Work

VP Team, Clust, and Happy Monday published a joint study of the IT labor market. dev.ua collected seven insights that change the modern logic of hiring and retaining people.

A new informal hierarchy of candidates has formed on the Ukrainian labor market, taking into account the risks of mobilization.

In the last month alone, the technology market has seen several high-profile transfers of top managers to the miltech sector. At the end of February, it became known that Head of AI Volodymyr Kubitsky was leaving MacPaw, who joined Yaroslav Azhnyuk’s The Fourth Law. In early March, everyone learned that a similar decision had been made by former Intellias Vice President of Talent Management Roman Hapachylo, who headed the defense startup DoD Solution, in which he has a stake. Around the same time, the former director of digital product development of the telecom operator Mykhailo Nestor also announced that he was leaving his established position at Kyivstar. After a long pause, he shared that he had joined the miltech startup Swarmer as an SRO.

Ukrainian IT professionals are massively complaining about burnout, chaos around artificial intelligence, and problems with the labor market. The corresponding thread gathered dozens of comments on Threads after a question from IT stand-up comedian Vlad Halytskyi, «IT professionals, what’s driving you crazy about your work right now?» The discussion quickly turned into an emotional cross-section of the industry — and it turned out to be quite harsh.

Team Lead та Senior PHP Engineer Станіслав Ревко розповів, що під час співбесід на позицію PHP Software Engineer троє з семи кандидатів «попалилися», що використовували ШІ. Цей кейс викликав активну дискусію в LinkedIn.

Коли автор матеріалу чекав на маршрутку від метро, прямуючи на ярмарок вакансій в оборонній сфері «Арсенал Талантів», то поряд із ним уже зібралося чимало людей. Склалося враження, що більшість із них їдуть туди ж. Таке враження в деяких склалося і щодо автора — бо до нього підійшла дівчина, котра представилася Марією і запитала, як дістатися до місця події. Після small talk у маршрутці вона розповіла, що сама світчнулася з журналістики в miltech, а на захід їде в пошуках нових кар'єрних можливостей. 

Ukrainian IT outsourcers are changing their business model — and this is already being felt in the labor market, Forbes Ukraine has investigated. In particular, SoftServe is hiring fewer juniors, Ciklum and Capgemini are going beyond classic development, and Sigma Software has even launched a cofounding direction. The common denominator is that AI has changed not only the tools, but also the very logic of why clients pay IT companies.

Artificial intelligence is rapidly changing the way programmers work. According to GitHub, developers who use AI assistants like Copilot can write code up to 55% faster than without them. But with these new capabilities comes a new question: what will the role of the engineer be as machines learn to perform more and more technical tasks. dev.ua asked the tech leaders of several Ukrainian IT companies: What would they do over the next 12 months if they were ordinary engineers without management positions today, so as not to fall out of the market? Here’s what they advise.

I've been on both sides of an interview more than once - as a candidate preparing for tough questions, and as an interviewer - a Project Manager (hereinafter - PM) with experience, who works with risks, crises, people and uncertainty every day. I always catch myself thinking: standard interviews rarely reveal the real power of a project. Questions like "tell me about your most successful project" sound logical, but in practice they say little about the maturity of a specialist. Because the true value of a PM is not revealed when everything is going well, but when something does not go according to plan. So how can a PM present their experience convincingly — without templates and memorized answers, and make recruiters see specialists not as "task managers," but as managers, team leaders in conditions of risk and uncertainty?