IT professionals in Ukraine

Today I’m going to talk about the IT sphere and workers of my home country – Ukraine. Despite today’s actions in eastern, northern, southern, and central parts, IT companies are still managing to function, though in distance work mode. Before the wartime started, we had a truly big IT sphere with its main center in Kyiv, there was great competition for all positions in every more or less large company. We have lots of offices and employees all around the country, that do a great job for the benefit of Ukraine’s economy. Actually, our government has provided convenient conditions to promote IT business including lower taxes and an easy startup process.

As for a truly professional specialist, I have seen some individuals when I was working as an intern in a company. The first impression of such people is that they tend to be dedicated to their responsibilities and work in general. They have a passion to create something new and unique and proper skills to implement their thoughts. This is what makes them different from the rest of the audience. Not to mention the soft skills, they have to be good team members and great colleagues. But taking into account their commercial experience, they have had time to master their communication. Usually, there are also people with less experience working in some stack of technologies in the company, so the ability to explain how to do something is nearly a necessity. What else…, I think that honesty is a key to professionalism. Pretty unexpected, but a true “guru” should not act like a 15 years old girl, I mean to express their thoughts about something without any hidden context. Particularly if you are in a position of a team leader or PM. If something is wrong, just tell your team, the specific member of the team, or management about that. Only with some kind of discussion, the problem can be solved or bypassed.

Regarding education, it is not a mandatory point. Yes, it is easier for a person, that finished the course related to IT in some university or to become a professional, but the real picture shows us the further: it is more about wish to study, even if you are self-taught. I met a couple of programmers, that worked and studied in completely another discipline, but changed it to try IT. Though there is a difference, usually such people are much older =).

And the last thing, like icing on a cake – skills. As for me, there is no such evident line between frontend and backend professionals. Sure, there is some limit in frontend development, but I think “guru” should have knowledge in both, even if he is a backend dev. As for frontend developers, they should have pretty deep experience and competence with the backend. It is not only about React or Angular, but about the logic that is shown using these technologies. Frontend itself is dependent on the backend, this is why I have such an opinion and I’m not trying to insult anyone.

To conclude, we have a lot of examples of IT professionals everywhere, particularly in TalTech. It is more of a general figure, hard to combine everything in one person because we all have unique characteristics and features.