Russia's IT Market Stalled: Salaries Frozen, Junior Developers Sidelined by AI

Russia's IT labor market has faced wage stagnation: according to CNews, specialists' salaries are practically not growing due to the spread of neural networks and the overall economic situation, and some job seekers cannot find work for up to six months.

Why Salaries Have Stopped Growing

According to the material, the convergence of two factors — growing use of neural networks in development and a difficult economic situation — has led to IT specialists' salaries in Russia effectively being frozen. A significant portion of job seekers, according to the publication, search for work for up to six months and eventually agree to offered conditions without even attempting to negotiate for higher pay — the balance of power in the labor market has clearly shifted in favor of employers.

Just a few years ago, a shortage of qualified IT professionals in Russia was considered almost chronic: companies competed with each other for specialists, regularly increasing offered salaries to keep employees from moving to competitors. The CNews material records a reversal of this dynamic — the job seekers' market has changed to an employers' market, and now candidates are forced to agree to conditions that just recently they would have considered insufficient, simply because they have no alternative offers in hand.

• Trend: stagnation of IT specialists' salaries in Russia
• Causes: growing use of neural networks + economic situation
• Job search duration: some specialists — up to six months
• Behavior of job seekers: agree to offered salary without attempting to increase it
• Demand for juniors: companies have almost stopped hiring them

Why Have Companies Stopped Hiring Juniors?

A separate and perhaps most alarming part of the material is the near-complete absence of demand for junior specialists. Companies, according to CNews, do not want to hire beginning developers — probably because part of entry-level tasks (simple code, typical scripts, routine fixes) can now be handled by AI tools without the need to pay a salary and spend time training a junior employee.

Traditionally, a junior position was not only a source of cheap labor for routine tasks, but also an entry point into the profession, through which a specialist gradually accumulated experience and grew into a mid-level and senior level under the guidance of more experienced colleagues. If companies are massively cutting precisely this level, then the institution of mentorship and gradual growth within a company, which long held the entire model of personnel reproduction in the industry, is effectively being destroyed.

What Risks Does This Create in the Future?

The material directly indicates that the refusal to hire juniors threatens serious problems in the future: if the industry today stops training beginning specialists, in several years there will be a shortage of experienced mid-level and senior professionals, who normally grow out of junior positions. A vicious cycle emerges — AI reduces the need for beginning personnel today, but undermines the personnel reserve from which the industry should be drawing specialists in several years.

Similar dynamics — the contraction of entry-level hiring against the backdrop of growing AI capabilities — is being discussed in other labor markets as well, where technology companies are also reconsidering hiring models for young specialists. For the Russian IT market, the situation is exacerbated by additional pressure from the general economic situation, due to which the effect of AI implementation overlaps with and without the cautious company policy regarding staff expansion.

Under these conditions, particularly vulnerable is the position of university graduates and course retraining participants who considered IT several years ago as one of the most reliable employment trajectories with rapid income growth. The CNews material fixes that today this trajectory works quite differently: a diploma or course certificate no longer guarantees quick entry into the profession, and competition for rare junior positions becomes noticeably higher than before.

At the same time, the material's very formulation — that the situation "threatens serious problems in the future" — leaves open the question of how exactly the industry and the state can respond to this imbalance: whether through internship programs, subsidized employment of beginning specialists, or other measures compensating for the disappearing lower rung of the career ladder in development.