Russian IT industry: what will remain after the flight of our programmers and Western firms

In the end, young, talented IT network engineers also leave. But there are those who stay at home. What is it like under the sanctions?

Sergey Kron

The economic situation in the country today depends not only on the results of the special operation in Ukraine and the anti-Russian sanctions of the West, but also on the decision of international corporations to stay in Russia or leave forever.

Pessimists: Forward into the 1990s

The Habr website updated the list of the world's largest IT companies that left Russia:

- Microsoft, the main manufacturer of software for ordinary users and large industries and offices;

- SAP, German developer of ERP systems;

- Oracle, the world's second largest software maker;

- Cisco Systems Inc, a company that develops and sells network equipment;

- Atlassian, developer of Jira software bug tracking;

- Nvidia, developer of graphics processors;

- Figma, a graphical editor for collaborative website design;

- Autodesk, supplier of software for industrial and civil engineering and others.

According to experts, the IT industry primarily implies international cooperation. Softs that have been created by the whole world for decades have left the market. It will simply not be possible for domestic manufacturers to urgently replace this, and not only private companies, but also public services will suffer.

It doesn’t fit in my head, Habr writes, what this can lead to, because ALL the modern infrastructure of the country depends on the supplies of these IT giants: the work of banks, retail chains, logistics, rail transport and air communications, supercomputers, etc.

Pessimists say this: when the stocks of spare parts and software run out, then support for the operation of servers will be carried out on the principle of “pull out of this and stick into that”, but this will also not be enough for a long time.

And this is just the beginning, because a boycott from such software companies as Microsoft, Google, Apple, Amazon, Meta, Adobe, Dropbox is next. There will be no more support, no more subscriptions, no more clouds, no more payment systems.

Another problem is that a significant part of all VPNs (virtual private networks) and means to bypass Russian and foreign sanctions can also be disabled and not all hosting providers will continue to cooperate in order to raise their server with an encrypted channel.

However, this problem can be solved by using virtual hosting to create your own VPN servers. The difficulty of this decision lies in the fact that in Russia today not all IT specialists have a sufficient level of knowledge to implement this decision.

According to IT-specialists, it is a little comforting that, most likely, the supply of consumer goods will not stop in the near future: laptops, smartphones, phones - they will be sold in Russia, as before. So far, only industrial technologies have fallen under the total ban.

Computer scientists believe that if the sanctions do not stop, then Russia will slowly, but inevitably, begin to return to the era called the "Beginning of the Computer Age", when information technology was just beginning to be introduced on an industrial scale and most computer users were among home users.

"I need to learn python"

Before the start of the special operation in Ukraine, the IT sector in Russia was the most desirable place to work: according to a survey by the Outside Digital agency, every third Russian wanted to move into it. The sphere attracted high wages and good working conditions. In addition, she was ready to accept anyone: guys with technical and humanitarian education, and without education at all, came to IT. On the Internet, as Novaya Gazeta wrote, even the meme “you need to learn python” (Python programming language) appeared. There seemed to be no other way to make money.

After February 24, the situation changed: queues of IT specialists fleeing the country lined up at the Russian border. Only in the Russian-language chat in Telegram “IT vacancies in Armenia” there are more than 8,000 people. Our programmers have already raised rental prices in Tbilisi, Bishkek and the cities of Kazakhstan...

However, IT-engineer Mikhail Krylov told NI that not all young computer scientists were going to leave Russia.

- There are 4,000 IT people on one of the chats in Telegram with which I communicate. Someone calculated: of these, only 40 people want to go to the West in search of work. They say that in Germany or Hungary they were offered better conditions and a good salary.

In his opinion, Western sanctions will be minimized when Chinese manufacturers of network equipment and Turkish supplier companies come to Russia, who seemed to be waiting for the opportunity to take the place of European and American firms.

Krylov told a recent story related to the departure from one of the production facilities of Cisco Systems Inc. Its employees did not have time to pack their bags when applications from Chinese IT companies and Turkish IT equipment suppliers with a proposal for a turnkey partnership rained down on the administration of the enterprise.

Natalya Kasperskaya, Russian IT entrepreneur, president of the InfoWatch group of companies, believes that the situation with software in Russia is quite good. At the moment, according to her, the register consists of more than 11 thousand Russian-made IT products that cover the main areas where software is required. Among them are general-purpose software, information security systems, and so on:

"If we take information security, here the software is mainly of domestic production. In office software, not everything is so simple - there enterprises use about 20% of domestic developments, the rest is imported, foreign. This model will have to change and will have to be done very quickly".

"What else can be done? I've been hearing this question for the past few years. We, unfortunately, are used to working on the principle of "two steps forward, one step back." But the law prohibiting the transfer of advanced technologies to Russia was adopted by the West two years ago. It was a signal for the Russian IT industry. That is, they had already pulled out the gun and showed what they would shoot from. For some reason, we always hope for a chance, they say, we will slip through. How long will the transition to domestic software take now! Russian IT has little choice - either jump in and create your own IT industry, or legalize piracy in the 1990s. But it can hit Russia with a boomerang", - said Natalya Kasperskaya.