Photo: UnsplashThe "IT bubble" burst primarily in Silicon Valley. Global events spilled over into the domestic IT industry, and companies in Serbia with successful operations, which until recently, apart from attractive salaries, offered idyllic working conditions, dismissed several hundred IT experts in the past few months, without notice
The salaries of IT candidates were up to three times higher than the average salaries in other sectors. Along with an attractive salary in domestic companies, programmers were offered numerous benefits such as flexible working hours, working from home, private health insurance, and even massages at the workplace. There were almost no unemployed IT experts on the labor market, according to last year's "Pulse of the Serbian IT Community" survey. Therefore, the news about the wave of mass layoffs in the IT sector around the world came completely unexpectedly.
Sudden layoffs began at the end of 2022. In tech giants like Amazon, Google and Microsoft, hundreds of thousands of people lost their jobs.
According to Tech Crunch, 190.000 IT workers were laid off in the first five months of this year alone.
Employees to bench'
The week behind us was marked by the news that the wave of layoffs also spread to the domestic IT market. The company Quantox was the first to announce that it had to lay off 170 workers, while the HTEC Group in Novi Sad recently laid off 200 employees.
"The levels of layoffs in our region are not at the level of those in America, but they are certainly not negligible," Dušica Lukić, co-founder of the Joberty platform for hiring IT candidates, told the "Vremena" portal.
A combination of macroeconomic and geopolitical circumstances led to this scenario, and one cause cannot be singled out for the crisis.
"In the United States, interest rates were raised and money became more and more expensive. Alternative funds stopped investments, which directly affected startups in the later stages of investment, as well as the projects of many companies. A significant number of Serbian and regional outsourcing companies cooperate with startups from the USA and Western Europe, so this is also one of the reasons for the current lower productivity and higher number of employees 'on the bench', as it is called in IT. This consequently led to the cancellation or reduction of projects involving IT companies from our region", says Lukić.
Half as many job ads
Most domestic companies have currently stopped hiring new people, and are focused on business stabilization until the end of the crisis.
"Of course, this does not mean that no one is hiring, which can be seen from the number of advertisements, which has dropped significantly, by around 50 percent on average, but there are still open IT positions both from IT companies themselves and from companies from other sectors that they are looking for IT experts. Companies from other industries, which have significant IT teams and interesting projects, represent an increasingly frequent choice of our engineers when it comes to the next employer. Another trend we have seen through our platform is the increase in activity on the platform itself of our users and a significantly higher number of people signing up for ads than before the crisis," said Joberty.
The answer Company left behind
The IT community in Serbia is characterized by flexibility and transparency, but due to the sudden storm on the IT market, the communication of most companies to employees, but also to the public, was absent.
"In our company, a good number of people were laid off in several waves last year. The last one was in December. Other companies are also massively cutting the number of employees. I don't know what the reasons are, the standard answer is 'the target profit was not achieved', 'investor pressure, 'the situation on the market'", one of the IT experts, who wanted to remain anonymous, told the "Vremena" portal.
Platform Joberty says that each company tries to adapt to the conditions of the crisis in its own way, depending on how much it is affected by it.
"Keeping people 'on the bench', on the one hand, can bring new projects, given that you have people ready to jump in and work on it, but on the other hand, they represent an extremely high cost for the companies themselves, so that solution is needed in times of crisis, when the number of projects has decreased significantly, they are applying less and less", says Lukić and adds that this crisis, like every previous one, will pass, and companies will come out of it with new knowledge and probably oriented towards more sustainable growth in the future.
Z.S.
Read daily news, analysis, commentary and interviews at www.vreme.com
Nenad Stefanović filed a disciplinary complaint against Branko Stamenković, claiming that his public appearances damaged the reputation and trust in the work of the public prosecutor's office. Among the disputed statements is the one that Stamenković gave to the weekly "Vreme", talking about the "para-prosecutor system" in Belgrade.
"I have not terminated the employment contract of any employee," said the principal of the "20. Oktobar" elementary school, Gordana Radojević, in her denial regarding the article about the parents demanding her resignation. He claims that the employees left at their own request or their fixed-term contracts expired.
The mayor of Smederevo, Jasmina Vojinović, was arrested along with two other city officials
The BIA rejected Radar's allegations of personnel changes and documentation, calling them part of a hybrid attack on the security system. The agency points out that by law it does not inform the public about internal personnel decisions.
The findings of the experts represent new evidence in the proceedings regarding the physical confrontation between Šapić and Mićić, which took place on September 28 at the Bežanijska Kosa.
At the moment when the institutions of the Republic are destroyed, when Vučić's octopus is still alive, when people are disgusted by the injustice and the stench left behind by the Essenes regime, we have, as Machiavelli said, only civic virtue as the fuel with which we can return to the beginning
The four independent members of REM are an example of perseverance and civic responsibility. Rodoljub Šabić even, upon leaving the premises of REM, after the sentencing of the Informer, experienced that the Essenes insulted him, hit him with their hands and feet. But that too will soon be over
Vučić pardoned the batterers and Dijana Hrkalović. The election winners should abolish the sultan's power that allows one man to run afoul of the entire judicial system
Interview: Branko Stamenković, public prosecutor of the Supreme Public Prosecutor's Office
A black picture and the breakdown of the rule of law subscribeThe archive of the weekly Vreme includes all our digital editions, since the very beginning of our work. All issues can be downloaded in PDF format, by purchasing the digital edition, or you can read all available texts from the selected issue.
See all
For months, tech giants like Microsoft and Meta have been laying off their workers en masse, but at first, the citizens of Serbia weren't overly worried, because it was happening "somewhere far away". Now the situation is completely different, so not even workers in the IT sector here are safe from sudden dismissal
Salaries remained at the same level as in previous years. Senior IT experts are less sought after, and more mid-level IT experts
