According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, there were ~150k employed computer programmers in the U.S. in May 2021. Will that number grow (or shrink, perhaps due to automation) between now and 2030?
Worth noting that the BLS has very different numbers for "software developers" vs "programmers" despite them often being interchangable in common parlence: https://www.bls.gov/ooh/computer-and-information-technology/software-developers.htm
@ElliotDavies 1.7m working in software development vs 0.14 for programming, also expecting 25% growth for software development vs 11% decline for programming
@Nikos I'll reveal why I bet the market from 80 to 20. Here's the graph of programmers over time:
You can see the number of programmers has fallen ever since ChatGPT came out in 1998.
@ducat It’s very unintitive to me that there was more programmers in 2000 than there was in 2008. It’s also a little strange that the BLS is projecting a 10% decline when your graph looks much worse than that.
@ducat This random blogpost I found shared the same concern: https://computinged.wordpress.com/2013/01/03/how-many-programmers-are-there-from-the-computer-boys-take-over/
The bureau of labor already believes compute programmers will be 11% less common in 2032 than in 2022.
https://www.bls.gov/ooh/computer-and-information-technology/computer-programmers.htm
@Vorak Unless their estimates dramatically updated in the past 1-2 years since generative AI (code and otherwise) swept the planet, I don't put much stock in them.