India To Overtake US On Number of Developers By 2017 157
dcblogs writes "There are about 18.2 million software developers worldwide, a number that is due to rise to 26.4 million by 2019, a 45% increase, says Evans Data Corp. in its latest Global Developer Population and Demographic Study. Today, the U.S. leads the world in software developers, with about 3.6 million. India has about 2.75 million. But by 2018, India will have 5.2 million developers, a nearly 90% increase, versus 4.5 million in the U.S., a 25% increase though that period, Evans Data projects. India's software development growth rate is attributed, in part, to its population size, 1.2 billion, and relative youth, with about half the population under 25 years of age. Rapid economic growth is fueling interest in development. India's services firms hire, in many cases, thousands of new employees each quarter. Consequently, IT and software work is seen as clear path to the middle class for many of the nation's young. For instance, in one quarter this year, Tata Consultancy Services added more than 17,000 employees, gross, bringing its total headcount to 263,600. In the same quarter of 2010, the company had about 150,000 workers."
Re:Quanity over Quality? ~nt~ (Score:5, Informative)
That's because the software they help write has already been branded by a start up in LA or New York.
The stuff you do see them building is plugins and modules for various platforms where they can take the idea of another developer, add a new logo and what not, and repackage it for sale as their code.
I have worked with many different "One Step Checkout" for the Magento platform that were developed in India. They are all basically copies of each other, with only one version (developed I believe in Ukraine) standing out as being solidly developed and easy to work with.
You get what you pay for... (Score:4, Informative)
Programmers, not Developers (Score:4, Informative)
I'm not saying India doesn't have any developers, but I have seen a lot of programming defined as copying and pasting the code of someone else and testing that it "works as required". I couldn't understand why the JavaScript countdown timer we were supplied by an Indian company was written in Spanish until I caught on to how they "fulfilled" their contract obligations. I'm sure a lot of that goes on in every country with programmers (and developers). My point here is that we should be careful how we define developer vs programmer (not to mention the ongoing debates regarding the phrase "software engineer").
Re:College Costs and Preceived Value (Score:4, Informative)
And most of them made horrible developers. There's basic bits of theory and knowledge that most (not all, but most) self taught and high school educated developers never learn. The move to requiring a CS degree wasn't due to degree inflation, it was to get more knowledgeable developers.
Re:Quanity over Quality? ~nt~ (Score:5, Informative)
You don't see what's happening on the back-end and they don't want you do know. Most consulting companies are now a shim layer of local people who outsource the actual coding, that's at least how Accenture, Deloitte, PWC, Ernst & Young, KPMG, Capgemini, McKinsey etc. operate. Other big companies just go directly to Indian consulting companies like Tata or get their own local staff in India. Locally, they still have the same brands, the same "local" image but in reality they're getting Indians to take over piece by piece. In-house development is slowly being phased out, in reality what's left is a sales front like a sophisticated version of Walmart. I was at an interview for a position like that, I'd be the only local resource and leader keeping up appearances while eight people in India would be doing all the actual work. Didn't get the job and in retrospect glad I didn't.