Why is python salary high?

There are not many programmers. It is said that there are only 2 million people in China who can write programs (accounting for 0.14% of the population). Quite a few.
In addition, India has 2.7 million programmers (the largest number), which only accounts for 0.2% of the population.
Let’s start from the perspective of Western countries. Although it is different from China and India, it still has great reference value.
The number of workers in the Tech industry (including IT) in the United States reaches 7 million; accounting for more than 2% of the population.
The UK is similar, with 1.6 million employees, accounting for 2.4%. Other Western European countries should have similar proportions.
However, it is inappropriate to compare the entire industry. Because only a small number of people in the high-tech industry are programmers. The number of people in the United States who are professionally engaged in software programs seems to be only 1.02 million; 0.3%.
In addition, in the ranking of occupations in the United States, programmers rank 30th in population among all occupations, less than:
Lawyers, 1.04 million; Financial asset management, 1.1 million; University teachers, 1.3 million
If you think the high salaries of finance and lawyers are reasonable, then the high salaries of programmers are also reasonable.
In other words, the software industry is also classified in detail, with various special requirements for various languages ​​and platforms. As for programming languages; only 30% of programmers are familiar with Java to a professional level. Python estimates 20%. C is less than 10%. Niche languages ​​​​like Golang are not even available in 1%. (Maybe you can refer to the user data on github).
We assume that only 0.3% of people in London write programs to a professional level, which is about 40,000 people. If a company in London had to recruit people with Golang experience, there might only be three to four hundred programmers to choose from. If we ask people to know both Python and Golang, there may be as few as 50 suitable candidates. If you look at the recruitment requirements of any technology company, there will be a lot of confusion, such as this language, that language, SQL, Linux, machine learning, and cloud computing. . . Every company's requirements are different. There may be only a few people who can meet all their requirements or even none at all. Finding someone who meets two or three requirements is pretty good.
Other industries are not so troublesome. There are always many people who are qualified for a position. With more choices, companies are able to keep wages down and so on. But in terms of program recruitment, the right to negotiate salary lies with the programmer, because the other party has no choice. Programmers are so rare, and programmers who are very suitable for the requirements are even more rare and cannot be missed.
Demand:
Well, there are tens of thousands of programmers in London. Assume that on average, you change jobs every two years. If the market is stable (full), then there should only be a few thousand newly opened positions every month, right? But there are obviously hundreds of thousands of job advertisements in London every month. And there are more and more every year. This can only mean: no one can be found!
Many companies are unable to recruit programmers. Some companies were very naive at first, posting an advertisement for a low-level position that they thought was easy to recruit, and prepared a salary of 40,000 pounds (more than 300,000 yuan) per year. As a result, after a few months, I found that the occasional contestants who came for interviews were not suitable, so I had to increase my seniority to 60,000, 80,000, or 100,000. Finally, a programming guru came along who was very suitable, but he was robbed by another company that offered him 150,000 pounds of seniority. As a result, I have been waiting for someone for more than a year; the boss's dream was destroyed by reality.
(Of course there are a lot of programmers with 40,000 to 50,000 pounds in London, because these people can always find a company that accepts them. Either the company is too impatient to wait and can only choose them, or they succeed in showing off. I just got in. Maybe I really found the most suitable one... But it's a pity that I don't realize how rare I am and underestimate my own value. Some people probably only have this awareness after working for several years. , and then the pursuit of wages started to skyrocket.)
Overall, it makes sense that programmer salaries are high in London (and across the West). Because demand is much higher than supply. In other industries, companies select employees. But in this industry, employees really choose the company. This may also lead to various unfairness. Many employees are in the range of 500,000 yuan (RMB) of seniority, and there are also many employees who are in the range of one million or more (because they have found their uniqueness and taken advantage of it). Anyway, the average is probably around 800,000 (twice as much as the average salary in London), but very few people earn at this average, usually at the two extremes.
Is China in a similar situation? It seems so. The principle should be very similar. That's certainly the case if you're looking for 10 million people and only a few million people can do it. Moreover, only about 10-100 people can perform each position well; it is easy to judge whether they perform well or not, and the salary gap is naturally obvious.
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It is a fact that programmers earn more than other professions. And it’s not false at all.
The world needs many people to do these things, but there are too few capable people.
As long as these programmers have several years of experience in several companies and have accumulated a unique (limited to themselves) set of skills, they can always find valuable jobs with high salaries. Because they are rare animals. Whenever a company happens to be in desperate need of that unique set of skills, the rarity becomes apparent. The problem is that more than one company thinks they are rare, so they are trying to get them first. Therefore, rare senior programmers can pick and choose. Companies compete to grab programmers rather than programmers competing to join the company.
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Finally, a few words about the future:
First of all, among all professions, programmers are the fastest growing. Everyone should be able to see it. Many traditional job types have gradually been replaced. It is precisely because programmers have automated these tasks. This trend is sure to continue.
The simplest example should be the cashier job. Supermarkets that used to require dozens of employees to handle cashiers now only need one or two cashiers. Various increasingly advanced automatic cash register machines in supermarkets. At least this is the case in most supermarkets in the UK. The entire manual banking industry may not exist in the future. Oh, and almost all transactions in the financial industry are now automated.
In fact, in most industries, similar elimination phenomena will occur sooner or later. At present, no one imagines that one day doctors will be replaced by software. But if you think about it carefully, a software can share and synchronize all the medical data in the world to make a diagnosis, which is far better than what one person's brainpower can do. A lawyer's ability to analyze cases and files over the years to find loopholes may also not be as good as a software program. I won’t talk about other industries one by one. They are worth writing about separately in the future.
These changes will far exceed the changes of several industrial revolutions. The software industry is the only one that can persist for a relatively long time. The automated softwareization of these other industries also requires these programmers to implement and maintain. But demand will only grow in the coming decades. The wage gap with other industries will also become increasingly extreme.
I feel that many people outside the industry have an illusion. . .
Mistakenly believe that programming (or Tech) is just one of many industries.
I can only hehe.

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