How to measure enterprise software market share?

Question

I often hear from fellow programmers something like "enterprise software is 90% programmers do, nothing else really matters". Is it any statistic sources that can show approximate, relative number of programmers working in such areas as "enterprise software" (business automation), "game development", "driver development", "end user software development" etc? I feel that 90% is too high to be true, but i don't know what information sources can be relevant for such question. Maybe no one cares about such statistics?

Answer 1

icanhasserver pointed out that you should "Never trust any statistics that you didn't forge yourself." This can answer your question in two ways.

First, it’s a way to reformulate the statistics that people quote:

“what I understand as enterprise software is 90% people I know and consider programmers do most of the time, nothing else really matters".

In itself it is a statistic, the methodology is awful and probably not representative but that may be enough to make the point of the argument. Or to make them shut up you could ask them about their methodologies.

Any statistics you would find about this topic will probably have the some kind of definition problems. Who do you consider a programmer? Is someone who uses an if function in a spreadsheet a programmer? Does it depend on your job title (are statisticians who use R programmers)? How do you tag the kind of programming, does it depend on the firm you work with? Depending on the choices you make you will have very different answers.

This brings me to the second way icanhasserver might answer your question. Who would be interested to forge the same statistics you are interested with and have the money to do it? Governments are not interested in data that detailed, you can probably forget it.

The only people who might be interested in the data and have some statistics might be the placement agencies (monster.com, for instance). The job posting might reflect well what the market is, and give an implicit definition of programmer. After a (very) quick search I did not find anything, but I hope you could be luckier.