There are many similar thought experiments out there about various things. One example often used in job interviews is: "How many gasoline stations are there in -place-?"

Running through a few variations of the thought experiment on my own, I estimate between 6M and 12M active professional programmers right now, depending on how I estimate it. My lowest number comes from estimates and quick Google searches for schools that teach computer science. My higher estimate was based on reported numbers for major compiler distributions.

Another resource, Wikipedia's "Software Engineering Demographics" page puts it around 1.5M in the United States alone. That fits with a rough 10M global estimate.

slicer4ever

6,773

January 31, 2014 10:48 PM

Considering that anyone with a computer has the potential to be a programmer just by installing any of the free tools out there. I'd say the nature of the question isn't answerable to your criteria. We can get a pretty good estimate of the number of professional programmers, but since programming is something anyone could pick up as a side hobby, I'd say that it'd be realistically impossible to give any type of ballpark estimate, as it'd be a lot of wild speculation, with little hard facts to back up those numbers.

Check out https://www.facebook.com/LiquidGames for some great games made by me on the Playstation Mobile market.

Luckless

3,283

February 01, 2014 04:29 PM

Even 'professional' programmers can be hard to judge. I've written code at several jobs where technically I was an analyst, one where it was most of what I did really, but I was not counted as part of the "development" team because I wasn't working on core sections.

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jHaskell

1,856

February 03, 2014 01:00 PM

http://www.infoq.com/news/2014/01/IDC-software-developers

fir

Author

-460

February 03, 2014 02:22 PM

http://www.infoq.com/news/2014/01/IDC-software-developers

DAMN

this would be about 10 millions of professional + 10 millions of hobbyst

also this division on 1/3 1/3 1/3 for americas, emea and asia is interesting (10x more then i estimated)

frob

46,272

February 03, 2014 08:33 PM

Running through a few variations of the thought experiment on my own, I estimate between 6M and 12M active professional programmers right now, depending on how I estimate it. ... That fits with a rough 10M global estimate.

So...

http://www.infoq.com/news/2014/01/IDC-software-developers

this would be about 10 millions of professional + 10 millions of hobbyst

Yay for validating my thought experiment with about10M professionals in an actual study.

jHaskell

1,856

February 06, 2014 09:26 PM

Yay for validating my thought experiment with about10M professionals in an actual study.

So how many gas stations are there in the world?

Nathan2222_old

-395

February 07, 2014 03:02 PM

There are more than 7 billion people in the world. Thousands work for different tech giants, others for game dev giants, others for indie devs, others do it as a hobby, others do it as a requirement/elective for their university course.
So there may be 1 - over 3 billion programmers in the world.
Calculate the number of universities + high schools in every continent - antartica and find the number of people doing/that did science related courses in that high school/university

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ambershee

532

February 07, 2014 03:31 PM

3 billion might be a bit of an overstatement (as may be 1 billion).

2 billion of your 7 billion are children and leaving the remaining 3 in every 5 or even 1 in every 5 people as a programmer seems a bit silly. In your every day life, maybe one in every hundred people you meet has some programming ability of merit in a city in a developed country. The reality is there are probably only millions of programmers, probably between ten and thirty million.

how many programmers all over the world?

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how many programmers all over the world?

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