Managing Director of Luxoft Ukraine Olena Samborska is not sure that after the end of martial law and the cessation of hostilities, IT specialists will leave Ukraine en masse.
Managing Director of Luxoft Ukraine Olena Samborska is not sure that after the end of martial law and the cessation of hostilities, IT specialists will leave Ukraine en masse.
She noted this in an interview with dev.ua, commenting on the forecast of the CEO of the Lviv IT cluster, Stepan Veselovsky, that Ukraine is facing a large wave of emigration of the economically active creative class.
«Maybe this is one of the scenarios, but in my opinion, it is not the most realistic. Even if our specialists try to leave en masse for a while, a significant part of them will still be forced to return. Not all of them will be waiting abroad,» Samborska noted.
According to her, Ukrainian IT specialists, having emigrated, may later face the need for legal employment according to the standards of the country to which they have moved, and this will potentially cause its own difficulties.
«For example, the United States has now effectively closed visas, so Ukrainians are unable to enter there en masse and work there legally. And we cannot work with illegal specialists. If you are an international company, then you legalize everyone and formalize everyone in accordance with your legislation,» added the top manager of Luxoft Ukraine.
She gave the example of Poland, where it is not possible to work with a Ukrainian sole proprietor, but it is necessary to hire an employee for a Polish legal entity. «And imagine, for example, that Poland terminates its program for simplified obtaining of work permits for IT specialists,» she emphasizes.
According to Olena Samborska, there are also many other factors that can influence the decision of Ukrainian IT workers to return home.
«Even under current conditions, Ukraine remains a fairly comfortable country in many aspects, and it will definitely be so after the war. Many specialists have already seen that medicine is not so simple in Europe, and with kindergartens and schools. You can adapt to everything and get used to it. But the standard of living that IT specialists had in Ukraine is very difficult to maintain in Europe,» she stated.
Thus, Samborska emphasized that the scenario of a mass exodus of IT specialists is generally possible, but «there are other alternative scenarios.»
As dev.ua wrote, CEO of the Lviv IT cluster Stepan Veselovsky once predicted that in an optimistic scenario , up to 20,000 representatives of the IT industry would leave Ukraine, and in a pessimistic scenario, 75,000, that is, a third of the industry.
