Developer Growth
Uncle Bob, in his presentations, likes to say that the number of developers in the world doubles every 5 years. Recently The Primeagen in one of his shorts he echos that statement. They both do not give any source for this information, so can it be validated?
The Netherlands has an agency called Centraal Bureau voor de Statistiek (CBS) which collects all kinds of statistics about the country. It turns out that they also have statistics on the type of field people work in.
The current amount (Q4 2024) of workers in the field of ‘Applicatie Ontwikkeling’, application development is 382.000, with 59.000 women and 323.000 men in the occupation. So, if that is the current number, for the statements to hold it would need to be around 190.000 5 to 6 years ago.
In 2019 it was 258.000 and 2020 270.000. All the way back in 2014 there were 185.000. For The Netherlands it seems the doubling occurs every 10 years, or does it?
It turns out that COVID created a sudden influx of more software developers, (sidenote: I can not find independent data to backup these statements, but searching the internet there seems to be consesus.) .
Interestingly, the number of high educated (hbo,wo) particpants in software development jobs seems to decline, while the number of very-practically educated (basisschool, vmbo, mbo 1) started to rise making up the deficit. Perhaps this signals an change into more “doing” of software development, assisted by AI?
Since the end of the pandemic the number of workers has very slowly been growing. This might be due to retirement and inflow from education/reschooling being at the same level. At the same time we are still facing a shortage of workers, as seen in the arbeidsmarkt dashboard:
This graph is on the macro level, all job openings. Looking at the job openings in ‘Informatie en Communicatie’ it mirrors the developer job openings in the US (but on a different scale of course), in contrast to the US it does not continue to decline.
In the US the (unconfirmed) graph looks very similar.
Obviously this doesn’t say anything, in The Netherlands there are less people looking for jobs then there are jobs, meaning the relationship is strained. For the US I do not have sources to validate if the same goes there.