Work

Hello! It’s #vsrativakansii again. A new selection of trashy job offers as usual on Friday’s broadcast. Today’s episode features another Russian holiday, penny rewards, and the requirement not to be an idiot and an offer for a test week.

The median salary for DefTech specialists in June 2026 is $2,500, the same as six months ago. For comparison, the median in IT in general is $2,700, meaning DefTech pays $200 less on average.

When an experienced professional is looking for a new job, it is expected that his strong personal brand and his own projects will be convincing advantages for the employer. The case of Head of Marketing Yevhen Grebinenko showed that in practice it can turn out quite the opposite: a successful interview ended with a sudden withdrawal of the offer due to “excessive independence”, and then he was sent another offer - in particular, to share his work for free.

Many stories have been written about the thorny path of finding a job for juniors in recent years, including on our website. But recently one of these stories went viral — Junior UI/UX Designer from Lviv, Oleg Banera, told on social networks how a recruiter from one of the largest Ukrainian IT companies voiced «slave-like» conditions, unacceptable even for those young specialists who are willing to work almost for free for the sake of experience on their resume. Oleg’s post then garnered thousands of reactions, but all the discussions mainly concerned the «cringe» vacancy, while the personal situation of the author of the viral post remained, in essence, behind the scenes.

Currently, the vast majority of companies operating in the deftech and miltech sectors use polygraphs to screen candidates during the hiring process, making it a common practice in the industry. In addition, polygraphs have long been a common occurrence in employment in law enforcement and the security sector, the financial and banking sectors, for representatives of security companies and those specialists whose work is related to the topic of cybersecurity. In this article, we do not undertake to evaluate this practice in terms of evidence or effectiveness — let the experts argue about that. Instead, we try to convey the personal experience of those people who have successfully or unsuccessfully passed the polygraph and are ready to share their cases.

The Lionwood.studio team — a product subsidiary of Lviv-based Lionwood.software — has developed the RewardChain platform, which preserves the successes of specialists at work. This Web3 tool records the professional achievements of specialists in the form of protected digital assets that remain the property of the employee forever and do not disappear after their dismissal or the closure of corporate accounts.