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

[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

[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]

I guess you never heard of Buckminster Fuller.

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 ...."

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

[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.