World Economic Crisis. IT prospects
- by Andrew Florko
There was alike question in 2008, 2 years passed. Please, share your expectations about IT market and employment in the next year or two (or so far you can predict).
IMHO Russia (my native country) fully met Crisis in spring, 2008. Stock markets shrank 3(!) times during half a year. Many developers were fired those days but I suppose just because business was shocked and freezed some projects. Developers expected +20% salary growth per year in 2004-2007 (Developer salary in Moscow was about 2-3K$ in early 2008). Then there was 30% (very subjective) salary cut-off in 2008 and salaries were frozen till 2009. Now things are slowly coming back to 2008.
Looking in the future I expect pessimistic scenario and another crash. Our economic depends more and more on oil & gas every year. IT that serves industry will be shrinked because we can't compete to China in real production. Due to high currency board (rubble is strong compared to dollar) we can't rely on offshore programming. Our officials are concerned on innovative economic breakthrough but it's an ordinary budget money assignemtn in practice. I don't believe in innovations either because who require innovations if you have debts and tomorrow is vapor?