The State of The Ukrainian Tech Segment Salaries Q4 2024

The Ukrainian Tech Segment salaries had a rough year. Some bad stuff happened due to things out of everyone’s control. The other stuff happened because of long-term bad decisions finally paying off.

The big narrative of 2024 is that the business is down, the market is down, and naturally, the salaries also go down. If we take a glance at the salary dynamics – the overall shift is 35%.

If we take into account the cost of living growth during 2024 – the salary buying power decreased by approximately 30-35% at a minimum and it will probably go all the way to 45-50% by Q3 2025.

With that said, there is no real way to predict how things are going in our situation. Everything is volatile.

• Pretty much everyone predicted the labor market would cease to exist outright by late 2022 and it didn’t happen. 
• Then everyone yapped about how things were going surprisingly strong going into 2023.
• By late 2023, it was obvious that 2024 would be rough, except no one wanted to say it out loud and the whole “how bad can it get anyway?” thing. 
• And all this time the whole segment was breathing that sweet copium that things would be alright and acting like Frank Booth.

Well, things got bad because copium is not a valid business strategy to operate on during market volatility and economic turmoil. Duh. And it is not the company that is going to pay for this. 

What’s going on with the Ukrainian Developer salaries Q4 2024?

The overall salary decrease across the segment is in-between 30% and 40% depending on the niche. 

• The decrease itself didn’t happen because tech talent suddenly became less valuable. It happened because companies like surviving as an entity more than keeping their “company is a family” thing intact. Thus the layoffs furloughs and farewells.  

The outsourcing segment has been downsizing ever since the 2022 energy grid attack turmoil. The transformation was slowly, seemingly merely percolating in the background – the teams got leaner, the structures more straightforward, no sprawling multi-module projects – just down-and-dirty outsourcing for gutter punks.

• Because of that, if you compare the salary decrease in outsourcing during 2024 – it doesn’t seem like a lot (25-35% across tech positions for new hires). 
• But if you look at the overall respondent employment history over the 2022-2024 period – there’s barely anyone working at one company for over a year – the majority is less than a year, 1-2 years is barely a quarter, the rest is long-term outsourcing company employees. Back in 2021 – 1-2 years and 2-3 years were core segments for outsourcing. But not now.

Meanwhile, the product companies are all over the place. You have highs, lows, mids, and outliers all rolled into one messy falafel. 

If we look just at medians – it’s a solid 40% decrease across the board, except for military tech which is a parallel universe to everyone else. 

Curiously, the majority of average maximums across the tech positions remain more or less the same since late 2023, but the lows and the majority of the range went all the way down. It is way thicker on figures on the lower end. 

• Why the decrease? The business is not working out more or less. SaaS and IoT business models live and breathe on getting more and more subscribers and monetizing more and more features to get that steady cash flow running. 
• But at some point, you hit a ceiling and need to figure out how to run a sustainable product and that’s where the trouble starts because there are simply not that many experienced managers who can do that. And it turns out that most of these products simply have a low ceiling and there is just not much you can do about it.
• There are lots of people who know how to get the product off the ground, but not that many folks know how to keep it running through thick and thin. That’s not just a problem for Ukrainian managers – it is a worldwide issue. Maybe the world doesn’t need all these endless applications. 
• Because of that, the projects either fall apart completely or get reorganized into something slightly different with less money involved.

The startup segment somehow manages to be an even bigger mess than it already is because of course it does. 

• A quick look at the median levels across the board shows a solid 45% decrease. If we take into consideration non-tech positions – it is 55%. 

At the same time – the high ends of the ranges remain at relatively the same level as in late 2023 which is surreal because new hires get a lot less and even that doesn’t matter anymore because just as I’m writing this paragraph there’s another wave of layoffs across the board so get ready for 50% decrease by late Q1 2025.