SoftServe President Taras Kytsmey explained why the number of IT specialists in Ukrainian locations has significantly decreased over the three years of the war, and whether artificial intelligence had an impact on such personnel optimization.
SoftServe President Taras Kytsmey explained why the number of IT specialists in Ukrainian locations has significantly decreased over the three years of the war, and whether artificial intelligence had an impact on such personnel optimization.
«If you look at it, before the war, software services were actively growing. And every time you grow, you make an investment in growth. And investment in growth is mainly people who are on the bench who are preparing to take on new projects and so on. When the growth prospects in Ukraine fall, whether you want to or not, you cannot invest in growth if it is difficult to get orders for that growth. This is the first delta that has fallen. The second delta that has fallen is that many people have gone abroad. And the third — we are consciously focusing on the development of our global locations now, we kind of want to create the same model in other countries that we created in Ukraine, a model of working with people, working with educational institutions, and recreating development processes,» Kitsmey explained in an interview with Forbes as part of the Business Breakfast project.
However, according to Kitsmey, AI did not affect the reduction in the number of programmers in the company.
According to him, Poland currently looks to be the most promising market for the company. «We have invested the most, more than a thousand people are currently working in Poland. This also includes Bulgaria and Romania. And in 2021 we started working in Latin America, we are investing, creating development groups in Latin America and, in fact, we are gradually transferring all our best practices processes there. With such differentiation, it is easier for us to fight for new orders, because the client, when doing a project only in Ukraine,» said the president of SoftServe.
In addition, he added that Ukraine continues to be the company’s «coolest location.» «If clients were to come to Ukraine, we would continue to focus on Ukraine for various reasons. And even if we look after the war, there are many predictions about what Ukraine will be like after the war. It seems to me that the IT industry will successfully return to its previous pace. Another issue is other industries and the decline in the population. This is perhaps one of the main issues that worries everyone. Can 20 million people live in a large territory? There will probably be immigrants, too,» predicts the top manager of the largest Ukrainian outsourcer.
