Demographics

A high proportion of freelance and self-employed programmers in a country or region can potentially indicate the local economy’s focus on the export of software development services. This is because many programmers from developing countries can earn more when working remotely for overseas companies compared to being employed in their domestic markets. An interesting observation is the relatively low level of freelancing in India and Brazil (each at 10%). Presumably, people there often work through large outsourcing firms or directly in international companies’ development centers situated in these countries.

The proportion of young developers, on the one hand, depends on the overall demographic makeup of the particular country or region. On the other hand, it depends on how long ago software development began there. Outside the US and Japan, you can find individuals over 60 in programming teams, but this is rare. However, in many American offices, you can gather an entire team of people who remember the smell of punched cards and the clatter of dot matrix printers.

Please note that the data in the table above represents weighted shares, not the raw responses we received. We have undertaken extensive efforts and statistical work to minimize bias in our data. For example, we received far more responses from Türkiye than from Japan. However, we know that there are significantly more developers in Japan, so we applied weighting to correct for that fact. You can find more information about our weighting process in the Methodology section of the report.

Only 11% of survey participants work in a country other than the one they were born in. As a result, we don’t have enough data to reliably establish the main migration routes, but we can show for specific regions the proportion of people that are leaving and arriving there.

As the data shows, 2022 saw a marked increase in the migration of programmers. This is largely linked to the war in Ukraine, considering that nearly 40% of all programmers migrating that year hailed from Russia, Ukraine, or Belarus. While many Ukrainians moved to EU nations, a considerable number of Russian programmers also migrated to visa-free countries. These primarily include nations in Central Asia, the Caucasus, the Balkans, as well as Israel and Türkiye.

Unfortunately, the data on Ukraine and Russia is heavily skewed and the emigration rate is likely inflated as we did not advertise the survey in these regions in 2022 and 2023. As a result, programmers who had emigrated were more likely to participate in the survey. However, we kept the data on these countries as it is evident that the number of emigrants from these countries is significant and continues to increase.