Fast forward 10 years. Stack Overflow conducted a survey and only 5.56% of respondents said they programmed as "hobby" and were not employed as "developers". But 70.4% said they were employed as "developers" but also programmed outside of work as a "hobby".
Those are some interesting findings. And while it probably doesn't need to be said: this is a Stack Overflow survey where the respondents voluntarily filled it out. I'd expect them to be a bit nerdier than the average! Indeed, 25% claiming to contribute to open source is pretty high haha.
https://www.computerworld.com/article/1513176/the-rise-of-ho...
https://www.pcworld.com/article/443076/idc-hobbyist-programm...
Fast forward 10 years. Stack Overflow conducted a survey and only 5.56% of respondents said they programmed as "hobby" and were not employed as "developers". But 70.4% said they were employed as "developers" but also programmed outside of work as a "hobby".
https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2023/
Perhaps there could be some ambiguity in the term "hobbyist" as applied to computer programming.