Spolsky: 40M people write software monthly, vs 9M professional developers
Joel Spolsky · a16z Podcast | The Future of Software Development · Jan 2, 2019 · at 29:41
Joel Spolsky, co-founder of Stack Overflow, discusses the global reach of software creation based on monthly active user data from Stack Overflow.
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“When we started building Stack Overflow we did a lot of research on how many software developers there were in the world, and the conclusion seems to be nine million people that call themselves software developers in the world, and we had at the time six million users, so we thought that was a pretty good percentage of them, and then we got to nine million users, and then we got to twenty million users, and we thought, who the heck are all these people writing code that we never expected were writing code, and today we're looking at about forty million people every month, human beings, not unique visitors. That appear to be using Stack Overflow every month. So the number of people writing software is probably around forty million out of you know, only nine million people that call themselves developers.”
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