Although the United States is still a leading producer of software, it seems that the nation is falling behind in training and using developers. Media experts predict that India may exceed the United States in the number of software developers in 4 years. At the moment, there are 18.2 million software developers in the world – this number is expected to increase to 26 million by 2019.
Such almost 50% increase might appear bad news for people who want the United States to remain the center of the software universe. At the moment, there are 3.6 million developers in the United States and 2.75 million in India. However, by 2018, India is said to have 5.2 million developers, almost 90% increase, versus 4.5 million in America.
Experts believe that India’s rapid software development growth can be explained, in part, by its population size (1.2 billion), and relative youth, (almost 50% of the population under 25 years of age), along with economic growth. In the country, IT and software work is regarded as clear path to the middle class for lots of the nation’s youth – however, India has seen real GDP growth of around 8% over the last decade, which may fall and lead to adjustment in the projections.
This is not the first time that the experts from Evans Data have predicted the country will surpass the United States of America in software developers. Previously, the agency believed that this would happen by 2015, but after their predictions the seriousness of the recession had hit the IT industry. It looks like the recession really delayed the country’s rise to dominance. Aside from India, China will have around 1.9 million programmers in 3 years, and Russia about 1.3 million.
