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Daddy_Surprise

It seems unrealistic that 1 in 4 of the entire population of Hong Kong is working in software development (including, children, elderly etc)? Is it per 100 of working age adults? The other explanation would be a lot of the Hong Kong accounts are being used by people in mainland China.


sh1boleth

I’m more inclined to believe it’s Chinese developers with Hong Kong VPN or “Location”


FindTheSandwich

this specifies accounts, and not people. it's highly likely that a good chunk of those 24 accounts are second or even third accounts made by existing users


Lyndon_Boner_Johnson

A lot of them are also probably Chinese users circumventing the great firewall.


LordRaeko

It’s 1000% this


theganglyone

Even the US number of 6.2 seems crazy high to me. I'm sure there's a lot of people with multiple accounts.


mata_dan

Yeah I have one personal account that I've also done work with once on a private repo, 9 different accounts for specific contracts, and I've had 4 other accounts in the past specific to full time jobs - in most of those so did most of the other devs and external contractors or consultants.


Silver_PP2PP

That would still not explain anything, because that would also be the case in any other country. Why would they make more accounts than any other nation. I guess its more something Github is Blocked by the great fire wall in china and the vpns connect the devs to Hong Kong for free open internet.


azunaki

Accounts is a terrible metric, as other countries don't have the same incentives to make multiple accounts, and so wouldn't bother. If this was active accounts with a commit in say the last month or minimum number of commits. It might be more relevant, but even then I'd find it questionable. It's just a bad metric to count.


Silver_PP2PP

Its just Data, there is no reasoning or justification for anything based on this Data. It completly depends on the context its used for. I dont see why this country has an additional incentive to make multiple accounts, more than other users from other ips.


flywithredbull

Exactly ! Are these all accounts from the beginning of time ? Seems like the graph is designed to be more of a clickbait than to provide any meaningful insight. Just because there’s “data”, it doesn’t mean that it’s useful or right. Agree that “active” accounts with a commit in the last 3, 6 and 12 months would be slightly more interesting. Is that “data” available ?


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Silver_PP2PP

How does this change anything ? That is not against the argument in anyway. It even supports my theory that there are outside people making accounts with a Hong Kong IP, because the City is smaller that affects the statistic even more. Edit: typos


Railmouse

It's unrealistic that 24% of the HK population has an account, but if users have 3 accounts on average, it would not be unrealistic that 8% of the HK population has an account.


Daddy_Surprise

It kinda is, as it works out at 1.3 million accounts in place where only about 70k of jobs are in software development. IT is not a major industry in Hong Kong, it’s only 3.7% of GDP (US it’s 9%). Hong Kong has a big finance / banking industry (22% of GDP) , a lot of those software jobs will be for the banking sector. Banks are very conservative IT wise. For obvious security reasons they will not be letting most of their devs post code / use code from GitHub. Hong Kong software developers will be less likely to use GitHub than developers in countries which are less dependant on the banking sector.


Silver_PP2PP

So how does this explain why Hong Kong has 4 times more Acccounts than the US or Norway ?


YourPalCal_

It doesn’t, that requires a different explanation (probably the mainland china one). But they are actually all higher than you would expect, one in 20 brits have a github account?? So its a good explanation for them all being higher


eilif_myrhe

Also a lot of workers in Honk Kong live in the other side of the border. Many of those accounts may be from mainland Chinese workers.


Tentacle_poxsicle

China uses HK VPNS so they can connect to Western internet (because of the firewall of China) Also using software devs per population and calling it a software hub is kind of a dumb take. If everyone in Iceland was a programmer you wouldn't call it the programming hub of the world when California has three times Icelands population in just software engineers alone but they make up a small fraction of California population.


NicuCalcea

It is per 100 population. As the other comment mentioned, the subtitle says "accounts" rather than unique users for that very reason, I can't account for people using multiple accounts, VPNs, etc.


Daddy_Surprise

With a population of 7.3 million that would be 1.8 million accounts? A very quick internet search says about 70k people in Hong Kong work in software development in Hong Kong and that the entire IT industry only makes up 3.7% of GDP. These figures don’t match up,


NicuCalcea

Yes, it's 1.83m accounts [as per GitHub's own numbers](https://innovationgraph.github.com/economies/hk). The data doesn't specify whether these are unique users, just the number of accounts.


Wolfgung

As other commenter mentioned, a large portion of the hokgkong and Singapore accounts are likely VPN mainland China users


r2k-in-the-vortex

I wonder how many teachers get their classes to submit homework assignments via github. I would totally pull that stunt if I was a teacher. Self-grading assignments ftw, no-pasaran my class if CI doesn't pass on a pull request.


Being_No-42

Totally, the amount of accounts means nothing. I used to have up to 6 accounts when i was doing courses and making challenges for different companies when I was trying to change jobs. The thing is, you hide the repos, but if you need all of them simultaneously, you are screwed.


sammybeta

GitHub is banned in China mainland and many developers in China will need to use Hong Kong as a landing zone to the Internet. That might be the reason why the dev count is inflated.


gravitysort

Singapore too. Many chinese vpn users use Singaporean IP.


Olivia512

Why? Why not HK or Japan or whatever closer to them?


gravitysort

HK and Japan are also popular. Not sure why Japan is not showing up on the chart though.


apple_dough

Japan probably has too much population for it to distort it as much.


Olivia512

So why choose Singapore when there are closer alternatives (better ping) like Japan, Korea and HK?


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Astromike23

> as it's closer to 20 000km. 20,000 km is half the circumference of the Earth. It's the distance between Shanghai and Buenos Aires.


Abd5555

Singapore has a very significant (ethnically) Chinese population, might be the reason


Olivia512

Why would that matter? Do you know what a VPN is? It's not a house.


Abd5555

Webseites default location to language settings is what i had in mind, why so passive aggressive? I'm just trying to rationalize the phenomenon


Olivia512

And what do you think Singapore website's default language is?


waspocracy

I don't know about banned, but most developers use Gitee anyways.


FireIre

That and Hong Kong is essentially a high tech city state. Single out “San Francisco” or “Berlin” on the chart and they’d be pretty high too.


sammybeta

I don't disagree, it's just hard to justify Hong Kong ranked even higher than Singapore


ObviouslyTriggered

Looks like you have a case of the GIGOs, as both Hong Kong and Singapore are smurf jurisdictions for China and SEA countries.


ZetaZeta

This tells us the number of people who forget their password most often.


Mark8472

What’s your data source please?


NicuCalcea

Hey, the data is from [here](https://innovationgraph.github.com/).


Mark8472

Thank you!


DrinkinDoughnuts

Github accounts in a country ≠ number of develpoers in that country.


gravitysort

Both Hong Kong and Singapore numbers are largely skewed by the VPN users based in China as GitHub is intermittently blocked by the firewall or has very slow connection from China.


PhantomAfiq

Why'd they use Singapore as their VPN location? Genuinely curious


gravitysort

I think it is relatively close geographically, and good internet infrastructure makes it ideal for VPN providers to have lots of available connections there.


LeCrushinator

What if I have multiple GitHub accounts? I’m still only one dev.


mongol-2121

If India is not on here I don’t believe this list. No way Iceland has more devs than India.


Quirky-Elderberry304

You forget India has a huge population of 1.4 B and this is per 100 people


lucific_valour

Also, India has large non-services sector, such as agricultural or manufacturing. The top 2, Singapore & Hong Kong, are islands with economies focused on services. That probably includes VPNs, which heavily skews the resident to account ratio. One household is a single bachelor who's a software dev. The other household is a large extended family of 18, with 9 members in software dev. It's 100% vs 50%, but come on; The 2nd household is probably more of a "software development powerhouse".


mongol-2121

Good catch. I didn’t see the per 100 population


GameXGR

It's per 100 people, of course that is why Iceland is so high up(●'◡'●)


Striking_Order4862

If you do this for Bangalore which is 2x Hong Kong's population, you might actually get over 25% lol


karmikoala888

this is incredibly meaningless, this just indicates the popularity of Github in general, most companies like to keep private repositories in Europe and therefore avoid shitty Microsoft products


napleonblwnaprt

I'm interested to see what China's GitHub alternative is, and how many accounts there are. Apparently Gitee has 30 million but idk if that's the biggest or only alternative there.


gravitysort

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gitee This is the most popular chinese code hosting service based on git. Its website says 12 million registered users as of now.


napleonblwnaprt

Yeah I saw. Seems super low for a developing economy of 1.4 billion people. I think another person was right, the HK numbers are inflated with mainlanders VPNing past the great firewall.


gravitysort

There’s quick a few Chinese code hosting services, so it’s not as concentrated as GitHub overseas (but there’s bitbucket and others too..) Also I guess not as much developers are doing open source work in china too.. Edit: and yeah the HK and SG numbers are 100% propped up by VPNs.


gazbo26

Funnily in the past month I have had developers from 4 countries on the "upcoming" list send me Google Drive links to code instead of GitHub repos.


LeftOn4ya

Interesting that Estonia is so high. Wondering if its people from Russia like people from China are using Hong Kong and Singapore VPNs. Israel, Ireland, Nordic countries and Canada and US make sense though


zakuivcustom

Lol Hong Kong a "software hub"? I wish... Like its economy would be in a much better shape if tech is even a thing there.


ghost_desu

Now adjust this for % urban population


Use-Quirky

Now do San Francisco. Hong Kong is a city state


OverdosedCoffee

The claim Hong Kong is a VPN hub has more truth than the misleading claim of it being a development hub.


[deleted]

Why tf are there so many devs in Iceland? Is it some sort of target destination for remote workers?


Electrical_Theme_488

Oh no Indians are missing from the list where majority of the software codes are delivered. Next time post original data instead of fake


pensiveChatter

So.. what this graph is saying is that people in PRC are using a VPN in Hong Kong and Singapore instead of a VPN in the US or other free country to create their GitHub accounts. Also, Hong Kong is not a nation, as much as it would like to be.


Rexpelliarmus

Okay, now do the same statistic for London, New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco and see how they compare to the city states.


NicuCalcea

There's no city-level data, I'm afraid.


gebregl

Yes, comparing city states to regular countries isn't very meaningful.


Ok_Pie7707

Billions of Muslims and not even one Muslim country...


NicuCalcea

**Article**: [SAMIZDATA](https://blog.samizdata.co/p/russias-tech-brain-drain-in-numbers) **Data**: [GitHub Innovation Graph](https://innovationgraph.github.com/) **Tools**: R **Methodology**: [GitHub](https://innovationgraph.github.com/methodology)


[deleted]

😂🤣😂🤣 the only thing they develop is something that the US already made


gloomyturkey

If you see neither US nor China in such a chart, you know that stats means nothing 😃


NicuCalcea

The US is in the chart.


dr_black_

Sorry we Americans just assume if we're not at the top something is wrong with the chart.