Where developers work.
Who employs the developers who publish on GitHub?
17.6% of UK developers who give an employer on GitHub name a university or research institute; 3.7% name a big tech company (n=67,965).
Sample: 67,965 developers · source: public GitHub profiles · data to 24 September 2026
UK vs China
| Country | Figure | Sample (developers) | In words |
|---|---|---|---|
| China | 41.7% | 99,131 | China: 41.7% name a university or research institute and 10.7% a big tech company (n=99,131). |
How this is measured
The free-text company on the profile, among developers who give one (placeholders like "n/a" and "student" are dropped; freelance / self-employed / contractor are reported separately as freelance_pct of everyone giving any answer). value = % naming a university or research institute; value_json.bigtech_pct = % naming a large tech company (UK: Google / DeepMind, Microsoft, Meta, Amazon, Apple, IBM, Bloomberg, Nvidia, Oracle, Salesforce, Intel, Netflix, Uber; China: Alibaba / Ant, Tencent, ByteDance, Baidu, Huawei, Meituan, JD, Xiaomi, NetEase, PDD, Kuaishou, DiDi, plus the US majors); top_employers = the 20 most named, as [name, developers] pairs (spellings merged: UCL / University College London, Facebook / Meta). Self-reported and unverified; students often give their university, so "name a university" is not "work at one". Source: public GitHub profiles and their public repositories (the teky search dataset; each finding's date is the date the data runs to). Population: GitHub accounts whose stated location we confirm as the UK or mainland China — the geocoder's country is re-checked against the location text (DevLocation), which drops "Cambridge, MA", "Stanford, CA", "Birmingham, AL" and "Philadelphia, PA"-style mis-codes and bare town names shared with a larger place abroad, and Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan; organisation accounts and profiles with no GitHub account are excluded. It describes developers who publish on GitHub and state where they are, not every developer: it leans towards open-source contributors, academics and students, and Chinese developers also use Gitee, so China is under-represented. n = developers (GitHub accounts) unless the insight says otherwise.
Cite this
Free to quote with a credit and a link.
ProdReady Recruitment (2026). Where developers work. Data to 24 September 2026. https://ProdReadyRecruitment.com/research/dev_employers
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