In IT on demand – Kommersant

The traditional shortage of IT personnel, which has been observed in recent years and has worsened due to the departure of many specialists abroad due to hostilities in Ukraine, began to grow in early 2023. According to the government, the demand for IT personnel has increased by 63%. Analysts note that the term for searching for candidates for IT vacancies has increased more than the market average. A number of players are already considering outsourcing specialists from India, Israel and China. Experts admit that in the future the shortage will help smooth out the use of artificial intelligence: neural networks are already used abroad, for example, to write code.

“The IT industry is again frozen in anticipation, and employees of companies that do not have reservations and do not fall under the deferment from mobilization or conscription for military service are again “on their suitcases,” says Oksana Pakhomova, HR Director of Hi-Tech Group of Companies, in connection with amendments adopted by the State Duma, toughening the punishment for evaders and introducing the digitalization of military records. Information about the ban on remote work from abroad by large Russian companies such as VK and Sber also provoked a wave of layoffs of employees who left last year: to replace them, companies began to open new vacancies (see. “ Kommersant, January 26).

Demand for IT personnel grew by 63% compared to the previous year, said the press service of Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Chernyshenko. At the beginning of 2023, there were about 59 thousand open IT vacancies in the domestic market. In Mintsifry “Kommersant” confirmed that the need for specialists is constantly increasing. According to Yakov & Partners (formerly McKinsey in Russia) and HH, at the beginning of 2023, the search term for candidates for IT vacancies increased more than the market average: twice compared to 1.5 times in other industries.

Not just a deficit

Ozon told Kommersant that the offer on the market began to be determined by IT companies that resumed hiring in the process of adapting to new conditions. Over the year, the Ozon Tech team itself has increased by more than 40%, now there are more than 4 thousand developers and engineers on the staff, says Anastasia Kuchay, Ozon IT personnel director. At the same time, she noted, the competition for the positions of novice specialists remains high: companies need developers who are “already immersed in processes and can quickly complete this or that task.”

Kaspersky Lab says that the market lacks DevOps engineers, Python developers, and there is a shortage of middle- and senior-specialists (high-level) among system analysts. Maria Grigorovich, head of the recruitment and adaptation department at Softline Group of Companies, confirms this: there is still a shortage of IT personnel with experience in narrow areas. Wildberries named database administrators (DBAs), Golang developers, and employees with experience working with high-load systems among the rarest specialists.

VK noted that the shortage of qualified IT personnel is a permanent situation for the entire market, but since 2022 it has become more acute: candidates.” According to a company spokesperson, “the hottest majors right now” are AI, ML, and data science. Yandex says that by the end of 2022, the state has grown by 16% and the demand for highly qualified personnel is stable.

The most difficult thing is to find employees with experience, confirms HH.ru’s chief labor market expert Natalia Danina: “On average, the increase in the search time for candidates with more than six years of experience was four to six months. And these, obviously, are people with experience in overcoming repeated crises, in expert or leadership roles.” Such a situation inevitably leads to a drop in the performance of the company as a whole, she believes. “It is interesting that, despite the increase in the search term, employers still prefer just such candidates: 84% prefer people with work experience and without special education to candidates with special education, but without experience,” the expert clarifies.

At the same time, a number of Kommersant’s interlocutors claim that the market is “not just a shortage of personnel, but a serious crisis.” A Kommersant source in one of the large companies says that about 70% of the candidates have already left the Russian Federation, and some are planning to move in the near future, in connection with this, salary expectations have increased by about 20%. “Many people leave, even if remote work is not possible in their current company, and start looking for work already from abroad,” he says. Over the past year, he said, about 40% of employees who previously worked from Russia have decided to move. The representative of SIBUR added that the company was faced with the fundamental choice of remote work: “For many, the decisive factor in choosing an employer was only completely remote formats and the ability to work outside the Russian Federation.”

There are still no official regulatory restrictions for this. Although the Ministry of Digital Development admitted that it “strongly recommends carefully analyzing the risks of remote work” for employees with access to the functions of administering critical applications and elements of the IT infrastructure, as well as information security systems.

Import of expertise media

Some IT companies admit that attracting foreign specialists both for individual projects for outsourcing and for the staff will help to cope with the shortage of personnel. “Our companies are ready to hire foreigners,” says Valentin Makarov, president of the Russoft association (which unites 315 IT companies). According to Aleksey Smirnov, the head of the board of directors of Basalt SPO, the company is ready to consider IT specialists from any countries, including India, Israel, China and others: “Due to the shortage of personnel in our country, it is necessary to create favorable conditions for for a position for remote work of foreign employees. But so far, no action has been taken in this direction.”

Organizational Development Director of the Reksoft Group Faina Lerner believes that efforts are needed to build cross-cultural teams: “Besides, both the Chinese and Indian markets are huge, you choose not one out of ten candidates, but, for example, out of 500.” At the same time, all the world’s largest and local companies are represented in these countries, she adds: “You have to compete at a very high level.”

Director of the Artezio development center Dmitry Parshin notes that there are many problems with the inclusion of foreign specialists in the work: “One of them is the level of training. For example, if we talk about India, China and Iran, then the level of training of developers in these countries is often lower than in the Russian Federation. It is thanks to a good school of programmers that Russia has managed to compete with India and other countries in the American and European outsourcing markets.” Therefore, he adds, it is better to pay attention to the local market. In addition, you need to be attentive to the formation of teams, based on linguistic and cultural differences, take into account the difference in time zones, the expert notes.

However, large holdings are not yet seriously considering IT specialists from abroad. Softline says that they study only candidates from the Russian Federation. Ozon’s IT HR director Anastasia Kuchay also said that the company does not attract foreign employees even through outsourcing. Aviasales noted that they do not work with outsourcing on a large scale in general. Yandex also said that, as a rule, they do not use the services of external specialists in development as a whole. Companies need to build competencies in the field of corporate education in order to ultimately reduce the cost of attracting and retaining employees, says Yelena Kuznetsova, partner at Yakov & Partners and co-author of the report.

New generation assistants

In the near future, neural networks can help companies partially solve the issue of IT personnel. While their active introduction goes mainly abroad. So, according to a survey of 1,000 companies conducted in March by ResumeBuilder.com, almost half are already using ChatGPT. And half of those who have implemented a chatbot report replacing some of their employees: 66% of companies use the system for writing code, 58% for copywriting and content creation, 57% for customer support. According to ResumeBuilder.com, almost all companies using ChatGPT said they saved money by using it.

Meanwhile, international companies are laying off real employees. Since the end of 2022, staff cuts have taken place in Meta (its activities in maintaining the Facebook and Instagram services in the Russian Federation are recognized as extremist and banned), Twitter, Amazon, Google. In the spring of 2023, Disney announced this. “The large-scale use of large language models will reduce the number of developers who do not create a unique product, but are engaged in routine tasks, writing code,” says Ani Aslanyan, founder of the Telegram channel “All About Blockchain, Brain and WEB 3.0 in Russia and the World”. But in the Russian Federation, AI employees may be under threat (see Kommersant dated April 14). Not to mention the fact that there is not even an analogue of ChatGPT in the country yet.

Large Russian IT companies are still cautious about using neural networks to replace programmers. VK admits that they create products based on machine learning and neural networks, but “the thesis that they will completely replace people is, in our opinion, incorrect, especially in the field of development.”

Aviasales confirms that it is paying developers for Github’s Copilot (an AI-powered development tool) “which covers basic features and saves time”: “It’s hard to say how it will develop further.” Softline says that the company has ambitious goals, “therefore, we are sure that there will be enough tasks for everyone – both developers and neural networks.”

The process of developing software and models consists of several stages, while in the case of developing models, the process is more complicated, explains the head of Yakov and Partners Yakov Sergienko: “Writing code is the minimum part of labor costs. If we take the classic process, then most of the time is not writing code, but testing it. The larger the corporation, the longer it takes: there are four to six types of testing. Each time it requires refinement and rewriting of the code.”

If we talk about AI in general, then the entire process of both developing and writing models can now be fully automated, adds Mr. Sergienko: “Starting from data collection and ending with testing. This is not only about neural networks, but also about other technologies that allow you to do this.” On the one hand, he notes, this leads to the fact that less classical programmers or big data specialists will be required, but there is a need for competencies of a different level – for people who are able to create and configure this system: “Thus, the role man is changing.”

Tatiana Isakova, Timofei Kornev, Yuri Litvinenko, Yulia Tishina