The IT 'bubble' burst — and there's still nobody to hire. Anatomy of a tech labor shortage

Industry media celebrate the IT bubble bursting. But when you actually need a senior backend for a complex B2B platform — silence. The role hangs for months, zero relevant applications. Why the headline 'collapse' is wrong for the level where you actually hire.

Open any industry media — it's all celebration. The IT bubble has burst, neural networks are about to replace programmers, the market is overheated, and juniors are ready to work for food. It looks like the employer's market has arrived: just open a vacancy and pick the best.

But when it comes to reality — say, you need a solid backend engineer for a complex B2B SaaS platform, or a systems architect to migrate a project from outdated P2P to normal server infrastructure — silence sets in. The role hangs for months. Zero relevant applications. And the salary expectations of the rare seniors who actually make it to the technical interview land well above your hiring band.

So did the bubble burst or not?

The numbers say the opposite. The Russian economy has a critical shortage of engineers. Salaries in key areas are not falling — the median is confidently creeping up 10–15% a year. The illusion of a "collapsed market" comes purely from the colossal traffic jam at the very entrance to the profession.

The traffic jam at the entrance

Today hundreds of applications rain down on a single junior posting. That's an army of online-course graduates who believed in easy money and remote work from Bali. But the rules of the game have changed. Business is cutting costs, optimising processes and no longer wants to be a free university. The entry threshold has become steep: at the start they now expect understanding of Docker, CI/CD, databases and microservices.

It is precisely these hundreds of empty, irrelevant applications that create the HR impression of a flooded market. They produce noise — and the real work drowns in it.

Why it looks broken from inside

Your internal HR currently spends 80% of the time clearing out spam and AI-generated CVs. They open the funnel — and see noise. They report to the head of engineering — "we're getting nobody." The head of engineering reads the news — "the market is in correction." The conclusion forms itself: just wait, the right person will appear.

The right person will not appear in your inbox. The right person is already employed somewhere where the architecture is interesting, the team is sane and the offer was made on the day of the final interview.

What to do about it

Stop refreshing the posting on job boards and waiting for a strong candidate to land in your funnel. Inbound recruiting for complex roles barely works anymore. The model that still works is direct sourcing — what is sometimes called executive search in the senior segment.

That means knowing where the passive candidates sit right now: in which companies, on which projects, around which problems. It means having a reason to reach out to a specific person — not "are you open to opportunities," but something the person can actually engage with.

It means presenting your project as a step forward, not as a salary band. People who are already paid well don't change jobs for a 10% raise — they change for a problem they want to solve.

This is the work an agency does — or should do — that an internal team rarely has the bandwidth for. We don't wait for applications, we map the donor companies, we approach the specific people, and we put 3–5 vetted candidates on the desk. Ready to do the job from day one.

If you remember nothing else

The "bubble has burst" narrative is wrong for the level you actually need to hire at. The senior segment has not become easier — it has become harder, because the market is over-prospected and the strong specialists have learned to ignore noise. Your job posting is, by default, classified as noise. Get to them another way.