London Charging Ahead In Global Tech Hub Race?

There are more tech talents in London than any other major city in the world, a new survey has shown.

These new figures came from online developer community, Stack Overflow, and London & Partners, the Mayor’s official promotional company for London.

For the past six months, users of Stack Overflow were analysed, and the results show that London houses more than 71,000 professional developers.

This means it has more than any other European city, the metropolitan area of San Francisco and New York City. Across Europe, London is attracting more developers than Stockholm, Berlin and Dublin combined and the nearest competitor city is Paris with 40,538 IT programmers.

The numbers are also expected to grow. Oxford Economics, for London & Partners, found that the wider tech workforce in the city is predicted to grow by 22 per cent over the next 10 years.

This will bring the number of people working in the IT sector up to almost 240,000 by 2025.

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Employment growth in London’s tech sector is forecast to outperform the national average, growing almost four times faster than all other sectors in the UK.

Not only that, but the number of tech companies in London is also expected to rise to 51,500 by 2025. This is a 92 per cent increase in the number of tech businesses since the launch of the Tech City project by Prime Minister David Cameron MP and Mayor of London, Boris Johnson MP five years ago.

Such an environment also produces good salaries. According to Stack Overflow’s 2015 Annual User Survey, London’s developers are amongst the best paid in Europe, earning an average of £56,830 per year. This is greater than any other European country and is more than the Middle East’s emerging tech hub, Tel Aviv.

London has 30,062 developers specialising in this field which is more than the combined total of Tallinn, Barcelona, Dublin, Berlin, Budapest, Stockholm and Amsterdam.