Software development as a growing profession - Present

Software development is a growing profession. In three blog posts I’ll take a glance at the past, present and future of software development. This post looks at the amount of software developers today (2020).

Today there are an estimated 23 million computer programmers, up to 26,5 million. Of these programmers, 15.5 million are professional software developers. The number still grows with 20% each year.  (If you regress the number of programmers with a yearly growth factor of 1.2 (20%), you end up with a tidy 8 pro’s and 11 total programmers in 1940.) 

In other words, the number of developers doubles in less than 4 years. This means that on average 1 in 6 developers has less than 1 year of experience. Almost 1 in 3 developers has less than two years of experience. Over 2 in 5 developers has less than three years of experience. And to point out the obvious, half of all developers have less than 4 years of experience. This estimation seems to be confirmed by developers that reported the years they've been coding professionally.

 

Just some number for comparison. There are 10 to 15 million medical doctors in the world (there is also a severe shortage of MD’s). And at the other end of the spectrum, there are an estimated 570 million farmers in the world (equating the number of farms with number of farmers). To be fair, farmers have had over 10.000 years to grow their profession. Still, I'd say we scale pretty well.


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