There are only 5,000 elite software engineers in the world
7 hours ago
- Recruiting top engineers reveals a small, interconnected community of about 5,000 people worldwide.
- Alfred Lotka's 1926 study showed scientific publication output follows a 1/n² distribution, with a few producing most work.
- Derek de Solla Price's law states that half the work in a field is done by the square root of the number of contributors.
- Applying Price's law to software developers (20–27 million) suggests roughly 5,000 engineers write half the foundational code.
- Software development is even more skewed than science when measured by code dependency, not lines written.
- The elite grows only as the square root of the field, so as software expands, the top engineers become a smaller fraction of the whole.
- AI-driven growth in developers will make the elite even rarer, not more numerous.
- Recruiting from this tiny group requires personal networks, not job postings or resumes.
- Retaining elite engineers is critical because there are few replacements and Price's law predicts slow growth at the top.