IDC: 40 Percent of Developers Are 'Hobbyists'

itwbennett writes "A new IDC study has found that 'of the 18.5 million software developers in the world, about 7.5 million — roughly 40 percent — are so-called hobbyist developers,' which by IDC's definition is 'someone who spends 10 hours a month or more writing computer or mobile device programs, even though they are not paid primarily to be a programmer.' Lumped into this group are students, people hoping to strike it rich with mobile apps, and people who code on the job but aren't counted among the developer ranks."

Re:Too narrow a definition

[Anonymous Coward]

As an actual software developer who has had to occasionally deal with code written by "research/data scientist[s]" before, believe me, we wouldn't even classify you as high as a hobbyist.

nonsensical

[Anonymous Coward]

Every engineer in the building writes some amount of code. Instrument control for test automation, number crunching and analysis, logistics process automation, etc. We are mechanical, electrical, and industrial engineers. I am the only one with a CS degree, and I write less LOC/month then most other engineers.

Stupid, nonsensical, devoid of purpose or logic. Go ahead slash-puke, make my day...

Re:1%

[TheRaven64]

Someone I was talking to a few months ago claimed that around half of the applicants they get fail to be able to write fizzbuzz in their interview. This is just a function that has to take an input number, print fizz if it's divisible by 3, buzz if it's divisible by 5 (fizzbuzz if it's divisible by both), or the number otherwise. It's a trivial use of simple flow control and if you can't remember the name of a print function in your language of choice (no marks deducted for using printf instead of puts) then there's really no hope for you.

Re:Too narrow a definition

[rnturn]

I can recall an incident where a number of Ph.D. dissertations were called into question because of a bug that had been discovered in a mainframe statistical package they had used. If memory serves, the University was contacting graduates and asking them to revisit their results to ensure that the bug didn't adversely affect the content of their work. Perhaps, nowadays, the University wouldn't care so much though I'd hope they would if for no other reason than to maintain the school's reputation.

I wouldn't call pseudo-code a reliable indication of what actually processed the data. It's pretty much the same thing as writing a specification and getting a faulty interpretation of that spec. We've all had an idea of what we wanted a piece of code do only to find that it didn't quite live up to our expectation due to some subtle bug (round-off error, etc.). I've spotted weird coding in other colleagues' code that introduced problems in the results. Perhaps that experience is why I'd still like to see the code. YMMV