In 2018, reports Evan Data Corp, 23.9 million software developers were active worldwide. A year later, the figure was 26,4 million and forecast to reach 27,7 million by 2023 and 28.7 million by 2024.
IDC calculations reported that in 2014 18,5 million programmers were at work in whereas in 2018 the figure for active software developers globally had reached 22,3 million.
According to statistics published by Slashdata,18.9 million software developers were active worldwide in the world in 2019 and there will be 45 million in 2030.
How Many Software Engineers does the US have?
In 2016, according to Evan Data, North America could claim to have approximately 4,4 million software engineers. DataUSA reported software developers in applications and systems software in the US, grew to 1,36 million in 2017.
Estimates by Don’t Quit Your Day Job closely match those of Evans Data Corp – namely that as of 2019, there were, in the USA, 4,2 million software engineers. This was a figure reached during a study of developer numbers in all 52 states.
What is noteworthy is that the above approximate figure takes into account technical writers, electrical and hardware engineers, CAD programmers, actuaries, statisticians, economists, mathematicians, basically anyone who writes or reads code daily, not just software developers. Only looking at software developers per se would only give a figure of 3,4 million people.
Top 10 US states with the highest percentage (%) of software developers
Washington DC has the highest concentration of programmers (6.46%), followed by Virginia and Maryland – 4.43% and 4.41% respectively. Other counties showing on top of the list are near Seattle, Los Angeles, Dallas, and Boston.
Top 10 US states with the highest number of software developers
Since county sizes aren’t uniform, when we compare counties by the total number of developers and the proportion of total workers with software proficiency we’ll see some diferences. On the basis of raw data, California is top of the list with 628 thousand developers, followed by Texas and New York with 325 thousand and 218 thousand respectively.
The top 27 sees all 4 counties in the ‘Inner’ Bay Area in California, Alameda, San Mateo, Santa Clara, and San Francisco. We also see many counties near Washington, D.C., Boston, and Dallas.
How Many Software Engineers does Europe have?
StackOverflow reported that, in 2016, Europe had 4,7 million software engineers and this grew to 5.5m in 2018. The largest number was based in Germany – approximately 837K. France and the UK complete the top three with 813,5K and 467,5K respectively.
Here is a list of the European cities suffering from a software developer shortage
‣ Amsterdam — tech startups consist of about 70% foreigners (mainly from Brazil, France, Turkey, Ukraine, and India).
‣ Helsinki — Finland currently lacks over 7.000 software developers (most of them are needed in Helsinki, the capital). The need is estimated to grow to 15.000 unfilled positions in 2020.
‣ Copenhagen — the Danish government has estimated that by the year 2030, Denmark will be 19.000 IT specialists short, most of them in Copenhagen
‣ Munich – there is a serious shortage of IT professionals, a problem that shows in almost all regions of Germany. In Munich and Cologne, the problem is most crucial.
Here are a few other interesting statistics:
- By 2022, they are projected to be 26 million software developers worldwide
- 6.5 million developers are using AI or ML in their development.
- 5.8 million plan to implement some form of AI or ML in the near future.
- 9.9 million devs are involved with optimizing security solutions.
- 16.5 million devs are in organizations that have a formal DevOps strategy.
