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Former military man and now QA Expert at SoftServe, Vitaliy Kalinichenko, created the NGO "Ukrainian Veteran IT Association". The goal is to build a holistic ecosystem for veterans and employers in the IT sector. The NGO's activities began with the launch of the job search platform "Veteran+ JobPortal".

Ukrainian defense-tech has long ceased to be a narrow niche for military engineers. Today, software developers, embedded specialists, data engineers, QA, product managers, R&D teams, designers, and operations specialists are moving here. The reason is obvious: complex tasks, a fast development cycle, and the feeling that your work affects more than just business metrics. However, with this comes specific hiring. The sector may conduct background checks, require an offline format, give applied tasks, and in some cases, conduct a polygraph test. dev.ua spoke with recruitment specialists from Ukrainian defensetech companies — General Chereshnya, HIMERA, BlueBird Tech, WIY Advanced Aerial Systems, The Fourth Law, Odd Systems, and Frontline Robotics — and explains what to expect from an IT professional who wants to move into the most promising industry today.

I work with teams and candidates every day and see how much our professional environment has changed in recent years. Today, it would seem, has already taught us anti-fragility: we adapt faster, go beyond familiar scenarios more easily, think more flexibly and make decisions in conditions of constant uncertainty. We are scaling communication, restructuring approaches to interaction and forming a new culture of partnership dialogues — more open, honest and mature.

Candidates are increasingly using artificial intelligence not only to prepare for interviews, but also during them. This is no longer an isolated incident, but the new norm in the market. However, as the practice of Ukrainian companies shows, most of such «tricks» are quite easy to read. dev.ua has collected real cases — from reading out answers to AI avatars — and explains why this is almost always noticeable.

What happens to the IT market when AI changes the rules of the game? Why does classic business education no longer work? And most importantly, how can technical specialists not lose their value in a world where a team of 10 people can do the work of a hundred? The answers to these questions were given to dev.ua by Serhiy Bondarenko, CEO of Skywell, a serial IT entrepreneur and investor. Over 18 years in business, he has launched and developed companies, invested in startups, and is now building an educational project for entrepreneurs, Scale Academy. We talked to him about the transformation of the IT market, the new role of AI for developers, the end of the «Jun era,» and why classical business education is no longer keeping up with reality.