Although the entry is not meant to extol the virtues of IT, it may prove useful to those who don’t want to read it but still want to use IT. It’s all good and well, but when it comes to IT, one item gets overlooked. In an effort to save money, many Western corporations are laying off their own workers in order to hire cheaper labor from the east, such as Poland, India, and so on. For enterprises with foreign money, the weak zloty and advantageous exchange rate of the USD/PLN are also a plus. You don’t have to be in the office to work here. IT encompasses a wide range of professionals in addition to programmers, such as testers, business analysts, and managers. In the past, layoffs have been widely discussed, but mostly in the management sector. Organizing, integrating, and managing the team are the responsibilities of the manager. Workers may save money on rent and utility expenses by working remotely, while achieving the same outcomes as if they were in an office. The barrier between managers and their teams has blurred since employees no longer report directly to them, and the manager’s responsibility has been reduced to attending meetings and communicating online, as I like to say. To put it another way, I wouldn’t be concerned about redundancy in coders, but rather in management. There is a shortfall of around 20,000 experienced programmers in the market (engineers, programmers, testers, security specialists). The keyword here is “EXPERIENCED.” If you’ve been in the sector for a few years and have a good amount of knowledge and abilities, you’ll be able to get a job without hunting for one. It will be more difficult in the future for “newbies,” or juniors, to break into the workforce, and they will likely have to accept lower earnings in return for the chance to gain experience. My own expertise as a coder spans six years, so I can speak from first-hand knowledge. Since my company failed to discuss pay or raises at the yearly interview in March (i.e. -4 percent or more when inflation is taken into account), I put myself out there for job offers on a website and waited about 2 hours for the first ones to come in. In less than two weeks, I gathered approximately 80 bids, narrowed it down to five, planned the second stage (technical) of (online) conversations, and then decided on a firm and that was it. Typically, it takes 2 weeks to gather bids and HR discussions, a week for technical discussions, and a week to gather replies and make a choice. Because of the accepted job offer, a termination notice was submitted with the existing employer in April, an increase of almost 70%. I continue to receive job offers from the aforementioned site in spite of this, and while I usually respond with something like “thank you, but I am changing my job and at the time he is interested,” there are recruiters that question directly “what rate would you be interested in?” If I’m being honest, the current situation is a gold mine for Polish experienced workers in every industry and for foreign companies looking to hire them off the street. On the other hand, it’s a nuclear disaster for Polish firms that aren’t as competitive and rely on less experienced workers looking to enter the workforce while also accounting for demographic challenges. Wind energy, uniformed services (police), and medical services are all suffering from a scarcity of employees in Poland, which is based on a somewhat distinct set of factors. We’re all getting older, whether we’d like to admit it or not. For the next 20 years, there will be no one to work with, “even Solomon vacant…”
