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Марія БровінськаWork
9 February 2026, 09:26
2026-02-09
"We decided to give preference to candidates with classic, stable experience in companies." QA Team Lead spoke about the employer's rejection due to freelance experience. There is a discussion on LinkedIn with 100+ comments
Ukrainian IT professionals are once again arguing about what constitutes «stability» in IT. This time, the reason was a post by QA Team Lead and career consultant Inna Dvoinikova, who, after two years of freelancing, faced an unexpected problem — Ukrainian IT companies are in no hurry to consider her for long-term positions.
Ukrainian IT professionals are once again arguing about what constitutes «stability» in IT. This time, the reason was a post by QA Team Lead and career consultant Inna Dvoinikova, who, after two years of freelancing, faced an unexpected problem — Ukrainian IT companies are in no hurry to consider her for long-term positions.
«After two years of freelancing, is the path to Ukrainian IT companies closed?» Inna asked. The girl posted a screenshot of a potential employer’s rejection.
According to the specialist, she has been testing for over eight years. Before freelancing, Inna worked in Ukrainian, Israeli, and German companies, staying in each project for several years and going through the full product development cycle — from launch to supporting stable versions.
«I changed companies not because I was ‘bored,’ but when development stopped. When there were no budgets for automation and the development plan was ‘out of date,’» she explains.
This, according to Inna, was the impetus for freelancing. During this time, she managed to work with Web3, AI, and GameDev projects — both in the format of long-term full-time cooperation and short-term engagements. This experience taught her to quickly enter new domains, build processes from scratch, and work with chaos.
However, the irony of the situation, says the specialist, is that today Ukrainian companies actively invite her as an interviewer, performance review expert, speaker, and «coming-in» QA Lead — but are not ready to consider her as a permanent member of the team. «When I say that I’m looking for a stable company or product for several years, I often hear: 'you’ve been working freelance for too long, it’s unstable,'» she notes.
This, Inna believes, exposes a deeper problem in the market: freelance experience is often perceived as a risk, even if it is backed by years of responsibility and real results. «If a specialist from different domains and many years of experience is a risk, then who do we consider stable? Middlemen who leave after a year due to lack of development?» asks the IT professional.
The post sparked lively discussion among the IT community.
It turns out that discrimination based on freelance work really does exist.
Some users agree that the Ukrainian market still thinks in terms of «binding to one product», while others admit that companies are afraid of losing specialists who are accustomed to the freedom of freelance work.
Here are some of the most striking thoughts from community members.
Inna herself emphasizes: her post is not a complaint, but an attempt to hear the other side and start a conversation about whether it’s time for Ukrainian IT to look at freelance differently as a source of strong expertise, rather than a «red flag» on a CV.
