Why China Has Too Many Low‑Skill Programmers but Not Enough High‑Skill Talent

Hello, I'm Liangxu. When I first saw the question about whether there are too many programmers, I assumed the asker was a recent graduate still looking for a job.

Only when job hunting becomes difficult do people start questioning the size of the programmer pool. In reality, the shortage is not of programmers but of programmers who can actually get work done.

According to the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, China has about 9 million software professionals, which is roughly 0.6 % of the 1.4 billion population. By contrast, the United States exceeds 2 % and Japan and South Korea are around 1.5 %.

Thus, proportionally China does not have an excess of programmers. The perception that “everywhere is full of programmers” stems from geographic concentration: Beijing, Shanghai, Shenzhen and Hangzhou host the majority of developers, creating a visual overload, while smaller cities have very few.

For example, a friend in Fuzhou who runs an outsourcing firm struggled for six months to hire a competent embedded engineer. The issue was not a lack of applicants but that most candidates could not even handle basic pointer operations, let alone driver development or kernel debugging.

This leads to a second question: what is the skill level of boot‑camp graduates? While some bootcamps can produce competent developers, most graduates are “API‑calling engineers” who can use frameworks and write CRUD code but lack understanding of underlying principles.

Employers actually need people who can solve problems independently, learn new technologies quickly, translate business logic into code, and step up during critical moments. These qualities are rare.

In my years interviewing candidates for foreign firms, many resumes boasted expertise in Java, Spring, micro‑services, etc., yet the candidates failed basic algorithm questions, could not discuss multithreading, and had no approach to performance‑bottleneck analysis.

Such candidates are abundant, but they are merely “people who can write code,” not true programmers who use technology to solve real problems, continuously grow, and add value to teams.

High‑end technical roles—kernel development, compiler work, database engines, distributed systems, AI algorithms—are perpetually understaffed because their entry barriers are high and cannot be overcome by short boot‑camp training.

Embedded systems, in particular, suffer from a shortage of engineers capable of writing low‑level drivers, debugging hardware, and optimizing system performance, while most developers gravitate toward web, app, or mini‑program development due to lower entry barriers.

The result is an oversupply of low‑skill positions and an undersupply of high‑skill roles. Consequently, the answer to “are there too many programmers?” is: low‑skill programmers are indeed abundant, but high‑skill programmers are always in short supply.

For fresh graduates, the advice is to avoid competing for entry‑level positions saturated with boot‑camp graduates. Instead, focus on rapid self‑improvement: read source code, build projects, understand the “why” behind technologies, and develop a unique competitive edge.