Poland faces ‘IT crisis’ from abroad

High Performance Computing Center Stuttgart (HLRS) of the University of Stuttgart

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The number of ICT industry offers decreased by as much as 43% in the first half of 2023, according to the sector job website Inhire, local media reported.

The crisis has arrived from abroad, according to Gazeta Wyborcza, as the Polish IT industry relies largely on orders from elsewhere in the world.

International corporations’ programming centres are doing well, but the rest, almost 80%, are susceptible to global trends. Only a handful of domestic software companies build their own products in Poland or provide IT support to Polish companies.

Salaries cut in half

In a wide-ranging report entitled “Programmers are falling off the bench: the IT crisis has reached Poland,” Gazeta Wyborzca discussed the situation in background chats with a number of industry employees.

One said: “a friend who runs his own software house told Java programmers that he was cutting their salary from PLN 40,000 to PLN 30,000 PLN per month. He fired those who did not agree. Apparently, they can’t find a job even at half that rate now.”

Another said: “I know a president who fired 500 people in a year, but he doesn’t want to talk about it.”

Global market increasingly budget conscious

Wojciech Mach, president of recruiter GFT Poland said: “We see a significant cooling in the IT industry around the world: companies that commission IT projects are paying much more attention to every dollar and zloty.

“The decision-making process is longer and much more careful. A year or two ago, decisions were made within weeks, today they take months or quarters,” he added.

Chat AI disruptive, but software will specialise

Meanwhile this year’s boom in chat-based AI has led to questions about programmers being displaced from work, because it can perform their tasks.

ChatGPT, Figma and GitHub Copilot can speed up the software development process by up to 20-30% and there are more and more clients of IT companies demanding that programmers – often paid hourly – use AI.

AI will make it unnecessary to hire expensive programming services for some tasks, Gazeta Wyborzca concluded. Nevertheless, the demand for software technologies will continue to increase, but will move towards narrow specialisations.

CET Editor