IT in Poland: outsourcing as a starting point

Exclusive. Oh, and we like to speculate on the topic of brain drain! They say, if Ukrainian programmers outsource everything, write code for Western companies, then nothing useful will ever appear in Ukraine.

As part of a big technological journey across Europe, let's take a look at a country that was able not only to outsource, but also raised its own IT industry.

This is Poland, an optimally balanced European country with an acceptable cost of living, a working legal system and decent beer. Well, the population is enough to launch powerful domestic projects.

Actually, I have listed all the main components of success, you can not read further.

Kings of outsourcing

Doing business in the old Europe is expensive, especially paying salaries and other obligations. Therefore, it is normal for EC when the main office of the company with the management staff is open in Norway or Finland, and the development department sits in a much cheaper one Portugal or Poland. Global companies also have offices in Polish cities: Google, Microsoft, Oracle, etc.

The high demand for IT specialists, independent of fluctuations in the domestic market, has developed professional education and networking in Poland. There is still not enough staff to cover all outsourcing tasks, so Polish businesses have interesting tax options for the employment of migrants: from short-term project employment to long-term permanent work. In the next section, we will say a few more important words about it.

I would also like to point out that outsourcing of services not directly related to IT, but well complementary to them: accounting, HR, etc., is developing in Poland. And it is trivially easier to manage when most of the departments are concentrated in one country.

Kings of migration

Even before the war, Ukrainian IT companies slowly crawled to Poland, escaping from the glasous Ukrainian femme fatale and bold fiscal reforms. With the beginning of the war, the move of the Ukrainian IT business to Poland took on a biblical character, and I take "go" in the broadest sense: from startups to teams, excuse me, affiliate marketers.

In Warsaw coworking spaces are occupied by ours, cash flows are slowly being legalized (everyone is waiting for 2025) and they are asking the Polish economy. Since learning the language is quite easy, some of the refugee migrants will move to Polish companies, which has reduced market salaries and increased the competitiveness of Poland itself as an important element of global IT.

Kings of games

But the Poles are not interested in the success of outsourcing, Ukraine was able to do no worse before the war, and even now it is still too early to write us off. The Poles were also able to build their own strong projects. This can be seen in the games, because one of the best gaming companies, CD Projekt RED, is based in Poland (The Witcher game series, Cyberpunk 2077, the online game Gwint). These are games that are popular all over the world, setting development trends and developing the global industry.

However, when we talk about the industry as a whole, it is important to see the whole picture, not just a few successful cases. The Poles played a lot of games in the "nil games". Very bad games. Games so boring and meaningless that the phrase "Polish shooter" became a meme. And what, this made the Polish game industry unsuccessful? On the contrary! First, these bad games were sold, earning money for their creators. Secondly, the Poles got their hands on them, and now they are making very decent games. Not by one witcher, so to speak.

The Polish studio Techland made several cool series of games about zombie apocalypses (apparently, the familiarity of the developers with sales at Lidl is reflected): Dying Light and Dead Island. In the 2000s, Techland produced consumer-grade "Polish shooters", ten years later - a respected global player. By the way, the author of another interesting game Torment: Tides of Numenera, the aesthetic successor of the legendary Planescape: Torment (well, this was already done for aesthetes, to show that we do hits and we can do culture).

The second Polish studio, City Interactive, which started with some rather disgraceful shootings, is now releasing games from the Sniper: Ghost Warrior series.

To put it simply, the Poles entered the game industry in about the same way as the Chinese entered the smartphone industry. That is, they were a little embarrassed with cheap goods for the poor, then they went to the top league. Only in games, the margin is more interesting, and there are no such problems as Huawei experienced.

Kings of startups

What do we have with classic IT in Poland? Everything is also not bad: unicorn companies, according to different estimates, there are six to ten.

The formal status of the "unicorn" does not interest us as much as the real significance for the industry. For example, here is the startup ElevenLabs, which is engaged in the generation of voices in different languages ​​with the help of AI. The above-mentioned game companies CD Projekt RED and Techland are also in the club.

Further: InPost logistics, Allegro and Modivo e-commerce, Pracuj Group headhunting platform, DocPlanner aggregator of medical services.

Chatbot developer Text (formerly LiveChat) deserves special attention — their products are now integrated into most online stores, so you definitely know these guys.

Separately, we will mention the Polish media group Wirtualna Polska Group, which is also worth almost a billion, has a lot of resources and, in general, is a powerful media player.

Why poland

I indicated the main reasons at the very beginning: an acceptable cost of living and a working legal system (I was, of course, joking about beer). That is, the Poles had twenty years of a quiet life, which they devoted to the creation and development of high-tech businesses, and now they are reaping the well-deserved fruits. If Ukraine had lived these twenty years at the same calm pace (when the change of president does not change the course of the country, and tax officials and firefighters are not perceived as horsemen of the Apocalypse), there would be a Ukrainian phenomenon. And so we have the Polish phenomenon and millions of Ukrainian refugees in Europe alone.

Our war really helps the Poles: they have an opportunity to suck up our personnel, projects, and capital. Personally, I think that this happiness is short-lived and the Poles will have to fight too have to. But if I'm wrong, and Poland remains an island of peaceful, well-fed and reasonable life in Eastern Europe, Polish ayti with such support will go very far. I will have to write another article...

Denis Skorbylin, trend analyst Newsky