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‘Hobbyist developers’ -- people who write computer programme code as a hobby -- have become serious competitors for software professionals. An increasing amount of programming code is done by these hobbyists thanks to mobile revolution.
Of the total 18.18 lakh software developers in India, about 5.08 lakh or nearly a third of them are hobbyist , including students, who write programming code though it is not their primary occupation, according to research firm International Data Corporation (IDC). The rest 13 lakh are professional developers.
A. Sriram is an engineering graduate working with a construction company but does coding during free time. “It is just a hobby and I earn some money. Many of my friends also do this,” he said.
“While the numbers of both developers and ICT-skilled workers are expected to grow over the next few years, shifts in how IT is being delivered through cloud services will favour the growth in developers over other ICT-skilled workers,” according to Al Hilwa, Program Director, Application Development Software at IDC.
Global trend It is also a global trend. IDC data shows that globally there are 18.5 million software developers of which 11 million are professional software developers and 7.5 million are hobbyists. IDC also believes that there are 29 million ICT-skilled workers in the world, including professional software developers.
Emergence of enthusiasts is the result of democratisation of the IT world. The previous world view was that software development was confined to corporates and professional developers. Emergence of Internet and concepts like open source and crowd sourcing are anchors for communities to evolve where knowledge is shared widely, said E. Balaji, former CEO of Randstad India, a HR company.
Many of the hobbyist developers are students and a sizable number are millennial — the generation defined as those born between 1980 and 2000. They want to make a contribution and an impact the society.
Yahoo! paid $30 million to acquire a reading app called Summly developed by 17-year-old Nick D’Aloisio and his five buddies.
Such acquisition is a big motivation to the concept of hobbyist developers, he said.
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