[Bug Future Show] The Fight for IT Professionals: The Workforce is Being Snatched Through Email Inboxes

Do we have the competencies and strength to think and live outside all frameworks every day, asked Predrag Pale, an associate professor at Zagreb’s FER, on Thursday at the beginning of the ninth Bug Future Show, which this year is held online under the motto ‘Unzoom Your Vision’. In his presentation, Pale introduced several technologies that could radically change society, and then representatives of the Croatian IT elite took the stage to discuss what needs to be improved for this sector to produce more serious global players.

Kidnapping of people through email inboxes

Although IT is perceived as a bubble where almost everything functions perfectly compared to some other parts of the economy, this IT Disneyland has its problems. One of the burning issues is the shortage of personnel, which has reached such proportions that programmers, as testified by Tomislav Grubišić, CEO of Bornfight, receive job offers from competitors in their email inboxes with double the salary and no obligation to attend any job interview.

Attracting IT personnel today implies generous salaries, but even that is no longer enough, as candidates, given that they can choose, select companies with projects that seem most interesting to them. Average salaries in Croatian IT hover around 11,000 kuna, and that is an amount without non-taxable allowances.

Why not compare with tourism

The former president of CISEx, now director of Astra Business Engineering, Tajana Barančić, who despite her discontent with the title is called the ‘queen of the IT sector’, presented several interesting and exclusive data, the results of her own research conducted on 60 companies in the sector engaged in computer programming. She explained how these companies are considered relevant benchmarks and indicators of trends since they account for 35 percent of exports, 30 percent of revenue, and about 20 percent of employees in the computer programming segment.

The results she presented show that these companies achieved a revenue growth of 15 percent, an export growth of 28 percent, and an increase in employees of 23 percent last year. Looking at last year’s results, Barančić estimates that the overall result of the Croatian IT sector last year would be around 15 percent in terms of revenue and number of employees, and she hopes that the growth in exports could be even higher. Last year, the sector recorded a revenue growth of nine percent and an export growth of about 13 percent.

It is often compared the share of IT in GDP with the share of tourism, but tracking that race is pointless as it is not expected that IT will catch up with tourism; in fact, it has no chance, Barančić asserted. When looking at European statistics, even the most technologically advanced countries with the most developed IT have it accounting for six to seven percent of GDP.

Thinking ‘outside tax frameworks’

What should be strived for, however, is to enable Croatian companies to become global players, in which tax policy plays an important role.

– Our competitors are global firms, and if we are taxed differently than British, German, or American companies, we cannot compete with them. If the state has determined that IT is strategically important, it should enable us to be globally competitive – asserted Saša Kramar, marketing director at Span, which was listed on the Zagreb Stock Exchange last year, and in the first nine months of last year, 75 percent of its revenue was generated in foreign markets.

Regardless of the fact that the state, in the opinion of the panel participants, focuses too much on financing through labor taxation, IT companies will continue to progress. The founder and CEO of Photomath, Damir Sabol, adds that a poor tax framework hinders the more intensive recruitment of foreign experts, but that if strategic support is provided for the development and growth of IT, the positive effects would spill over to society as a whole since IT companies no longer employ exclusively STEM experts.

Some more about the ‘future show’

Panel participants welcomed the inclusion of IT as a vertical in the Smart Specialization Strategy, politely said ‘no, thank you’ to the potential establishment of a ministry of IT or digitalization due to the dangers of overregulation in which ministries are skilled, and they expressed that in the coming years they would like the IT sector to be less fragmented and that instead of renting labor, companies focus more on creating their own services and products. By creating large IT companies, the chances for significant global breakthroughs would improve, and the key to everything is education and people, especially attracting foreign young people to our study programs. In any case, significant growth is impossible without a workforce, and according to the information Barančić has, about 30 companies plan to hire a total of two thousand people this year. It seems that inboxes will be even fuller of immoral offers.

Web 3.0 is an energy vampire

After the panel, we stayed for a 5G coffee with a legend. HT’s director of technology and information technology, Boris Drilo, casually skimmed through the latest technological developments with the doyen of Croatian informatics, Ante Mandić, founder of IN2 and director of the digital forensics company INSIG2. One of the few nuclear weapons experts in Croatia who turned to IT out of necessity because he could not find employment in his profession showed that he closely follows IT trends and nothing escapes him.

It was interesting to hear how blockchain holds much promise, but it is too demanding a technology for both computing and programming resources. The chip shortage, energy consumption, and the fact that about 50 programmers on a blockchain project is a small team are quite significant drawbacks. However, that does not mean that everything new coming is not being done precisely on that technology. The question arises as to how to meet the demand for all those resources.

– Just to process bitcoin on the blockchain, more electricity is consumed annually than Argentina uses. The electricity consumption for NFTs, according to some data I read, was only for the first half of last year 33 terawatt-hours, which is more than Serbia consumes. And every six months, the electricity consumption doubles for these needs. If this continues with the metaverse, the question is whether this can really be sustained, especially if this is just the beginning, and every six months the consumption doubles – commented Mandić.

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