If this is what you want Contact Us and skip our sales pitch
Otherwise... ask Dick an Anonymous Question
Thinking of building an Offshore Programming team?
Outsource to a Big Country. Programmers rarely exceed 1% of population, few have mastered more than 2 or 3 of the dozen specialties used in most programming. Without a large talent pool hiring can be a slow process. Read More
Choose an English-Speaking Country. English is crucial for a programmer to access international communities, documentation, and most professional development tools and platforms. Read More
If English make sure it is Good English. Explaining your vision to a programmer is hard enough without adding another hurdle. Ask anyone who has struggled with Indian English. Read More

Custom programming is usually defined by AI as writing “software specific to the needs of a particular user, business or system” and contrasted with off the shelf software that is “designed to be a one-size-fits-all solution for common needs”.
Romeo Acidera, President, If you wish such a computer program bring it to us. We can write it for you. This includes software for you to put on the shelf to sell to others.
The tools, or languages, used to write the software are constantly changing. If we were asked a couple of years ago to write an iPhone app we might have chosen Swift. Today it might be React Native, unless the programmer assigned the task was more efficient in C++! It does not really matter too much unless it is expected to be maintained for years to come in which case you have to speculate about the popularity of the language in the future.
Most clients do not really care about the language used so long as it is “mainstream”. But these things change all the time. If you do care then ask us what we are using these days for mobile apps, or database apps, or any other type of app. Today the language most in use in Cambria programming is C++ where we have 19 specialists who spend all their time using this powerful language. We use many others as well.
To illustrate how things can change, 5 years ago we did not have a single C++ project in process. 20 years ago it was our choice for several big hardware oriented programs we wrote for Mitsubishi including an early video conferencing product we wrote tor them.
So our message is this: If you have an idea talk to us, get some advice, and get an estimate. If details of our aproach are important ask us at the time. Anything said here is bound to be out of date.
This is for the English Speaking reader who wishes to save on labor costs by outsourcing computer programming needs or hire staff to augment inhouse staff. Common sense suggests that a primary objective would be to deal with sources who are themselves Fluent English Speakers.
Fortunately there is a Swedish Company, English First (EF), who specializes in teaching English through their staff of 52,000 who are active worldwide1. Based upon ratings of 2.1 million adults from 116 countries they produce an annual report that rates the English Proficiency of the countries in which they are active.
The table below was taken from their 2024 report.2 It shows that the Philippines rates 20th in the world with a proficiency of “HIGH” and their big competitor India rates as #69 with a proficiency of “LOW”. The definitions of these terms are3:
Our interest here is understanding a foreign computer programmer and more important them understanding you. It is hard to believe that managers would be happy communicating important information to programmers with a Low rating. Thus If we limit our definition of English Speaking populations to Very High, and High it allows us to make the statement that the Philippines is second only to the US in size of their english speaking population.
In what follows is the ratings of countries taken from the 2024 report.
The EF English Proficiency Index (EF EPI) is the leading source of statistics on English proficiency worldwide. It is published by EF Education First, a global education company (based in Sweden), and ranks countries and regions based on test results from millions of adults who take their English tests.[1] See https://www.ef.com/wwen/epi
Programming Skills
Java, Delphi, C, C++ and Visual Basic
President and co-founder of Cambria, Dick is a physicist who, as president of a medical testing company, became interested in software from the perspective of a user and business owner. His previous positions include President of Industrial Health, Inc., Vice President of Envirodyne, Chairman of the Shock Wave Physics Department of SRI International, and a member of the professional staff of the Arthur D. Little Company. He is the author or co-author of two books, several scientific papers and a Scientific American article.
Dick has programmed extensively in Delphi, C, C++ and Visual Basic but in recent years he has not done much programming apart from maintenance on old systems written in software unknown to modern programmers. He is now programming his iPhone using Swift.
He earned his B.S. in Metallurgical Engineering from Lafayette College and his PhD from Caltech on a fellowship in nuclear physics. He has also taken a business course for executives at the Harvard Business School where he was the only participant out of 100 who got the correct answer to the business problem that was central to the course. He is a member of the Sigma Xi, Phi Beta Kappa, and Tau Beta Pi honorary fraternities.
His favorite undergraduate achievement was, as a Metallurgy major, beating out all the Math majors to win the Barge Math Prize.
The prize was an awkward dinner with the Math faculty plus 5 advanced books intended for use in grad school where the assumption was that my major would be Math. All the books were inspired choices and much valued and used when I was at Caltech. My son Chase used them later when he was a physics grad student.
Programming Skills
FoxPro, Visual Basic, MS Access and Crystal Reports
MS SQL Server, ASP, VB.Net, and ASP.Net
Romeo Acidera brings over two decades of experience as a software developer, educator, and leader. He joined Cambria in 2007 as one of the company's first senior software developers in the Philippines. Through his technical expertise and leadership, he became President of Cambria Software Philippines in 2018.
Romeo's programming background spans FoxPro, Visual Basic, MS Access, Crystal Reports, MS SQL Server, ASP, and .NET technologies. He is recognized as one of Cambria's foremost experts in enterprise database systems and reporting tools.
Before his tenure at Cambria, Romeo taught computer science at the University of Asia and the Pacific, where he was a consistent Dean's List student and later an instructor. His deep academic foundation, combined with his hands-on programming work, shaped a leadership style built on mentoring and encouraging teams to excel.
His long track record of success makes him an indispensable leader at Cambria who has played big part in our success.
Chase Crewdson’s journey with Cambria began at age 15, when he spent a summer calling clients for the company. He went on to pursue particle physics and data analysis at Santa Clara University, studied materials science and metallurgy at Caltech, and completed graduate work at Queen’s University.
After his academic career, Chase joined his former Caltech lab’s industrial manufacturing startup in Pasadena, California. When the opportunity arose to return to Cambria, Chase eagerly rejoined — bringing with him a unique blend of scientific rigor, engineering experience, and a passion for problem-solving.
As Vice President of Cambria, Chase applies both technical and interpersonal skills to guide projects, support clients, and drive innovation. He is deeply committed to leveraging Filipino programming talent to deliver world-class solutions for clients across the globe.
Sales and Marketing
Jennifer is the front liner of Cambria and her role as Vice President and Sales Manager extends above and beyond as she is also responsible for several administrative tasks and handles day to day operations of the company. She took up Bachelor of Science in Computer Science at Systems Technology Institute Global City and studied Computer Secretarial at the Polytechnic University of the Philippines.
When she joined Cambria in 2008, she implemented several sales and marketing efforts which helped a lot in reaching clients not only in the US but also in the Philippines as well as neighboring Asian countries. She also has a Dutch residency and is a very active member of the Dutch Chamber of Commerce in the Philippines. She is very active in supporting Philippine Sports by sponsoring the number one female squash player. During her free time, she loves to travel, play squash, spend time with her family and cook them a nice meal.
Programming Skills :
HTML5, CSS3, JavaScript, jQuery, Bootstrap, WordPress, AngularJS, Basic PHP, Basic ASP.NET MVC, CSS, SASS
Work on : UI/UX Design, Mobile Application Design, Responsive Web Design, Graphic Design, Accessibility, Page Speed Optimization
Design in : Adobe Photoshop, Adobe XD, Adobe Fireworks, Adobe Illustrator, Invision, Figma, Canva
Jazen Agustin is a creative professional with expertise in web design, front-end development, and graphic design. She holds a BS degree in Information Technology from Lorma Colleges, graduating Cum Laude. Since 2016, she has been designing and developing responsive websites, combining her technical precision with a passion for user-friendly aesthetics.
Her skills span HTML5, CSS3, JavaScript, jQuery, Bootstrap, WordPress, PHP, and ASP.NET MVC, as well as design tools including Adobe XD, Photoshop, Illustrator, and Figma. This diverse toolkit enables her to craft websites that are visually engaging, technically sound, and optimized for performance.
Jazen specializes in accessibility and page speed optimization, ensuring that every site she builds meets WCAG standards, loads efficiently, and delivers a seamless user experience. With a strong eye for detail and a focus on blending form with function, she creates digital experiences that are both inclusive and impactful.
Skills
HTML5, CSS3, JavaScript, jQuery, Bootstrap, WordPress, SASS, UI/UX Design, Mobile Design, Responsive Design, Graphic Design, SEO, Core Web Vitals, 301 Redirects, Canonical Tags, On-page Optimization, Google Ads, Facebook Ads, Email Marketing, Link Building, Screaming Frog, SEMrush, Rank Tracker, Google Analytics
Recca Enal is a digital marketing professional with over five years of experience helping businesses achieve measurable growth through SEO and integrated campaigns. Since joining Cambria in 2020, he has combined technical expertise with strategic marketing to deliver results that improve visibility, traffic, and conversions.
Recca’s SEO skills include Core Web Vitals optimization (LCP, FID, CLS), resolving technical errors through 301 redirects and canonical tags, and on-page optimization of titles, meta descriptions, and structured markup. He also manages campaigns across Google Ads, Facebook Ads, and MailChimp, bringing together paid and organic strategies for maximum impact.
He leverages industry-leading tools such as SEMrush, Screaming Frog, and Google Analytics to analyze performance and guide strategy. His academic foundation includes graduate coursework in Chemical Engineering at the University of the Philippines (Diliman) and a Bachelor of Science in Chemical Engineering from the University of Santo Tomas.
With this blend of technical expertise, analytical rigor, and marketing know-how, Recca helps Cambria clients cut through SEO complexity and achieve clear, measurable results.
Dick Crewdson July 31, 2025
In choosing countries to focus on a list showing how many programmers are in each one would be valuable if such a list existed. But it does not – statistics on numbers of programmers are unreliable and statistics on programmer quality even more so.
How many in the Philippines
I hope to convince you to focus your search on the Philippines. So when I started creating this new website of ours the first thing to do was count the programmers in the Philippines. Easier to say than to do! When asked, Google almost always returns the number of 190,000 and quotes the official sounding Philippine Software Industry Association (PSIA) as the source for this figure. That sounds impressive but even little Singapore has 200,000 and Japan, a comparably sized country has a reported 1,290,000!
Even more depressing is the fact that “Top 10” or “Top 20” type listings of countries with lots of programmers rarely include the Philippines. This is kind of crazy. If you search for “top countries for outsourcing” you are sure to find that the Philippines is almost always cited as #1 or #2. Two decades ago the Philippines surpassed India in call center and in the last decade has been known as the world’s “BPO Capital 1”.
So, what is it with that 190,000 programmer figure? There is no evidence whatsoever about the source of that figure. The first mention I can find is of being reported by PSIA back in 2019 and this figure has been copied over and over ever since. I am sure that is why the Philippines never appear on those top 10 lists of Programming countries.
So with the help of ChatGPT I came up with this.
Estimated Number of Software Developers in the Philippines (2025)
Estimated Total (2025):850,000 software developers (Range: 780,000-910,000)
How about the rest of the World
At first I thought I would cherry pick from statistics on other countries to illustrate any points I wanted to stress but as I got into it decided to reproduce what we have on everybody together with a metric (1% of population) to use in evaluating some of he numbers. No asterisk means we feel the numbers are ok. One asterisk indicates some uncertainty and two indicates inspired guesswork. The table speaks for itself I think.
Dick Crewdson July 18, 2025
The Philippine Software Industry Association (PSIA) estimate of 190,000 software developers as of 2021–2022 appears very low for reasons outlined below. While this figure likely reflects developers employed by PSIA member companies, it excludes a substantial portion of the workforce: freelancers, startups, in-house corporate IT personnel, and government IT staff.
Based on available evidence, the most defensible and supportable current estimate is that the actual number of active software developers in the Philippines is approximately 850,000 as of 2025. This figure is grounded in multiple independent data points and reflects a conservative yet realistic midpoint estimate, not an upper-bound projection. It is consistent with several indicators:
Official Philippine government datasets, such as the Philippine Statistics Authority (PSA) Occupational Wages Survey (OWS), report on wage levels for software developers and applications programmers but do not provide total workforce headcount figures at the occupational level. The PSA's OpenSTAT platform and Freedom of Information responses confirm this limitation in currently published data.
1 Philippine Software Industry Association (PSIA), as cited by Relevant Software. "Software Development Outsourcing to the Philippines." https://relevant.software/blog/software-development-outsourcing-philippines/. Accessed July 2025
2 Mobilunity. "Hire Developers in the Philippines." Mobilunity.com. https://mobilunity.com/blog/hire-developers-in-philippines/. Accessed July 2025
3 HeroHunt.ai. "Find Developers in Manila, Philippines." https://www.herohunt.ai/find-developers/manila-philippines. Accessed July 2025
4 Stack Overflow Developer Survey 2024. "Developer Profile by Country." https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2024/developer-profile. Accessed July 2025
5 Philippine Statistics Authority (PSA). "2022 Occupational Wages Survey." https://psa.gov.ph/statistics/occupational-wages-survey. Accessed July 2025
6 Philippine Statistics Authority (PSA). "Freedom of Information (FOI) Response: Employment Data for Information Technology Jobs by Job Type." https://www.foi.gov.ph/requests/employment-data-for-information-technology-jobs-by-job-type. Accessed July 2025
The high quality of the English spoken in the Philippines is the reason it overtook India two decades ago for call center business to become the BP0 Capital of the world. In the developing world it is only matched by South Africa and Kenya. It is also the strongest reason to look for Philippine companies if you are in the market for Programming services. It is hard enough to explain a programming task to a programmer. Why add language difficulty to this pain and suffering.
The table below was taken from their 2024 report.2 It shows that the Philippines rates 20th in the world with a proficiency of “HIGH” and their big competitor India rates as #69 with a proficiency of “LOW”. The definitions of these terms are3:
Fortunately there is a Swedish Company, English First (EF), who specializes in teaching English through their staff of 52,000 who are active worldwide1. Based upon ratings of 2.1 million adults from 116 countries they produce an annual report that rates the English Proficiency of the countries in which they are active. There are other organizations that track English Quality, such as IELTS and TOEFL. EF is the most famous and comprehensive but gets its share of negative reviews. In a comparison of results from 34 countries my conclusion is that they are all close enough that any could be used for purposes here. So we choose EF for our discussion here.
The table below was taken from their 2024 report.2 It shows that the Philippines rates 20th in the world with a proficiency of “HIGH” and their big competitor India rates as #69 with a proficiency of “LOW”. The definitions of these terms are.3:
It is hard to believe that managers would be happy communicating important information to programmers with a Low rating. Thus If we limit our definition of English Speaking populations to Very High, and High it allows us to make the statement that the Philippines is second only to the US in size of their English speaking population.
In what follows is the ratings of countries taken from the 2024 report.
1https://a.storyblok.com/f/102671/x/a066369808/ef-2023-fact-sheet.pdfThe EF English Proficiency Index (EF EPI) is the leading source of statistics on English proficiency worldwide. It is published by EF Education First, a global education company (based in Sweden), and ranks countries and regions based on test results from millions of adults who take their English tests.[1] See https://www.ef.com/wwen/epi
The ranking system excludes the native English countries such as the US and UK. So a rank of 20 means 20th of all the non-native English speaking countries. Categories are defined as follows:
Very High Proficiency: : EF EPI score 600+How this works. If you wish to ask a question, but wish to remain anonymous for now, simply enter the Alias you wish to use for a chat conversation. Once you have an alias you can use it to retrieve an answer to any questions you wish to ask about Cambria and its services.
Q1: This part is for the sample question entered by the User under the Ask Anonymously form?
A1: This is the part to put the answers on the users question from the Ask Anonymously form.
Q2: This part is for the sample question entered by the User under the Ask Anonymously form?
A2: This is the part to put the answers on the users question from the Ask Anonymously form.
Q3: This part is for the sample question entered by the User under the Ask Anonymously form?
A3: This is the part to put the answers on the users question from the Ask Anonymously form.
Q4: This part is for the sample question entered by the User under the Ask Anonymously form?
A4: This is the part to put the answers on the users question from the Ask Anonymously form.
If your business needs software that fits you — not the other way around — that’s what we do.
Romeo Acidera, President, Bring us your idea. We’ll give you advice, an accurate estimate, and clear answers. If you’d rather avoid a sales call, use our Q&A section to ask questions anonymously.
Chase Crewdson, Vice President, Hiring internationally doesn’t have to be complicated. With Cambria as your Employer of Record (EOR), you can onboard employees in new countries without setting up local offices. We handle payroll, benefits, contracts, and compliance, while you manage your team’s work.
Hire Globally, Fast – Expand worldwide without the expense of local entities.
Stay Compliant – We take care of taxes, labor laws, and reporting.
Simplify Payroll & Benefits – Pay teams in local currency with benefits managed seamlessly.
Reduce Risk – Avoid fines and legal issues from misclassification or non-compliance.
At Cambria, we combine professional web design with proven SEO strategies to help your business stand out and attract customers. Our team researches and tests the best approaches for each client, ensuring websites that not only look great but also perform well in search engines.
Custom Design – Beautiful, user-friendly websites tailored to your goals.
SEO Expertise – Strategies that boost visibility, rankings, and traffic.
Integrated Approach – Design and SEO working hand-in-hand for measurable results.
Led by Jazen Agustin, Sr. Designer, and Recca Enal, SEO Specialist, our team combines creativity and technical expertise to deliver websites that rank, convert, and drive growth.
👉 Ready to grow your online presence? Contact us today to start the conversation.
(Letter from the Founder)
It was the autumn of 2025, and we Cambrians decided it was time for a new website. My last personal effort, back in 1997, was a success even though all it said—in just a few words—was that we wrote software and provided tech support.
Since then, websites have grown increasingly elaborate. Some, not all, seem more like entries in a beauty contest than introductions to real companies. I've always preferred sites like our old one - where you can quickly tell if they do what you need and, if not, move on without feeling you've missed something.
The challenge this time was to combine that same efficiency with a fuller treatment of topics visitors might find useful. My approach has been to keep navigation simple and rely on dropdowns for anyone who wants to dig deeper.
We're a democracy here, and not all Cambrians share my view. Fortunately, being the boss has its advantages—I decided to go ahead with my version, knowing full well that if it flopped, our team would quickly come up with something better.
Everything we do is summarized on page 2 of this site. If you're outsourcing, your choice of country is really important. On page 3, you'll find practical tips from our experience on how to choose wisely - including some statistics on programmer populations that you probably haven't seen elsewhere.
After more than forty years in this business, I've learned that success in software depends as much on communication and trust as on code. That's the idea behind this site—and behind Cambria.
Dick CrewdsonLets start a global list