Developer population growth slowing, yet applications abound

In a new study, Evans Data says that the developer population in established economies is expected to decline by 35 percent this year compared with last year, as InformationWeek reports. Despite this dearth of developers, however, we continue to see an explosion of open-source projects and social-Web applications.

What gives?

It's very possible, of course, that a dwindling number of developers is pushing more of its development work to the public eye of the Web, creating the appearance of more development activity even as the total number of lines of code written declines. Rising unemployment might be contributing to this.

In other words, perhaps that out-of-work Citigroup developer, who used to spend all of her time as one developer among many contributing to a big intranet application, has now launched an open-source project (or two) to ease the burden of unemployment?

(Credit: O'Reilly Media)

Or perhaps the development tools made available for writing Facebook applications, for example, make it easier to crank out more projects by fewer people. Maybe productivity gains are enabling fewer developers to do more.

I'm not sure. But it does seem that the developer drought, spurred by a sickly economy, isn't having an adverse effect on open-source and social-Web development. If anything, the weak economy may be encouraging more development, not less.

How would you explain the increased number in open-source and social-Web applications, in light of a reported decreasing developer population?

UPDATE @ 11:51 PDT: As noted in the comments below, I inadvertently describe a 35-percent decrease in the developer population, rather than a 35-percent decrease in developer growth. That said, the same quandary/question remains: the pace of new development in open source and the social Web exceeds the growth of the developer population. Your thoughts on why?

Follow me on Twitter @mjasay.

[jimmyed2000]

I think there is a typo in the InformationWeek article. In the article they are talking about lowering the projected growth estimates, not lowering the total developer pool.

There is only one statement where they talk about absolute numbers not growth estimates - "Other areas will fare better, but most will still see decreases in developer populations of about 35% compared with last year."

I think what they meant to say was "Other areas will fare better, but most will still see decreases in growth of developer populations of about 35% compared with last year."

James

[lalomartins]

Do they mean the number of professional developers? Because someone doesn't just cease to be a developer; if there is really a decrease in developer numbers, that means a lot of us are dying.

[myles taylor]

If someone stops developing, they, for all intents and purposes, stop being a developer. You're only part of the community if you're active in it.

[timcoyote]

Most of my professional developer friends that I have worked with no longer have developer titles. Most are integrators, desperate trying to integrate disparate products or they are coordinator/ testers spending their days preparing specs then shipping them off to India or Australia for the overnight developers and then testing their work the next day.

All of my clients want the flashy newly developer developed web packages that are devoid of integration and it's my job to create something to integrate the pieces, trying to find better ways to deal with developers that say, "Oh, just email me your data and we can throw it on our website for you." Since nothing is integrated anymore it is the new career . I spend my day extracting, downloading, ftping, emailing fragments of data back and forth between systems and trying to keep them all in sync. Then of course, even if they are automated, the constant battle catching up when the sub-carrier of the SFTP vendor goes down for the day. There is also the constant question, why is this data wrong on the new product? (Answer: "I haven't uploaded it manually yet"), It's a full time job without the word developer in the title.

Tim

[ITRebel]

The Information Week article says that "Evans Data projected a 7.4% growth rate in the developer population, which was expected to reach 15.2 million in 2009, but the company has revised its estimates for a growth rate of 4.3%". Hence, I believe that Jimmyed2000 has it right with the idea that the article (and Matt) actually mistate the statistic which should be stated as a 35% decrease in growth of developers rather than a 35% decrease in developers. There is still a year-over-year increase in developers; it is just not as fast as was previously projected.

Even still, I would agree with Matt's contention that open source development does seem to be at a faster pace than this. However, the reason is simply that the barrier to entry for open source developers is miniscule, whereas traditional closed source proprietary developers usually need a major corporate partner to provide source code, advanced technical support , and marketing support. The fact that the barrier to entry for closed, proprietary code development is so great is exactly why such applications are much more valuable than open source applications. Look at what happened to MySQL. They got taken over for free by Larry Ellison and all the poor saps who thought that they were rebelling against another yacht for Larry Ellison by developing MySQL have found out differently.

[Matt Asay]

Good catch. Fixing.

[pentest]

Mysql will fork and Oracle will have to compete against the code they just bought.

The power of open source.