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2025 was a year of endurance, difficult decisions, and strategy revisions for Ukrainian IT. Business worked under the pressure of war, staff shortages, a global slowdown, and the rapid development of AI — and at the same time, it was looking for growth points. We asked top managers of Ukrainian IT companies to describe in one paragraph what this year was like for them: what hurt, what worked, and what lessons they are taking with them into 2026. However, most of them were more verbose and revealed interesting insider insights.

Hello! This is the last episode of the #vsrativakansii series this year, where we follow how employers surprise and sometimes annoy IT professionals. Today we’re talking about superjun, the test task of the year, the one-zero error, and cheap specialists.

Senior Frontend Engineer from Vinnytsia Oleg Dutchenko shared the results of a two-month job search, namely personal notes and statistics. Aitivets had not changed jobs for 11 years, so receiving feedback was especially important for him. But after the third rejection, he stopped perceiving the cliché phrase “we are moving on to a candidate with more relevant experience” as feedback about himself.

Together with recruitment specialists from Ukrainian IT companies, we looked into the future and found out what Ukrainian IT professionals can expect in the context of job searches and offers from employers in the coming year.

Senior Frontend Developer Yuriy Honcharuk told how he, a programmer with 25 years of experience, was rejected due to an alleged lack of commercial experience working with monorepositories. The community is actively discussing this case.

Even in a difficult year for the market, some roles remained a real challenge for recruiters. Certain requests for specialists this year required recruiters to be extremely resourceful, time-consuming and patient, and sometimes the search lasted for weeks or even months before the perfect candidate appeared. dev.ua asked IT employers about vacancies that «didn’t give in» for months and about the longest hiring cycles in 2025.

The IT recruitment market looks paradoxical. Candidates have been looking for a job for months without a single offer, while employers assure: they are hiring no one. Vacancies are open, resumes are coming in, but no decisions are being made. The recruitment market seems to be stuck in a strange state: there are people, there is also work, but they cannot rush out. dev.ua, together with recruitment specialists from top employers, figured out why the system, which had been working almost automatically for years, failed?

In recent years, competition among businesses has increased significantly. First of all, this is due to the improvement of service. Companies are actively implementing new methods that help provide instant answers to potential customers' questions and quickly make sales, if there is such a potential. That is why business owners are looking for various platforms to optimize their work, such as CRM and chatbot designers. Company representatives no longer need to call potential customers and convince them of the need for the product. It is enough to provide clear answers to their questions in the chat and for this there is almost no need to involve company employees, because chatbots do everything as clearly as possible and at a time convenient for customers.

Even an 82% increase in applications for certain technical specialties does not cover the market needs. Employers may not receive any response for certain engineering vacancies.