I hear this often and I realize that there are not enough programmers to meet the demand, however I have seen estimates of at least 500,000 software engineers w

I hear this often and I realize that there are not enough programmers to meet the demand, however I have seen estimates of at least 500,000 software engineers working for large tech companies in the United States. It seems like that is a large number of people that presumably passed difficult algorithm-based interviews. Are programmers really that rare in this day and age?