I also don't think degree means much but anyone with some curiosity gets one here as it's free, so it's still good estimate. Even if you add all outliers, physics and math students then you get max 3x my estimation.
> Anyone who expected hands-on grappling with hard CS problems will be disappointed.
Those people are above my lvl and I estimate them to be max 30 per year.
You are only looking at university graduates. This, by far, doesn't tell you the picture in the job market.
I have worked for the past 17 years with a lot of brilliant engineers, some of them didn't even have a university degree, some had from a crappy uni just because they needed a diploma for a job, and others never touched CS and graduated in Biology or Statistics. You can't measure who is at your level or not just by university graduation stats, it's completely biased to your definition of what's a software engineer at your level: someone who graduated from a university considered at the same level or better than yours for research. That's all your metric tells, not how many people per year in Poland can develop/engineer the same feature set or product as you do, with the same time. And that's nigh impossible to measure or even estimate, there's no data available for that estimation.
> Anyone who expected hands-on grappling with hard CS problems will be disappointed.
Those people are above my lvl and I estimate them to be max 30 per year.