpenter; there is just more to being a professional developer than writing code, and there is a big difference between writing short pieces of ad-hoc code from time to time and writing large, maintainable applications as part of a development team.

TIL the CEO of GitHub is a moron

[Anonymous Coward]

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!!!

Re:TIL the CEO of GitHub is a moron

[tommeke100]

How do they define "active" users? I have a GitHub account but rarely use it, mostly for some open coursework machine learning examples / tests and Kaggle now and then. I am a professional developer though. I wonder how many GitHub account are just plain students setting one up because they need to for some course, but aren't developers.

Re:TIL the CEO of GitHub is a moron

[Tukz]

And not all those users are developers.

So yes, they CAN have more users than there is developers.

Re: TIL the CEO of GitHub is a moron

[Entrope]

Also, he doesn't understand why people besides "professional developers" might have GitHub accounts.

Re: TIL the CEO of GitHub is a moron

[angel'o'sphere]

I'm a professional developer and have no git hub account.
Why would I?
I don't host my professional code on a server out in the internet.
I'm not even legally allowed to do so. All companies I work for have their own git or svn servers.
The few hobby projects I work on I host on my git and on my back ups ... there is no point in having a git hub account.

Re: TIL the CEO of GitHub is a moron

[green1]

Meanwhile I would never describe myself as a developer, but I do have a github account.
I tinker with the occasional thing at home, an rpi for this or that, or my own server that I "play" with. Having a few web pages, and a bit of home automation does not make me a "developer" but I might be counted in this.

I think they need to realize what while there is probably some overlap between developers and account holders, neither one is a good indication of the actual quantity of the other.

Re: TIL the CEO of GitHub is a moron

[Entrope]

Shorter angel'o'sphere: "Stop liking what I don't like!"

Just because you don't see a point to having a GitHub account doesn't mean there is no point for anyone.

Re: TIL the CEO of GitHub is a moron

[pjt33]

There are reasons to have a GitHub account even if you don't host any code there. The obvious one is to be able to post issues on projects which are dependencies for your projects; slightly less obviously, github.io is in some senses the new Geocities.

Re: TIL the CEO of GitHub is a moron

[angel'o'sphere]

That was not the point :D

The point was: you can not calculate the amount of developers world wide by looking at git hub accounts, or bit bucket (there I have an account, and the username is not angelosphere)

What is a developer?

[prefec2]

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.

Re:What is a developer?

[green1]

"Anybody who writes code"? is that really a sensible metric though?
Does the purpose or quantity of that code count?

Compare to other industries. If I make myself a sandwich at home and I a chef? If I replace the faucet in my bathroom am I a plumber?

If I have my own tiny webpage and an rpi that I tinker with in my spare time, am I a developer?

I would never call myself a developer, any more than I would call myself a chef or a plumber, but I have done all of the above. I have a github account, so I guess I'm skewing the numbers.

Re:There are less western developers

[prefec2]

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.

Ok so...

[CODiNE]

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.

Re:Ok so...

[green1]

Exactly.

While there's probably some correlation between people who are developers, and people who have github accounts, I'm quite certain that it's not anywhere near accurate enough to get any sense for the quantity of developers.

They've done the equivalent of counting the number of people who buy groceries at one of the major food chains and assuming that they're all chefs.

Re:Ok so...

[Dutch Gun]

Grow the fuck up, labels are for pussies.

Says the guy who would never think about getting operated on by a back-alley "doctor". Because who cares about labels like "MD", "CPA", or "Professional Engineer", right?

Labels matter very much when you're talking about professional qualifications.

Re:Ok so...

[Hognoxious]

No, you're a slashdot editor.

Re:Ok so...

[drinkypoo]

It seems if merely downloading some code makes one a developer...

Nope. But modifying it does. It doesn't mean anyone should hire you, mind you. Getting paid makes you a professional, it doesn't make you a whatever. You can be a hobbyist whatever just by doing whatever. That's all it takes.

GitHub account != professional developer

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:GitHub account != professional developer

[0100010001010011]

I think I'm the only person in my group with a GitHub account. Nothing we develop is opensource. None of our compilers are opensource. (NXP just released a VLE enabled GCC).

At my company, competitors, and others in industry there are easily millions of embedded developers that aren't being counted.

Re:GitHub account != professional developer

[angel'o'sphere]

20 million professional developers globally[??] seems a reasonable estimate.
Reasonable estimate? As git hub clients/customers. Perhaps. As anything else, no.
According to Stackoverflow Germany has 700,000 software developers from about 80,000,000 inhabitants and 40,000,000 work force.
I would imagine that scales to far more than 20M developers world wide.

Am I the only one with multiple github accounts?

[Anonymous Coward]

> 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?

users != developers

[grahamtriggs]

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.

Depends...

[SCVonSteroids]

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?!

Re:Depends...

[SCVonSteroids]

No he's just a jack-of-all-trades that doesn't know a whole lot when it comes to computers.

Give him a welder and some random metal scraps and I'm sure he could come up with something nice.
My point was simply that there are a lot of people like him, not just the older folks.

Re:There are less western developers

[Cipheron]

> 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.

Re:Am I the only one with multiple github accounts

[asylumx]

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.

Why do they try so hard

[avandesande]

Are the purposefully writing to enforce Betteridge's law?

Re:Am I the only one with multiple github accounts

[Opportunist]

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...

Re:Its the wrong question.

[Opportunist]

No. Just too many codemonkeys.

Likewise, there aren't too many managers. We only have too many beancounters.

Top Tech School in the Word

[Neuronwelder]

India has the Best Tech Schools in the world. People are fighting to get in. What have we got? Nothing.. http://indianexpress.com/artic...

Re:Top Tech School in the Word

[green1]

Best? or most popular? The two aren't necessarily correlated.

Re:Top Tech School in the Word

[Neuronwelder]

The Web information that we are "given" shows american schools as being the best. (Of course they want to be popular with the suckers $$$, who go to them). They don't want you to know about Indian schools so the Web is "scrubbed of that information.

Re:Top Tech School in the Word

[green1]

So... basically, it's all a giant conspiracy theory... right....

Re:Top Tech School in the Word

[Neuronwelder]

If you say so.

Double counts?

[pdxtabs]

I'm a professional developer. But I have two active GitHub accounts. One for work, and one for personal stuff.

Re:There are less western developers

[K. S. Kyosuke]

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.

Promotion Paths

[Feneric]

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.

Depends

[ilsaloving]

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.

Let's not forget that there remains a great chasm

[PJ6]

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.

What fraction of developers use github?

[Cajun Hell]

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.

Github lies

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Am I the only one with multiple github accounts

[Kellamity]

I currently have 2. One is my own personal account. One is my 'work' account for projects with my current company. As I'm leaving there, there's a possibility I will need to start a new one for work with my new company.

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?

The truth is...

[helpfulcorn]

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.