Among the technology companies that recently laid off tens of thousands of people are Facebook, Amazon, Google, Salesforce, HP, Microsoft, but only Microsoft is present in Serbia with a significant number of employees.
Nebojša Bjelotomić, director of the Digital Serbia Initiative, emphasizes that the development center of this company in Serbia has exceptional engineering staff and works in very important areas both for Microsoft itself and for the entire IT market.
“For these reasons, I dare to conclude that Microsoft’s development center in Serbia will continue to be successful and grow,” says Bjelotomić for “Politika”.
Our interlocutor explains that in the period marked by covid, IT companies significantly increased the number of employees, even several times.
The current layoffs are caused by the general slowdown of the economy, but they are also a kind of correction of the ambitions of certain companies brought about by the momentum of digitalization caused by the physical slowdown of the world.
Again, how significant this phenomenon is is shown by reports from the US labor market, where the IT industry has seen a decline in the number of employees after more than two years.
With the fact that the total number of jobs is less than 5,000, which is a very small number for an industry that employs tens of millions of people.
– The economy in Serbia has a tendency to react with a delay to events in world markets. It is expected that the effect of global events in the IT sector in Serbia will be visible only in the spring.
The loss of clients, primarily startups from the US market, which have difficulty accessing financing, will lead our service IT companies to further develop their sales and market development segment.
We hope that the development of these segments of our IT companies will lead to the diversification of users and the markets in which they operate, which will contribute to an easier overcoming of the crisis – according to our interlocutor.
When asked how many development centers will opencontribute to the growth of the IT sector in Serbia, he says that development centers are places where the future is created.Â
Experts who have the opportunity to work in them have a window into that future. The knowledge and experience gained in the development centers creates personnel who raise the quality of the entire market, whether the next job of these people is in a local company or they found their own startup.
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