What LinkedIn Tells Us About Developer Population in the World

There are tons of articles about the number of developers in the world. But most of them either lack good methodology or simply borrow statistics from other resources.

Here's what I did differently. I counted a real number of developers according to the preferred language in European countries and the US based on LinkedIn data.

Why did I do that? Not for fun, for sure. I wanted to understand which country — the US, the UK, Germany, the Netherlands, or Ukraine locates the biggest number of JavaScript, Java, Python, Ruby on Rails, and PHP developers.

As a result, I found out that:

• The US has the biggest number of developers specializing in Java — 63K, JS — 12K, Python — 10K, and Ruby on Rails — 3K. 

• Among other countries, Ukraine has the biggest share of PHP programmers — 9K. Ukraine follows the US in several other technologies: the country has 3K Python engineers and 8K JavaScript developers. 

• The UK follows the US and Ukraine closely by the majority of technologies. There are 14K Java developers, 5K JS and PHP engineers, and 2K Python software programmers in the UK.
• The numbers of developers in the Netherlands and Germany coincide in many technologies. For example, there are around 6K Java and 3K JS developers in both countries.

Apart from researching the numbers of developers in the US, the UK, Germany, the Netherlands, and Ukraine, I've also decided to dig into the distribution of developers by seniority levels.

PHP developers: number and distribution by seniority



Ukraine has 9K PHP programmers, the US follows with 7K, the UK goes next with nearly 5K PHP developers. Germany and the Netherlands close the list with 2K+ and almost 3K PHP developers correspondingly.

Java developers: number and distribution by seniority



The US has the biggest number of Java developers — there are 63K professionals. The UK — 14K, Ukraine — 8K Java programmers, while Germany and the Netherlands go behind with 6K Java engineers each.

Python developers: number and distribution by seniority



The US has more than 10K Python developers, Ukraine follows with 3K, the UK has 2K+, while Germany and the Netherlands are behind with around 1K Python developers in each country.

JavaScript developers: number and distribution by seniority



There are almost 12K JS developers in the US, 8K in Ukraine, 5K in the UK, 3K in Germany and the Netherlands.

Ruby on Rails developers: number and distribution by seniority



There are 3K Ruby on Rails developers in the US, 1K in Ukraine, 700 in the UK, 600+ in Germany, around 300 in the Netherlands.

Conclusion

The research helped me to make three valuable conclusions:

1. The larger population doesn't always mean a bigger number of developers — Ukraine has more PHP developers than the US.
2. Countries with divergent population sizes can have similar numbers of programmers — by the majority of technologies Germany (84M population) and the Netherlands (17M population) have similar numbers of programmers.
3. Ukraine has an even distribution of developers by the seniority levels if compared to other countries.

Previously published here.