How many Flex developers are there in India?
A few weeks back Yakov Fain on his flexblog took a guess on “How many Flex developers are there?” and estimated the number to be around 70000 plus …
… people who instead of screaming on the net “Flex is cool†are quietly studying Flex in vocational schools in Bangalore suburbs. They are not registering themselves on Flex forums …
The estimate is quite reasonable but I feel that there aren’t many such people who are learning/working on Flex but who don’t have a presence in the Flex virtual world (as blog readers/writers or discussion forum participants). I base this on the fact that the offline resources for learning Flex (mainly Books and Training) are still very scarce. I cannot comment on the rest of the world but here in Bangalore none of the popular bookstores have any Flex books available, most of them don’t even have Flex listed as a topic in their databases. From a quick search on Google i found that there are a few Adobe training partners that provide training in Flex but their number is also very limited.
Having stated the above let me try and estimate “how many Flex developers are there in India” …
Abdul Qabiz recently compiled a list of Flex resources in india. As I only plan on using the discussion groups for my estimate, his list is pretty much exhaustive barring the Adobe Flex community on Orkut.
The number of members on each of these groups is as follows:
- iGeeks: 364
- RIA-India yahoo group: 174
- Flex India google group: 43
- Adobe Flex Community on Orkut: 267
Total: 880
Lets divide this total by 2 assuming that only half of this total are unique people, that makes the figure 440. Now keeping my views above in perspective, lets assume that this figure is 20% of the number of flex developers in India … I feel that there are about 2200 Flex developers in India.
February 8th, 2007
you have to checkout Abdul’s blog for Adobe Online Store – Nothing changed
. India still doesn’t exist among APAC stores list. It is not that surprising when you didn’t find flex books in the indian stores
Thanks
February 8th, 2007
Mrinal,
Welcome to blogging
I like this post, it tries to quantify things…I am sure, this can be more accurate over the time…Keep updating it…
-abdul
February 8th, 2007
Hi Elango and Abdul,
A very warm welcome to my blog. Abdul, I appreciate your advice, I will keep refining and updating the data here.
Coming to what Elango pointed out ….
I wonder why Adobe appears to be paying comparatively less attention to India when Indians form a considerable chunk of the software development world.
The Flex buzz has not yet caught on in India … most developers that I interact with have not even heard of Flex (I live in Bangalore and every third person here is a software developer) … and those who have think that it is the next version of Flash or something even weirder.
I feel that Adobe should put more effort into evangelizing Flex in India (more so because they have 2 development centers here) The number of developers adopting Flex in India is growing but I get a feeling that it is not growing at a rate comparable to the rest of the world.
Some suggestions that could help are:
I hope some one from adobe is listening
February 27th, 2007
Hey Mrinal, what about an enterprise survey in organizations (Indian) that have flex based development happening.
This could be a great way to collect some other unique facts about the profession as well. And we could get the approximate numbers as well.
February 28th, 2007
Hi Rohan,
That sounds like a great idea … only I don’t have any experience or ideas on how to do this survey.
Can you please elaborate a little on how do we go about it?
March 7th, 2007
hi,
i’m a flash and flex developer In my company i’m the only flex developer and in cognizant and symphonyservices my previous companies which has a combined strength of more than 30000 software engineers has less than 10 flash developers. Here the people aren’t still aware of the power of flash and flex they’re still treating flash as an animation tool.
March 7th, 2007
Hi Shajahan,
As stated above I also feel that the Flex buzz hasn’t really caught on in India … but hopefully this will soon change … John Koch who is the developer relations manager at Adobe for Asia is visiting Bangalore this weekend and he has organized a meeting with local Flex developers. If you live in and around Bangalore you should join us.
If you are interested in joiningContact Me
March 7th, 2007
[...] A month back, as a follow up to Yakov Fain’s estimate of How many Flex developers are there? … I had had tried to estimate How many of them are in India?. I find taking a guess on these numbers very interesting as these estimates give an idea of how Flex is is gaining popularity and how fast the developer network is growing. A month has passed since I first tried this and I now have a few new insights to share: [...]
March 12th, 2007
Hi Mrinal,
Great post..Keep it up..
Till now I only know TIS,Ness and Magnet(where I am working) in Mumbai working in Flex Development.There maybe others which I might not be awared of.
You can blog about this and request readers to put their names and their company names.That might be helpful for the survey..
March 12th, 2007
Hi Rajesh,
I am glad you like it … you may want to check the article that I wrote as an extension to this one Update: How many Flex developers are there?
Also such a list of names and companies already exists: Flexcoders.net, is a world wide registry of all flex developers … you along with your friends may want to register there.
March 12th, 2007
Flex India User Community: the seeds have been sown…
John Koch, Adobe’s Developer Relations Manager for Asia is in Bangalore and he with Abdul Qabiz’s help got some Flex Developers in Bangalore together for an afternoon drink today. It was quite an exciting experience for me especially so as …
January 16th, 2008
Hi Mrinal,
Nice blog… I am working as a flash developer in bangalore and I am self-learning Flex as of now. Now the issue I am facing is that I am not able to find a company where I can get a good exposure in Flex development. Most of the companies who are into web development are using primitive versions flash and the projects that they are involved in does not seem to be challenging. In one of my previous companies, in a casual meeting with the managers there, they said the comapny is not willing to take the risk of going into a new technology(like Flex) altogether as they dont want to waste much money in R&D.And because of this reason most companies,even the bigger ones are lagging behind in Technology,atlest when it comes to Flash/Flex. And as Shajahan quoted very correctly, Flash is still considered as an animation tool by majority of the people from different domains which I find very irritating sometimes. And Rohan also has a point, as we can have a kind of forum wherein we can share our proffesional experience with other through which we can get to know what all is happening at various places in the industry. My current comapny is into e-publishing, so I can share what all applications we develop in this industry, and how far we use Flash/Flex in developing these applications.
January 18th, 2008
Arul,
This post is almost a year old, things have changed a lot since then, the popularity of Flex has increased many folds, any serious company considering building an application for the web is thinking about Flex today. You should Flex-India.org, its a discussion list where almost 900 flex developers from India discuss Flex. There are many job postings from time to time as well.
March 2nd, 2008
[...] As far as I know, the group was started somewhere in mid July of 2006 by Manish Jethani, it stayed quite dormant during its early months, about a year ago it had 43 members and the number of discussions was starting to increase, today as we speak the group has 1003 members and 1079 messages were posted last month. A few months ago, Raghu had done an analysis of how well the group was doing.. [...]
March 14th, 2008
[...] How do you estimate the number of Flex developers in India? This is a question that has been troubling me for quite a while. Yakov & Mrinal have tried to come up with some ways of getting to this, but I was wondering if there are any other ways of doing this? [...]
June 27th, 2008
hey…. i am new to flex.. n i found it amazing…. but i dont have enough material to learn it…. please provide me with some books and online tutorials…..
regards
ayush
July 17th, 2008
Hello Mrinal,
This is Nilesh. I have been with Cognizant from last 1.6 years. Currently working in the eLeaning team as a flash programmer in Pune. I am currently expolring some flex data. I read so many articles on flex but wanted to start with the practicle ones. Could you please direct me to some site where I can get the code samples so that i can work around them
Thank you in adv
Regards,
Nilesh W