Serbian workers in the IT sector have been in fear of sudden dismissal for months, which is understandable considering that technological giants such as Microsoft and Google have massively dismissed their employees, and there is a fear that this trend could also affect companies in our country. Developers are on the front line, but other workers in the technology industry have not been spared either.
Those who were worried – they were right, because the number of advertisements for positions in this industry is drastically lower than before, and there are also those workers who, just like in global companies, lost their jobs overnight.
According to the data of the website Tech crunch, during the first five months of this year, 190,000 workers in the IT sector were laid off globally.
As Marko Vučetić from the employment portal Hello World tells Nova.rs, the number of dismissed workers in the technology sector was the same as during the entire previous year.
The situation In Serbia is not so dramatic, but there were layoffs.
In one of the companies operating in Serbia, workers were recently laid off, and as the company’s representatives publicly explained, at one point they lost their two biggest clients, the company took on more and more debt, and after 10 months – they realized that they could no longer so. They fired between 30 and 50 workers.
And this is not the only company.
As the company HTEC Group confirmed to Nova.rs, they had to lay off 200 workers.
“In addition to the reorganization of functional units, reorientation of people and retraining, unfortunately, this process of reorganization and optimization included about 200 employees with whom we had to part ways,” says the company.
Dwindling supply
As Vučetić tells us, in the last three months of last year, i.e. during October, November and December, the number of advertisements for jobs in IT companies decreased by 37 percent compared to July, August and September. At the end of last year, the collapse of the IT sector began on a global level.
“These events from the global level have also been reflected in our market. There are fewer and fewer ads, and during this year, more precisely in the first quarter, there were 50 to 55 percent less than at the same time last year,” Vučetić told Nova.rs.
The war In Ukraine, the global economic crisis, artificial intelligence that more and more companies want to apply in business – our interlocutor names these factors as “culprits” for problems in the IT industry.
And the demand is increasing
In complete contrast to the reduced supply of ads, the demand is increasing.
“More and more potential candidates are responding to job ads, and that’s because people are afraid for their existence and for the further continuation of their careers, so they are looking for a safer environment if they felt threatened at their workplace,” says Vučetić.
Salaries still good
Our interlocutor points out that the salaries of IT workers in Serbia are still good, despite the problems faced by this sector.
According to Vučetić, the website Hello World conducted a survey among employers at the end of last year, and 30 percent of them said they wanted to increase the salaries of their employees.
The last official data of this site, from August last year, say that the average salary in the IT sector was 1,600 euros. And judging by the advertisements for various positions, the salaries are still in that range.
What is happening in the world?
Already at the end of last year, the giants of technology companies started massively laying off their workers.
Meta, Reddit, Microsoft, Apple, Google – these are just some of the world’s companies that have “written off” a large number of their workers. For example, e-commerce giant Amazon suddenly laid off 18,000 workers to reduce operating costs. It all started in 2020, with the coronavirus pandemic.
At that time, people were in “lock down”, closed in their houses, so there was a growing interest in social networks and online shopping.
In order to take advantage of such attendance, large companies began to aggressively hire new workers. For example, Meta employed around 40,000 people, almost doubling the number of employees.
Two years later, in November 2022, 11,000 people lost their jobs in this company alone.
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