How many programmers are there in China?

Wandering around zhihu these two days, I was interested in such a question. Let’s study it together.

In recent years, programmers have attracted many friends, including those in the computer industry, or they have gone to training courses to become programmers.

Through his query data is estimated at least 50 million Chinese programmers? So he asked if the number of programmers was saturated or overgrown.

First of all, he’s right about the first part of the question, because programmers are a high-paying profession that has really attracted a lot of people to the field over the years.

Among other things, I was not engaged in the field of computer science in university. I graduated from the department of mathematics and entered the industry of programmer through training.

After engaged in programmer, directly or indirectly affected at least 20 more friends, into this industry; At the same time, I also have many friends around me, who were not originally in this field but also became programmers through training.

So in terms of the last few years, it really can be said: 365 line to line programmers, the number of programmers has really exploded.

But is there really 50 million programmers in China?

How many programmers are there?

The number of Chinese programmers has long been a mystery.

There are various statistical versions on the Internet, some say that there are more than 50 million programmers, some say that there are 5 million, and some friends say that the number of people who really write code is not more than 500,000.

But at least it’s not 50 million. I just saw on CSDN’s website that they have 31 million registered users, and that includes a lot of zombie users and other industries.

Let’s take a look at blogpark, another programmer community in China. Blogpark is a community for programmers to write blogs. The data here may be more accurate than CSDN.

Just in August 2020, 36kr reported on an article from Blogpark, in which it was stated that blogpark mothers have less than 3 million active users.

The data of blogpark is more vertical and accurate. If 30% are students and 60% are developers, there are about 2 million real front-line developers.

Not all programmers sign up for the blog park, of course, but there are certainly some non-programmers who sign up for the blog Park, so the 2 million or so front-line developers are relatively objective when all these things cancel out.

In other words, there are about 2 million Coding programmers in China.

How many people are the big factories hiring?

Let’s see, the 10 most valuable Internet companies in China have multiple programmers? I found the top 10 Internet companies in China on the Internet.

According to the online public data query:

Alibaba has 40,000 + programmers, Tencent 30,000 +, Meituan 10,000 +, JINGdong 18,000 +, Pinduoduo 2,000 +, Shell 3,000 +, Millet 6,000 +, NetEase 10,000 +, Good future has not been found, Baidu 20,000 +.

(Data from the network is not accurate, friends who know welcome to provide data, give me a message)

A rough estimate would be in the hundreds of thousands, but the actual r&d staff includes testing, operations and product managers.

But it does not include Internet or tech giants such as Huawei and ZTE, bytedance, Ant Financial and Didi Dache.

It can be concluded that the TOP10 companies account for about 5% of the number of developers in China, and as long as you can go to the TOP10 companies are basically in the TOP 5% of programmers.

Whether saturated

The core of this question on Zhihu is, are we really saturated with programmers today?

We are in pull hook net query relevant post, the big factory mentioned above is recruiting almost, and the number of recruitment is not little?

If there are programmers cognitive bias problem, then suggest to B station search: programmers reach 50W annual salary mystery? It’s very simple, it’s all in the job Posting;

And under the impact of the epidemic, there is not much information about layoffs in these big factories, but some companies (such as Bytedance, Huawei, etc.) are still hiring a lot.

One thing is clear: there is still a huge shortage of senior programmers.

But there is also a problem that many newly graduated or newly trained programmers find that the job is not so easy to find?

Once again, a problem can be explained: the competition for junior programmers is more intense, that is to say, there are more programs for beginners, leading to greater competition pressure.

Synthetically, it is primary surplus, advanced shortage.

Is it still a sunrise industry?

A lot of new people want to enter the Internet industry, there is such a question, programmers are still sunrise industry, will not go on a few years to rest.

To be sure, the Internet is still a sunrise industry and will be for the next 10 or even 50 years.

A friend of Zhihu searched the Internet for a question about whether the computer industry is included, and found that there are similar articles saying that it is saturated every year.

I estimate that after 10 years, there will still be articles like this every year.

Nearly 74 years have passed since the first computer was invented in the United States on February 14, 1946, and the Internet is still going strong.

The Internet in China has been full of information for less than 30 years. If we don’t move forward at this time, we will be nowhere.

The first 20 years, now, and the next few decades are still the period of great development of the Internet. If you really want to engage in this industry, you just need to accelerate forward…

Original text: mp.weixin.qq.com/s/aiyHX0zjS…