Recruitment thresholds

However, high salaries mean tough recruitment thresholds. "Nearly all the medium-sized or large internet companies only hire people with a bachelor's degree or higher, while tech giants like Baidu and Alibaba only employ graduates from the top universities," Zhang said.

In February last year, Proginn, a part-time job platform for programmers, released the results of a survey of 400,000 programmers across the country.

The survey concluded that about 76 percent of programmers have a bachelor's or higher, while the remainder attended vocational or technical schools.

Zhang said some training schools enroll students from vocational or high schools purely for profit, regardless of their career potential.

"Compared with university students, they haven't received good educations and they have no programming experience. Most of their resumes will be eliminated in the first round of recruitment," he said.

"Even if they are hired by software companies, it is common that after two or three years they will find it hard to improve their skills. Landing a job doesn't mean they will be able to stay in the industry, because the dropout rate is high among these young people."

Han Xiaoda taught himself coding by reading textbooks, but he couldn't see a clear promotion path so he quit his job as a programmer three years ago.

After graduating from the engineering major at a technical college in Wuhan, Hubei province, in 2013, Han found a job with an outsourcing company in Shenzhen.

It provided services such as making webpages for clients and developing mobile phone applications and other internet tools.

His salary rose from 2,000 yuan a month in the first year to 10,000 yuan, but then it plateaued.

Han said he admires Ma Huateng, CEO of tech giant Tencent, because he turned himself from a programmer into an entrepreneur.

He wanted to join one of the internet giants to experience a higher level of work, but his educational background meant he wasn't invited to any interviews.

"What we did at my former company had nothing to do with cutting-edge technology. When we worked on difficult internet functions, we didn't write the code ourselves－instead, we searched the web to find mature codes that had been expertly written by leading industry players," he said.

He was never worried that customers would demand the impossible because they understood the company's operating ceiling and only ordered items that could be produced via widely used technologies available on the open market.

Disillusioned, Han quit his job and opened an online travel agency with friends.

"Before, I thought programmers could change the world and earn a lot. Later, I realized that my technical skills made no difference to the world, so I turned to running a business," he said.

The COVID-19 epidemic meant Han's tourism company couldn't make ends meet. He and his friends closed the business and he is now running a short-video account and producing films to teach people how to use visual effects in movies.

"My videos haven't attracted any advertising contracts, so I haven't made a profit. I am using my savings to support myself. Before, I thought I owned the world, but the world has abandoned me," he said.