Developer insights: which cities have the most developers in Germany?

Only very few cities proper exceed the number of 10,000 developers in Germany.

In my recent analysis of the numbers of software developers by the Federal Agency for Employment two things became very clear:

• Germany is decentralized.

There is not one city that dominates the landscape in terms of numbers of developers. This is equally mirrored in the number of companies, IT salespeople, product specialists and sysadmins. This is unlike countries like the UK or France.

• Most digital centers need to looked at as a region or hub.

For instance, Frankfurt as a city proper only represents about 40% of the number of developers for the hub it is part of.

That leaves us with very few cities that go over 10,000 developers — remarkable when we consider that the overall number of developers in Germany is 281,380!

The German strongholds for developers

So which cities are we talking about exactly? Munich, Berlin, Stuttgart and Hamburg.

The other usual “suspects” like Frankfurt, Düsseldorf, Cologne, Karlsruhe, Hanover and Nuremberg need to be considered in their respective “environments”. There, we find that strength is in collective and neighboring numbers :D