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Software developers

Also called Software engineer, SWE, Developer, Software dev, Backend developer

In brief

The record opens on an estimate: the six ENIAC programmers of 1945. Today: 1.69 million. Median pay was $135,980 a year in May 2025. The last full technology era for software developers: Autonomous coding agents arrive, 2024 to 2025. The 2024 story was substitution: a machine pitched to do the whole job.

What the sources say

Official outlook

BLS projects employment to grow 10.2% from 2025 to 2035.

BLS Employment Projections 2025-35

AI exposure studies

  • 44.7% of this job's tasks are exposed to large language models. Not a forecast of job losses. Eloundou and others, 2023
  • 29% of work tasks in computer and mathematical occupations, this job's group, are exposed to automation by AI. Not a forecast of job losses. Goldman Sachs, 2023

Data as of BLS OEWS May 2025; BLS Employment Projections 2025-35.

Last updated .

Cite this page
APA

Future History. (2026, October 11). Software developers: jobs and pay since 1945 [Data set; data as of BLS OEWS May 2025; BLS Employment Projections 2025-35]. https://futurehistory.earth/timeline/15-1252

Chicago

Future History. "Software developers: jobs and pay since 1945." Data as of BLS OEWS May 2025; BLS Employment Projections 2025-35. Last modified October 11, 2026. https://futurehistory.earth/timeline/15-1252.

BibTeX

@misc{futurehistory_15_1252, author = {{Future History}}, title = {Software developers: jobs and pay since 1945}, year = {2026}, month = oct, howpublished = {\url{https://futurehistory.earth/timeline/15-1252}}, note = {Last updated 2026-10-11. Data as of BLS OEWS May 2025; BLS Employment Projections 2025-35}, }

The access date is today's date on your device.

drag to travel through time
195019752000now
Country
2026
Known then as Programmer (often called "coder" or "computer operator")
Known then as Computer Programmer
Known then as Programmer / Software Engineer
Known then as Software Developer (Applications / Systems Software)
Known then as Software Developer
Known today as Software Developer
Projected to still be called Software Developer
Data from the May 2025 survey
US Employment
1.69M
Est.

BLS OEWS May 2025 (published).

Official statistic
Report an error
Median Annual Wage
$135,980

≈ $132,494 in 2024 prices (derived by us, CPI-adjusted)

Official statistic
Report an error
Beat · 1843

Ada Lovelace publishes an algorithm to calculate Bernoulli numbers for Charles Babbage's Analytical Engine: generally dated as the first computer program, a full century before there was a machine to run it.

Beat · 1952

Grace Hopper completes the A-0 System: the first compiler-related tool, which she described as a program that translated English-like words into machine instructions. Coined the term "compiler".

Beat · 1968

The NATO Software Engineering Conference (Garmisch, October 1968) formally names "software engineering" as a discipline, in direct response to the "software crisis": the recognition that programs were larger than any single mind could hold and that the existing ad-hoc methodology did not scale.

Beat · 1983

Borland releases Turbo Pascal for $49.95: the first development environment that an individual could afford. Within five years had sold >1 million copies. The programmer cohort stopped being an institutional-employee-only category.

Beat · 2001

Seventeen software developers (Beck, Cunningham, Thomas, Sutherland, Schwaber, Highsmith, Cockburn, Martin, Beedle, van Bennekum, Fowler, Grenning, Hunt, Jeffries, Kern, Marick, Mellor) meet at a resort in Snowbird, Utah and publish the Agile Manifesto.

Beat · 2018

The 2018 SOC consolidates 15-1132 (Software Developers, Applications) and 15-1133 (Software Developers, Systems Software) into the current 15-1252 (Software Developers). Computer Programmers (15-1131 → 15-1251) is kept distinct because the BLS already saw the two roles diverging. The historical employment series before this date is no longer directly comparable to the modern 15-1252 number.

Beat · 2021

GitHub Copilot ships into technical preview (June 29, 2021): the first commercial product whose value proposition is "an AI that writes code with you". Within three years, GitHub reports it is writing nearly half the code in files where it is enabled.

Beat · 2025

Employment of US computer programmers (the sibling SOC 15-1251, kept separate from software developers) falls to its lowest level since 1980, about half the 2000 peak, with a 27.5% drop in the 12-month average since early 2023, correlating with ChatGPT's release.

Beat · 2026

The agentic-coding field goes multi-vendor. By early 2026 roughly 90% of professional developers regularly use an AI tool at work (JetBrains AI Pulse, January 2026): GitHub Copilot leads at 29%, with Cursor and Claude Code tied at 18%. OpenAI Codex, a 3%-usage laggard in January, surges past 2 million weekly active users by mid-March 2026 on the back of GPT-5.3-Codex. The job is shifting from writing code to specifying and reviewing what the agents write.

How to read this number

OEWS is a point-in-time survey snapshot, not a continuous time series; BLS advises against using it for year-over-year trend comparison.

Each dot is a cited figure over time; the dotted line only links them (values between aren't measured). Hollow dots are estimates.

Official statistic: Copied by a script from a statistics agency table or a published study's table, not retyped by hand. BLS figures and the forecast and exposure tables are also re-checked against that table on every data run. Researched context: Researched from the cited source rather than copied from it by a script, so it is not machine-checked yet. Spot a mistake? Each figure has a “Report an error” link.

Cited forecasts · present → 2035

Will AI replace software developers? What the research says

Each figure is stated by the named source; we publish no forecasts of our own. Where sources disagree, we show the disagreement rather than an average.

Each figure is stated by the named source; we publish no forecasts of our own. Where sources disagree, the spread is the honest signal.

What published forecasts say
Forecast change in the number of people doing this work, as published by each named source. Bars share one scale on every role, centred on zero and reaching the end at ±30%. Grey marks a small change, 3% or less either way.
BLS Employment Projections 2025-35
→ 2035
+10.2%
BLS National Employment Matrix, 2025-35 cycle, line for SOC 15-1252 (Software developers): 1,717.8 thousand jobs in 2025, projected 1,892.6 thousand in 2035, a change of +174.7 thousand (+10.2%). Matrix employment counts all jobs in the occupation, including self-employed workers (1.5% of this occupation in 2025). The average for all occupations in this cycle is +3.5%.
Official statisticReport an error
How exposed is this work to AI (research measures)
Scores as published by each study. Each row says what it measures. These measure what AI could technically do, not forecasts of jobs lost.
Eloundou et al. (2023), "GPTs are GPTs"
2023 study · Share of tasks exposed to LLMs (β, human-rated)
44.7%
of tasks
What this measures

Published occupation-level exposure from the paper's occ_level.csv for O*NET-SOC 15-1252.00 Software Developers. Shown: human-rated β = 0.447, the share of the occupation's tasks an LLM could do in at least half the time at equal quality, counting tasks that need LLM-powered software at half weight (β = E1 + 0.5 × E2). Other published measures for this occupation: human-rated α (LLM alone) 0.053 and γ (all LLM-assisted) 0.842; GPT-4-rated β 0.868. This measures how much of the work an LLM could touch, not how many jobs disappear.

Official statisticReport an error
Goldman Sachs (Briggs & Kodnani, 2023), "The Potentially Large Effects of Artificial Intelligence on Economic Growth"
2023 study · Share of work tasks exposed to automation by AI, all computer and mathematical occupations (US)
29%
of tasks
What this measures

Goldman Sachs Global Investment Research scored the task content of each US occupation for exposure to automation by generative AI and weighted by OEWS employment. Exhibit 5 (US panel) reports 29% for computer and mathematical occupations, the occupational group this role belongs to; the report publishes no figure for individual occupations. It measures how much of the group's work AI could automate, not how many jobs disappear, and it is a 2023 estimate, not a forecast for a later year.

Official statisticReport an error
Today, in this role

What's changing day to day for software developers

Three parts of your work where AI is already doing real lifting, and what stays yours.

AI is taking this onMigrate and modernize legacy codebases (refactoring deprecated patterns, upgrading dependencies, and translating between languages or frameworks) tasks where autonomous agents (Devin, Copilot Workspace) now handle most repetitive transformation work.

Migrate and modernize legacy codebases (refactoring deprecated patterns, upgrading dependencies, and translating between languages or frameworks) tasks where autonomous agents (Devin, Copilot Workspace) now handle most repetitive transformation work.[7],[10]

Where your edge is

Redirect effort from mechanical refactoring to post-migration validation: define the correctness criteria, own the test harness, and perform the business-logic review that verifies the automated agent preserved intended behavior.

AI is sitting alongside you herePrototype new features or proof-of-concepts rapidly using AI-native editors and agent tools, iterating on natural-language specifications before committing to a full implementation plan.

Prototype new features or proof-of-concepts rapidly using AI-native editors and agent tools, iterating on natural-language specifications before committing to a full implementation plan.[11],[12]

Where your edge is

Become fluent in prompt engineering for code, writing precise, scoped natural-language specs that produce useful first drafts; treat AI-generated prototypes as spike artifacts requiring design review before production use.

AI is sitting alongside you hereWrite and maintain automated test suites (unit, integration, end-to-end), delegating test-case generation to AI tools while curating edge cases that reflect real production failure modes.

Write and maintain automated test suites (unit, integration, end-to-end), delegating test-case generation to AI tools while curating edge cases that reflect real production failure modes.[6],[3]

Where your edge is

Focus on test strategy rather than test authorship: design the test pyramid, define coverage standards, and own the decision of which failure modes matter most, AI can generate hundreds of tests but needs human guidance on what to cover.

Where software developers go next

Natural next steps for someone with your foundation: not exits, evolutions.

What each move takes

The 2025-2026 labor market shows rising demand for managers who can evaluate AI tooling, set adoption strategy for agentic coding agents, and lead teams navigating AI-assisted development. Experienced developers who build management skills command the highest compensation premiums in the sector.

What you'd add
· AI adoption strategy: evaluating agentic tools (Devin, Copilot Workspace) for team ROI
· Budget ownership: headcount planning, cloud cost management, tool licensing
· Executive communication: translating technical risk into business impact
What it takesA real upskill, but a natural one
Tools of the era

How has the work of software developers changed since 1945?

The tools that defined the work, one line per era. Select an era to see how it reshaped the work.

  • ENIAC and plug-board programming

    No programming languages existed. Programs were specified by physically rewiring patch panels and setting thousands of switches by hand. Programming was treated as clerical work and largely assigned to women; the engineers who designed the machine considered hardware (not software) to be the intellectual achievement.

    Effect on the work

    Cohort: several ENIAC programmers in 1945. The broader US Army "computers" pool, hundreds of women doing manual calculation, was the recruiting feeder.

  • FORTRAN, LISP, COBOL, ALGOL

    First-generation high-level languages decoupled programming from machine wiring. FORTRAN (IBM, 1957) made scientific computation a writeable activity; LISP (McCarthy, 1958) seeded the AI tradition; COBOL (1960) put programming inside enterprise back-offices. Headcount grew from ~15K (1957) toward >100K within a decade.

  • Structured programming + UNIX + C

    Dijkstra's 1968 "GOTO considered harmful" letter triggered a decade of methodological re-tooling. UNIX (Thompson + Ritchie, Bell Labs, 1969) and C (Ritchie, 1972) made portable systems software possible and seeded the open-source tradition. The job title "software engineer" emerged, formalized at the 1968 NATO conference.

  • IBM PC + Borland Turbo Pascal

    The IBM PC (1981) and Borland's low-cost Turbo Pascal compiler (1983) democratized programming: a single developer could buy a development environment for the price of a textbook. Programming moved out of computer centers and onto individual desks. By 1990 BLS counted hundreds of thousands of computer programmers in the US, several times the 1980 number.

  • Visual Basic + RAD + Windows business apps

    Microsoft Visual Basic (1991) created an entire occupational sub-category, "VB programmer", focused on internal business applications. Rapid Application Development tools (VB, Delphi, PowerBuilder) let business analysts build their own software. This is also when "the programmer who isn't a computer scientist" became the modal hire.

  • Open source: Linux, Apache, Perl, MySQL

    The LAMP stack (Linux 1991, Apache 1995, MySQL 1995, Perl 1987→1994) made it possible to build commercial software entirely on free tools. Open source flipped the economics of software development; by the early 2000s no startup paid for a database license, a web server, or an OS.

  • Web 1.0: Netscape, Java, JavaScript

    The Netscape Navigator browser (1994) and the simultaneous arrival of Java + JavaScript (1995) created an entirely new programming target: the browser. Demand for web developers exploded; "webmaster" and "web programmer" were briefly distinct census-tracked occupations. The dot-com peak in 2000 saw US programmer headcount cross 700,000.

  • Agile + Scrum + XP

    The Agile Manifesto (signed February 2001 by seventeen developers at Snowbird, Utah) replaced the waterfall planning culture that had dominated since the 1968 NATO conference. Scrum (1995) and Extreme Programming (1996) provided the practice scaffolding. Developer time shifted from up-front specification toward iterative iteration in two-week cycles.

  • AWS S3 + EC2: public cloud

    Amazon S3 (March 14, 2006) and EC2 (August 2006) made it possible to ship a production service without buying a single server. By 2010 every Amazon.com retail site had migrated to AWS; by 2012 Netflix had publicly committed nearly all infrastructure to AWS. The "ops" half of the developer job mostly disappeared into AWS bills.

  • GitHub + distributed version control

    GitHub launched April 2008. Linus Torvalds's git (2005) had already replaced CVS/SVN in serious open-source projects; GitHub built a social layer on top and within a decade had >100M users. Open-source contribution became a public résumé. Hiring funnels reorganized around public commit history.

  • DevOps + Docker + Kubernetes

    The first DevOpsDays conference (Ghent, October 2009, founded by Patrick Debois) named a practice that had been emerging at Flickr, Etsy, and Amazon. Docker (2013) and Kubernetes (2014) operationalized it. The developer role broadened to absorb deployment, monitoring, and incident response: the "full-stack" era.

  • GitHub Copilot: first AI pair-programmer

    GitHub announced Copilot (technical preview) on June 29, 2021, built on OpenAI Codex. The first commercial product framed explicitly as "an AI that writes code with you." General availability followed June 21, 2022. GitHub later reported Copilot was "writing nearly 50% of code in files where it's enabled": the first widely-cited substitution claim that wasn't hype.

  • ChatGPT: general LLM code assistance

    ChatGPT launched November 30, 2022. Within weeks developers were routing Stack Overflow questions through it instead of Stack Overflow; by 2024 the Stack Overflow Developer Survey reported 63.2% of professional developers using AI tools in their workflow (with 82% using AI for code generation specifically).

    Effect on the work

    Sentiment turned mixed fast: favorability dropped from 77% (2023) to 72% (2024).

  • Cursor + AI-first IDEs

    Cursor (Anysphere, 2023) was the first IDE rebuilt around an LLM rather than retrofitted with one. Within a year it had displaced VS Code + Copilot as the modal "AI coding workflow" for ambitious developers: the editor where the AI is the primary interface, not a sidebar.

  • Autonomous coding agents arrive (Devin)

    Devin (Cognition Labs, announced March 12, 2024) was the first product pitched as a fully autonomous software engineer: take a ticket, write code, run tests, open a PR, with no human in the loop. Independent reviewers (Internet of Bugs) showed Devin failing on real Upwork tasks, and the autonomous-engineer pitch ran well ahead of what the tools could actually deliver. But the direction of travel was set, and within a year every major vendor shipped an "agent mode."

    Effect on the work

    The 2024 story was substitution: a machine pitched to do the whole job. In practice the early agents still needed close supervision, so the immediate effect was hype and anxiety far more than displacement.

  • Agentic coding goes multi-vendor: Claude Code, OpenAI Codex, Cursor, Copilot

    By 2025 and 2026 the daily reality was not one autonomous engineer but a crowded, multi-vendor field of agentic assistants a developer drives. OpenAI Codex was a striking case of how fast position can change. The incumbents moved too: Cognition, the maker of Devin, bought the Windsurf IDE (closed December 2025) and shipped its own SWE-1.5 model, consolidating rather than replacing engineers, and Google entered with the Antigravity editor (November 2025). The common thread: the editor or terminal becomes a place you delegate work and review it, not type it line by line.

    Effect on the work

    Usage rose while trust fell. In November 2025 the Anthropic Economic Index found that "modifying software to correct errors" was the most common task in sampled first-party Claude API transcripts, and it matched 46% of those transcripts to computer and mathematical tasks. The work is shifting from writing code to specifying and reviewing it.

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Software Developers employment and pay by year

On record since1945
Latest US employment1,687,890 (May 2025)Source: BLS OEWS May 2025Official statisticReport an error
Latest US median pay$135,980 (May 2025)Source: BLS OEWS May 2025Official statisticReport an error
Outlook+10.2% by 2035Source: BLS Employment Projections 2025-35Official statisticReport an error

In other countries

The latest figure each country's statistics agency publishes for this job. Each uses its own occupation definition, survey basis and currency, so the numbers are not directly comparable with each other or with the US figures.

  • Canada (NOC 21232)

    Employment, 2020
    87,015, Statistics Canada Census 2021 Official statistic Report an errorStatistics Canada Census of Population 2021: number of persons with employment income in NOC 21232 Software developers and programmers, Canada, reference year 2020. A recipients basis (anyone with employment income during the year), slightly broader than a point-in-time employed count. Statistics Canada Open Licence.
    Median pay, 2020
    C$91,000, Statistics Canada Census 2021 Official statistic Report an errorStatistics Canada Census of Population 2021 (Table 98-10-0586): median employment income for NOC 21232 Software developers and programmers, Canada, reference year 2020, full-year full-time workers (the basis comparable to the US OEWS full-time median). Statistics Canada Open Licence.

  • United Kingdom (UK SOC 2134)

    Employment, 2025
    360,000, ONS ASHE 2025 Official statistic Report an errorONS Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings (Table 14): employee jobs in SOC 2134 Programmers and software development professionals, United Kingdom, 2025 (ASHE "number of jobs", thousands x1000; excludes self-employment). Open Government Licence v3.0.
    Median pay, 2025
    £55,587, ONS ASHE 2025 Official statistic Report an errorONS Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings (Table 14.7a): median gross annual pay for all employee jobs in SOC 2134 Programmers and software development professionals, United Kingdom, 2025. Open Government Licence v3.0.

  • Australia (ANZSCO 2613)

    Employment, 2025
    188,400, ABS Labour Force Survey March 2026 Official statistic Report an errorABS Labour Force Survey (Detailed), table EQ08: employed persons in ANZSCO 2613 Software and Applications Programmers, national (summed across sex and state/territory), annual average of 4 quarterly estimates.
    Median pay, 2025
    A$131,924, ABS Employee Earnings May 2025 Official statistic Report an errorAnnualised (x52) from A$2,537 median weekly earnings. ABS Survey of Employee Earnings and Hours, May 2025: median pay for full-time non-managerial employees paid at the adult rate, before tax. Surfaced via the Jobs and Skills Australia occupation profile for ANZSCO 2613.
View all 12 years of cited US data, each linked to its source
YearUS employmentAnnual pay (median unless marked)SourceReport
19456n/aEst., Wikipedia Researched contextReport
195715,000n/aEst., Wikipedia Researched contextReport
1980318,000n/aEst., Fortune (Mar 17, 2025) Researched contextReport
1990n/a$34,000BLS CPS 1990 Researched contextReport
1999n/a$64,031Census 2000 Researched contextReport
2000707,000n/aEst., Fortune (Mar 17, 2025) Researched contextReport
2008n/a$85,430BLS OEWS May 2008 Official statisticReport
20211,364,180$120,730BLS OEWS May 2021 Official statisticReport
20221,534,790$127,260BLS OEWS May 2022 Official statisticReport
20231,656,880$132,270BLS OEWS May 2023 Official statisticReport
20241,654,440$133,080BLS OEWS May 2024 Official statisticReport
20251,687,890$135,980BLS OEWS May 2025 Official statisticReport
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