The total number of professional developers in Europe now stands at 4.7 million – more than the entire population of New Zealand – according to new data from Stack Overflow published today in The State of European Tech report from Atomico and Slush.
More than half a million (516,535) of those developers work in Greater London, Paris or Berlin. The Greater London area has the most professional developers in the whole of Europe with a total of 300,345.
Paris and Berlin have developer populations of 134,322 and 81,868 respectively. Madrid comes in at fourth place with 81,678.
| City and Ranking | Total no of developers in 2016 |
| 1. Greater London | 300,345 |
| 2. Paris | 134,322 |
| 3. Berlin | 81,868 |
| 4. Madrid | 81,678 |
| 5. Amsterdam | 66,778 |
| 6. Warsaw | 63,905 |
| 7. Barcelona | 51,809 |
| 8. Stockholm | 51,457 |
| 9. Budapest | 48,933 |
| 10. Dublin | 45,583 |
| 11. Vienna | 42,166 |
| 12. Prague | 41,848 |
| 13. Zurich | 39,623 |
| 14. Milan | 39,114 |
| 15. Copenhagen | 39,008 |
| 16. Oslo | 31,292 |
| 17. Helsinki | 29,208 |
| 18. Lisbon | 28,292 |
| 19. Brussels | 26, 635 |
| 20. Cambridge | 14,536 |
Europe’s developers working on deep tech areas such as machine learning
Trends are emerging in the field of deep tech. The proportion of questions on the topic of machine learning posted by developers in Europe using Stack Overflow’s Q&A platform has increased by 80% since 2015. This is a significant uplift compared to the 43% increase recorded between 2014 and 2015. In 2016, machine learning represents almost 1% of all 723,492 questions asked by professional developers in Europe throughout the year.
Kevin Troy, Director of Stack Overflow Insights, commented:
“The fact that we have so many developers in Europe is testament to two things — software really is eating the world, and Europe is a hub for exciting technological innovation. The shift towards deep technology underlines the latter. Some of the most cutting edge work in the world of artificial intelligence is being done in London — from the highly publicised players like DeepMind to exciting young startups like Weave.Ai and Tractable.”
Note: Stack Overflow Insights analysed developer activity on its Q&A platform across from 2008 – 2016*, identifying all questions posed by developers based in Europe, using the ‘tags’ associated with each of the specified terms (‘machine learning’ and ‘deep learning’). *2016 YTD based on 9 months to September 2016
