On Thu, May 07, 2026 at 11:14:12AM -0400, Rich Pieri wrote:
> On Wed, 06 May 2026 21:57:09 -0400 "Dale R. Worley" <[email protected]>
> wrote:
> > The difficulty is that the actual market for "creativity" is fairly
> > small; most "creative types" are employed as "illustrators", that is,
>
> I don't know about that. I do know plenty of actors, musicians,
> artists, writers, etc., who are in demand for their work.
having heard how hard it is for actors/musicians/artists to find enough
paid work to get by, I just looked up numbers on this and was surprised:
~2.5M creative professionals in the usa (2020)
("architects; art directors, fine artists, and animators; designers;
actors; producers, and directors; dancers and choreographers;
musicians; announcers; writers and authors; photographers; and
other artists and entertainers.")
https://www.americansforthearts.org/by-program/reports-and-data/legislation-policy/naappd/artists-in-the-us-workforce-2006-2020
which is about the same as the number of programmers in the usa!
(if we average the 2023 from wikipedia & jetbrains and then add in growth
to today, you get about 2.6M now:)
1.6M 2023
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_engineering_demographics
2.5M 2023 https://www.jetbrains.com/lp/devecosystem-data-playground/
3.2M 2025 https://www.jetbrains.com/lp/devecosystem-data-playground/
though given the subject of this thread, maybe I should have asked an LLM
to give me a report on this instead of looking anything up myself.
--grg
_______________________________________________
Discuss mailing list
[email protected]
https://lists.blu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
