Why middle-level specialists disappeared from the market

In 2022, many foreign IT companies left the Russian Federation, and some Russian ones reduced their staff. It would seem that we should have seen more candidates in the active search. However, the demand of the market for good developers, DevOps engineers, software testers, product managers, especially the middle level, is still much greater than the amount of released specialists. Plus, those who have the opportunity to work remotely have left. Where are the adequate middle specialists? – argues Anna SavelyevaHR partner of Beorg Smart Vision IT company.

Small business in the struggle for personnel

More than others on the market, IT companies with a good product, but a small staff, are experiencing a shortage of personnel. Such organizations are already a little more than a startup, but not a mature business that can easily pay for, for example, relocation of future employees from other regions.

For high-level candidates, small companies are gray horses, on which not everyone is ready to bet. And the skills of the juniors are definitely not enough to close the development needs. The question remains open, which today sounds throughout the market and greatly torments me personally – where did the normal middles go?

It is strange when at an interview a developer who has a year of experience claims a salary of 350 thousand rubles. But there are more and more such examples: skills are not so strong, and expectations, including financial ones, are very high.

Perhaps the reason is that various fast-courses are now being massively developed, where they promise a successful start to a career in IT. In general, this is good, but sometimes people come out with a slightly distorted picture of the world.

Another reason is that a lot of banks develop their internal development and indulge in high salaries, often significantly higher than the market. When such specialists enter the labor market, they want to work on a product that is more interesting to them, they find themselves in a difficult situation: the tasks are more interesting than in a bank, and they offer less money for them. In this case, a good middle-level developer makes very serious demands on the employer, which is not always suitable for young companies.

In search of a golden mean: ay, middles!

For example, we stumbled heavily on the vacancy of a full stack developer, that is, a person with a good understanding of each level of development. Super candidates prefer to go to large corporations, while others do not even reach the average level in terms of competencies. At the same time, not everyone thinks that in a large company there is less freedom of action, more bureaucracy. This is a traditional “payment” for employees of corporations. As a result, we abandoned this vacancy for some time and instead of a full-stack, we took another backend-er, strengthening the team.

Roughly the same story happened to a C++ developer. After 3 weeks of active searches in Moscow, we switched to other regions. The right candidate was found in Irkutsk. He came to Moscow for two weeks (we paid for the tickets and accommodation), got acquainted with the team, the tasks, and now works remotely. Of course, we were afraid to take a candidate from another city and time zone – with a difference of 5 hours. But in the end, we got an experienced employee with a broad professional outlook. He is currently the head of the development department.

We were looking for a product manager for about six months. They found good specialists at the middle and senior levels, but they chose larger employers who already have established processes. For some reason, many were embarrassed to be a pioneer. Since there was no product in the company before, obviously, part of the processes had to be built from scratch. Of course, this is a voluminous work, but, in our opinion, an ideal path for professional development. And it is significant that some of the candidates did not take on these obligations.

How a young IT company works with personnel

Back in 2022, we at Biorg managed to recruit IT specialists suitable for our personnel strategy. What does it mean? We proceed from the fact that it is difficult to find good ready-made specialists on the market for our tasks, whose career preferences and financial expectations would completely coincide with our company.

In this regard, the most common practice we have is to take people with the necessary competencies who want to study – no longer juniors, but not yet up to the average level. We help them develop, including in the context of our business, we introduce a grading system so that people grow professionally and earn more.

It turns out that teaching yourself is more profitable than looking for a ready-made specialist on the market. The reverse side of the coin is that people, having completed training, immediately begin to look at the labor market differently. It happens that developers leave us for large companies. We joke about this that we have become a supplier of IT personnel for the entire large corporate business. As they say, no thanks. Nevertheless, we do not abandon the position that raising company employees is profitable.

How can a career in a startup develop?

A vivid example of how an employee developed his potential at Biorg is our tech lead. He joined the startup team in 2017 during the very early stages of developing our document capture platform. He actually came as a junior. His task was to develop the cloud-based crowdsourcing part of the platform that we use to train neural networks. He wrote it from scratch, improved fault tolerance as the complexity of projects grew, and at the same time seriously increased his professional competencies. Over time, its module has become an important part of our service for converting data from an analog format to a machine-readable form.

At the end of 2022, this employee exercised the option specified in the contract – the priority right to buy out the company’s share and became a co-owner of the business along with several other colleagues. Why not a success story? It fully confirms the thesis that the main thing is to hire talented employees who can quickly learn and grow. This creates the most unexpected multipliers for the development as a team and for the growth of business indicators.

In 2022, the company launched several product lines. It became obvious that the product development model attracts more qualified specialists. We hope that this increases our chances of attracting worthy candidates. But to the question, where are the normal middles, we have not found an answer, which once again proves our point of view – it is easier and better to grow our own.