- Ewa Szuminska
- 2022, cooperation, job adds, jobs, python, report, Technology
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This is yet another blog entry summarising the 2022 trends in different areas of the tech jobs marketplace. This time, we would like to focus on broadly understood employment within the sector, the availability of tech positions, and the potential for job market growth.
Introduction
In many ways, the previous year was a peculiar one. On top of the 2020-2021 pandemics and the aftermath we had to be dealing with well into 2022, our neighbors went to war a little more than a year ago. This, in turn, gave the galloping inflation and the global economic crisis even more fuel. These and some other factors made a considerable impact in most industry sectors including the IT branch and employment trends in the tech jobs marketplace. While the following text is going to strictly refer to the Polish tech industry jobs market, the situation is likely very similar in numerous locations around the globe and, perhaps, indicative of future tech hiring.
Inire.io (inhire.io/) IT Market Snapshot 2022 report (link below the text), which is a tech jobs report, applies only to broadly understood IT advertisements (programming, administration, IT project management, business intelligence, IT system maintenance). Amongst other things, payroll analysis with reference to the area of expertise, technologies used, best-paid key phrases, and location were taken into consideration.
So… What does the report reveal?
Availability of job postings in 2022
One of the key questions was whether galloping inflation had an impact on trends in tech job postings. Analyzed data revealed that this, indeed, is the case. Especially in the 4th quarter of 2022, there was a dramatic decrease in how many job postings tech companies added with a stated salary in the job description.
Inflation is one of the key macroeconomic indicators and translates directly to the country’s economy and price increases as well as employment trends including those in tech positions. Unfortunately, the market is unable to react in real-time to economic changes. Curiously, though, despite inflation in Poland increasing rapidly since the beginning of 2022, major negative changes were not reflected in the labor market throughout most of 2022. This is also the case for tech industry jobs. Hence, as reasoned, the collapse in job market growth in the fourth quarter of 2022 may be a belated reaction to what has been happening in the economy in more general terms. This, however, will likely not be revealed until the next tech jobs report is published.
Decreases in job postings for tech positions were noted virtually in all cities across the country with the largest one reported in Krakow where the number of offers and employers hiring tech workforce dropped by almost 30% in the fourth quarter of 2022 compared to its first quarter. From this perspective, Łódź is an anomaly as the number of offers was practically constant throughout the year, with a 25% job market growth in the third quarter of the year.
However, as is suspected based on labor market data, this situation was largely impacted by the development of the Lodz branch of Infopulse (infopulse.com/company), the opening of the company’s Shared Services Centre Marel (suppliers of systems and software for the food industry) (marel.com) starting activities of FINANTEQ (IT area in mobile banking) (finanteq.com/). Thus, in the case of this particular city, the number of tech job postings was not a reflection of the actual tech sector situation.
We also ought to keep in mind that the IT sector and tech companies as well as tech workers excel at remote work. Therefore, even if the number of job postings ascribed to a particular city drops, the fact does not necessarily reflect a slowdown in the labor market there as the tech workforce is skillful at not working in the place of their actual residence.
Earnings vs. experience
The ongoing economic changes are also reflected in how earnings break down by experience. Regardless of the experience, the salaries offered in various tech positions are higher in the case of remote work than that done on-site. Especially in the case of in-demand tech jobs. Among the reasons responsible for this tech job growth, we can enumerate factors such as lower costs for employers due to the lack of need to maintain office space and the offer of foreign companies recruiting in Poland. Obviously, our market is financially attractive for Western organizations hiring tech workers, whose remuneration is highly competitive compared to Polish employers. The analysis of junior salaries in 2022 is particularly noteworthy as in the first three quarters of 2022 average wages were rising. However, as expected, in the last quarter of the year the average wages offered decreased.
If we add to this the decrease, as the labor market data suggests, in demand for juniors over the 12 months of 2022, we can see changes in the tech sector employment similar to those observed with our neighbours from across the ocean. In times of financial challenges, companies have limited funds for training. Hence, lowering financial expectations in the tech industry employment means that employers can afford more experienced employees. Thus, skilled tech workers are very much in.
Earnings vs. used technologies
When it comes to earnings in the context of technologies used in 2022… Well… Analyzing the pace of changes in earnings depending on the technology, interesting conclusions can be drawn after the comparison of the current report with last year’s report. The jobs report confirms that the average growth rate earnings were similar, i.e. 16.95% a year ago (2020 vs 2021), and 15.4% this year (2021 vs 2022).
Within two years, a record increase in rates (by as much as 47.47% over two years) was achieved by Swift (apple.com/swift/), and earnings in Scala (scala-lang.org/) grew the slowest.
It is also interesting that the languages that recorded the highest increases in earnings a year ago, slowed down last year. In contrast, the language with a record growth in 2022 – C (www3schools.com/c/c_intro.php) (36%) – had relatively low growth in 2021 (7.2%).
Only PHP (being a language often used for simple projects and creating little complex websites) (php.net/manual/en/intro-whatis.php) seems unfazed and is the language with the lowest every year salary with a significant difference in earnings compared to the best-paid technologies.
Looking at the highest paying keywords, you can see that it is invariably very desirable knowledge of data processing tools. Plus, many of the above technologies or tools make up the competence of DevOps specialists, with particular emphasis on IaC (Infrastructure as Code).
Comparing the fourth quarter of 2021 with the fourth quarter of 2022, a significant increase in average salaries among all programming languages can be observed.
Technologies such as C, C++ (w3schools.com/cpp/cpp_intro.asp), and Python (python.org/) recorded the largest leaps. Software developers in Python can currently count on the highest salary, which is associated with demand connected to these technologies. In previous years, Scala was the leader.
Invariably, the most popular technologies are Java (java.com/en/) and JavaScript (javascript.com/). Though the increase in earnings over the year is not as spectacular as, for example, for C, C ++, or Python amongst technology workers predominantly working with these technologies.
The year 2022, however, belonged to the SRE (Site Reliability Engineering) (raygun.com/blog/site-reliability-engineering/) technology, which is increasingly present in the tech industry. This term can be used in various meanings, e.g. as a position, a team of good people, engineering and programming practices, as well as a mindset.
SRE answers the question of how to implement the DevOps philosophy in an organization. So far, Google has been the biggest promoter of SRE. Over time, it turned out that many companies saw huge potential in the application of SRE in their teams, thus reducing operating costs and increasing software reliability. So it’s hardly surprising that SRE has become so popular.
Summary
All in all, the general increase in rates of tech job postings shows that the technology job market is still an employee-driven market Tech firms keep hiring tech talent for various tech positions, and future tech hiring trends look promising. Recruitment departments are facing yet another year of challenges when it comes to attracting and retaining talented tech workers in companies. The tech job market remains a strong job market.
For a detailed report, click the link below.
inhire.io/pl/insights/it-market-snapshot-2022/
