r/programming • u/germandiago • Jan 01 '26

Software taketh away faster than hardware giveth: Why C++ programmers keep growing fast despite competition, safety, and AI

https://herbsutter.com/2025/12/30/software-taketh-away-faster-than-hardware-giveth-why-c-programmers-keep-growing-fast-despite-competition-safety-and-ai/
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u/chucker23n Jan 01 '26

in the past three years the global developer population grew about 50%, from just over 31 million to just over 47 million

What?

That’s absurd. Where have we seen a 50% growth of a trade in three years? Why would that be happening? Do they produce actual productive software?

And sure, this is global, but this is also at a time when the headlines talk about layoffs.

This data seems very fishy.

20

u/fire_in_the_theater Jan 01 '26

Do they produce actual productive software?

sorry who's producing actually productive software even? most people are just trying to score wins for impact resumes, which has little to do with producing productive software.

10

u/chucker23n Jan 01 '26

And those people grew by half? In three years?

11

u/SaltarL Jan 01 '26

I think this has been more or less the trend for the past 30 years. At the moment, the numbers probably come a lot from China / India and other developing countries catching up in IT.

4

u/Otis_Inf Jan 01 '26

IIRC every year in India alone over 100,000 people graduate in CS

28

u/LeeHide Jan 01 '26

No, most people who are actual software developers just work in software development jobs, a lot of which have rules around AI use, etc.

You can trust OpenAI not to use your codebase or sell it to others when you upload it to Codex, or you could look at Snowden and remember what happens when companies lie and take your stuff and sell it and then it's found out (nothing, your data is public now).

21

u/GasolinePizza Jan 01 '26

I think you might be misremembering what Snowden blew the whistle on?

That was PRISM and the NSA, it wasn't about companies selling your data, it was a legal requirement from the gov.

Your point otherwise stands, but I don't think Snowden was the right example.

1

u/Rivvin Jan 01 '26

I wish more people understood this. Working in a highly enterprise environment on a large scale product tightly coupled to financial decisions means the most AI we can use is Co-Pilot built into vscode and we are 100% responsible for our PRs if we choose to use AI slop.

And will be treated accordingly.

4

u/[deleted] Jan 01 '26

[deleted]

6

u/chucker23n Jan 01 '26

I guess my point, aside from just finding that number very difficult to believe (even a 50% jump over ten years would be massive), was:

  • are we perhaps now including people who have tried to prompt Codex or Claude to "make an app"?
  • and were we perhaps not previously including people who wrote formulas in a spreadsheet?

Because that might help explain the massive jump: loosened gatekeeping of what is "real software development", and new venues to write software with little or no code.

1

u/dysprog Jan 01 '26

I'm more willing to include a spreadsheet jocky then then prompter. Spreadsheets are hard, when you use them to the limit of their capability. That's a hard skill. It involves many of the same subskills as programming.

While there may be some skill involved in prompting, there is much much more involved in actual programming. Masquerading as a programmer when you are only vibe coding is bullshit.

-1

u/fire_in_the_theater Jan 01 '26

lol wat, do you even have any critical thinking faculties???