Some insights in the world programmer population

According to the Public Relation newsarticle nearly all countries in the world are heavily interested to educate the people in programming skills. China alone has announced massive investment, but also the US and Europe have millions or billions of people with programming skills. Unfortunately, this description is some kind of cyber-myth which has absolutely no relevance for reality. The good news is, that nowadays it is relatively easy to get valide information about how many programmers are available worldwide. The major and only programming online forum available is stackoverflow and on their statistics section they have a detailed number about the users, https://stackexchange.com/leagues/1/year/stackoverflow Right now, they have 200k active users worldwide, that is the number of user accounts who has posted at least 3-4 postings in the last year.

That's it. The number are not billion, it is not million, it is 200000 worldwide. We can now discuss about the detail, perhaps in which country the programmer life or if they are familiar with Java, C or something else. But the fact is, that there is no hidden programmer army above the 200k level. The second fact is, that nearly everybody who is starting programming is listed in the statistics. That means, only a subpart of the 200k people have ever written real big programs, most of them are amateurs and hobby programmers who have only posted a novice question and increased their reputation counter.

Now let us take a look into mainstream public relations myth about software engineers. According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_engineering_demographics it is estimated that many million people are able to program:

“As of 2016, it is estimated that there are 21 million professional software developers.”

I would say, we have two numbers: Stackoverflow says that the number is 200k, WIkipedia talks about 21 million. I would guess, Wikipedia is wrong. Because all the million hidden software engineers need two things to be valid:

1. they need to program some kind of software

2. they need some kind of online forum to discuss problem

Because there is no hidden software pool and also there is no hidden online forums in which millions of programmers can discuss problems which are unknown for Stackoverflow, we must conclude, that only the Stackoverflow number is correct. That means, if somebody is interested seriously in software development he will post questions online, otherwise he will do nothing.

A nice side-note is, that even big companies in the gaming-industry who are programming games by hand have only a small number of employees. If a software-company has more then 100 employees it can be called huge. That means, in the 200k active Stackoverflow users, all the professional guys from Microsoft, Electronic Arts and Apple are already in-there.