IT@PL – the IT job market in Poland – study results

In early April 2013 Antal International, in cooperation with the Polish Information and Foreign Investment Agency, carried out a qualitative study of IT sector employers and employees. The results presented at last week’s conference are optimistic and unequivocally indicate a number of advantages arising from the development of the IT industry in Poland.

According to Pierre Audion Consultants whom the report cites, by 2015 Poland will be the second-largest market in the software and IT services sector in Central and Eastern Europe (after Russia). This will happen not only as a result of increased interest in our market from West European or American investors, but also of more numerous Asian investments.

A strong case can be made in favour of locating investments in Poland, human resources being the most significant argument: Poland has highly qualified engineers who communicate fluently in English. Polish students and graduates have been making the top places in sector competitions for years. Because academic centres are spread out all over Poland, there are no geographical barriers in access to professionals. Employees of the sector show above-average flexibility as regards mode of cooperation, which additionally speeds the completion of investments. According to respondents, Polish professionals have the big advantage of a work culture and efficiency similar to Western European standards while at the same time costs of services rendered remain lower than in comparable Western companies.

The report also indicates that employees are going through something of a stabilisation. Salary growth in the sector has slowed and the employee turnover rate has decreased: in the employees’ hierarchy of values, money has made way for relationships within companies.

The report also presents some barriers to the industry’s development. These include employees’ illusory mobility – in the survey, IT sector employees declare willingness to relocate for a job decidedly more often than people in other professions, but history shows that the opening of the German market to Poles did not cause a mass exodus to work abroad. Another barrier to development highlighted in the report is the comparatively low motivation for the vertical promotion path in company structures. The blame for this may be placed on universities, which create great engineers but not managers. However, some suggest that Polish programmers are enthusiasts – vertical mobility, and with it a significant improvement in the material situation, is not compensation enough for leaving behind a job with the new technologies that many programmers are passionate about.

SoftwareMill about the Polish IT market

At SoftwareMill we are aware that the IT market is extremely dynamic. We have also observed the trends described in the report, and more importantly we have worked out an elastic business model that eliminates the barriers present on the market.

First of all, at SoftwareMill we have all been working remotely as a distributed team from the very start. Owing to this solution we were able to create an expert team without limiting ourselves to professionals from one city. At the moment SoftwareMill employs 21 people, 8 of whom are leads in local Java User Group communities. Although SoftwareMill doesn’t have a single office, it is present in every large Polish city.

Remote work seemed a good solution to us from the beginning, particularly as all our clients are from outside Poland and we have rarely had the chance to meet them in person. From conversations at conferences we know that under pressure from employees, companies allow them to work remotely from time to time, but are not happy with the productivity of this solution. We believe that this is not the fault of remote work, but of the failure to develop a model of communication. We had to experiment for a long time ourselves before hitting on a system of communication that was right for us. You can read more about communication at SoftwareMill in ProSeed Magazine: proseedmag.pl/softwaremill.

We do not employ managers at SoftwareMill. Working with highly-qualified programmers allows us to reduce project team numbers. As a standard, we have 2-3 programmers involved in a project. Such a solution significantly contributes to improving communication between team and client and dispenses with the need to create managerial-only positions, into which good engineers rarely want to be promoted. According to the report, 58% of specialists and managers prefer horizontal (expert) promotion, while only 42% would choose vertical (managerial) development.

A full presentation of the study results is available at news.antal.com/poland, please feel free to review it and share your comments with us.