The Rise of the Patient Ones

A small piece of the IT market called "1C" is changing. If you believe publications on , the larger IT market is also turning somewhere. I mean both the labor market and the business market.

Some call these changes a crisis, others — a return to normalcy. The previous 2-3 years were supposedly abnormal, frenzied, an extremum. And what we have now is what things were like 2-3 years before that. So it's not a crisis. More like those 2-3 years were the crisis, just with the opposite sign.

I won't put on an expert's costume and mask to analyze the causes, mechanics, and consequences of these changes. I came to talk about what I know. Or rather, about those I know — the patient ones.

Who Are These Patient Ones?

So, the changes in the IT market are sad for most of its participants. People are losing jobs, can't find new ones, some are seeing salary cuts, businesses are having problems. Not good. I sincerely sympathize with these people — there are many in my circle. What can I say — I'll suffer too.

But there are people for whom the current changes are wonderful and beautiful. For whom the previous 2-3 years weren't a golden age but a yoke around their necks, a blocker for growth, impenetrable darkness. These people endured the extreme situation in the IT market. And now they're ready to rise. Well, not with picket signs, of course. They'll just come alive, get excited, start moving, and things will start flourishing for them.

ERP Transition Projects

The first category of patient ones, purely from the 1C world — clients who need to transition from old software to new. We had an unfortunate coincidence here — the market was feverish, and 1C Company announced the end of support for the previous flagship product called UPP. Everyone on UPP had to transition to new products — ERP or KA2. The transition deadline currently known is the end of March 2027.

And here's the rub: while the market was jumping, transition project costs shot through all the most shameful ceilings. Instead of 5 million rubles, they asked for 50 million, or even 100 million. It got absurd — they charged 2 million rubles for an "implementation roadmap." And that, mind you, is 1-2 pages of text, nearly identical for all clients.

Not to mention the quality of project execution. Well, obviously — if your budget is 10 times higher than it should be, you can drown any inefficiency and idiocy in money. Roughly speaking, you can grab 10 students and schoolkids from the nearest bus stop, even from a pedagogy college, and for 50 million rubles both train them and complete the project.

Clients who found that kind of money and transitioned — they're not the patient ones. They've already endured everything and are somehow moving on. The patient ones who are now rubbing their hands — those who refused to pay. Those who are ready to put up 5 million, 2 million, or even 1 million and get the same result. Their time has almost come — now, given falling project sales, people will take on projects even at those budgets. A year ago, no one would have even had a conversation.

The Price of a "Specialist"

I put "specialist" in quotes not because all specialists are incompetent. But because over 2-3 years, more people worthy of quotation marks accumulated in IT than there were actual specialists. To avoid offending anyone, I'll call them passengers. These are good people — they didn't deceive anyone or do anything bad — they simply entered IT when it was at its extremum, when everyone was short-staffed, when good and very good salaries were paid to those who hadn't yet learned to do their job well.

The trouble is that passengers didn't make very good use of the fat years. They should have been learning, but they were just earning money. Some did learn — they'll be fine. But those who just took the money — well, they made their choice in the marshmallow test.

So, by my subjective estimates, at the market's peak there were 1.5 passengers for every 1 specialist. But business is business, and the client, one way or another, gets quoted a price for services that includes both the specialist and the passenger. You can use my ratio or calculate your own. The passenger, unfortunately, knows less and works worse than the specialist. And their salary is lower, but not in the same proportion as their skills. Not to mention taxes, insurance contributions, and other cost structure items.

As always, the client pays. In the 1C world, we have a very specific metric — the hourly rate. Well, it so happens that we sell ourselves by the hour here, like representatives of another, much more ancient, famous, and respected profession. Our hourly rate determines both the cost of one-off tasks and mega-project budgets. Is it different in your world of general programming?

So, during the market's drunken frenzy, hourly rates rose significantly. Not because we all suddenly got better at our jobs. And not because capitalist overlords seized power over us and desperately wanted to skim superprofits — no. It's simply that passengers needed to be paid.

Their work efficiency is substantially lower. Meaning, in 1 hour of work time, they produce substantially less output than a specialist. But they need to be paid for that hour, remember, not substantially less.

And clients endured this inexplicable price increase. As well as the overall cost of support, development, and any automation whatsoever. You probably know there's a product pricing method called "cost-plus" — it was widely used in the USSR (and, by some estimates, became one of the causes of economic problems). That's when you add up all your costs, including passengers, tack on your desired profit margin, and arrive at the selling price. That's what the patient ones endured.

Now they're waiting and quietly celebrating that the situation will change. The hourly rate might not drop, but at least the specialist will be good, and there won't be any passenger to subsidize. The client, I think, wouldn't even mind an increase in the contractor's profit margin, if it comes to that. As long as the work gets done.

Employers

I work as a middle manager, so I see the employer's situation from both sides — I have to hire/train/develop/retain people, and I'm also an employee myself.

Employers endured — oh boy. There are few fools among them; the vast majority have been in the business a long time and know the difference between a specialist and a passenger. During the market's extremum, they had to seriously develop their acting skills to respond with a poker face, or even a kind smile, to passengers' questions, demands, and whims.

They had to endure because there was nobody on the labor market besides passengers. All specialists, especially good ones, were in the most acute shortage. And passengers behaved like specialists. Not immediately, of course — not from the first days or months of work. But a one-year-old passenger already fancied themselves a specialist, demanded appropriate treatment, salary, a gaming console in the office, a flexible schedule, no KPIs, and of course, respect for their personal space and work-life balance.

I don't want to say that everything listed is unnecessary nonsense — not at all. The problem is only that in return, the patient one got not a specialist and quality work, but a passenger and something sort-of-kind-of done.

HR

This isn't just about pure HR staff like personnel managers, but about everyone who participates in recruiting and onboarding.

With HR, it's complicated. On one hand — yes, they endured, much like employers, since they had to deal more with passengers than specialists. Previously, they mostly searched for and evaluated real skills; now they had to assess potential without experience or any kind of proof. And not select from a huge candidate pool but practically hunt for even somewhat capable passengers.

On the other hand, plenty of passengers settled into HR too. Where one personnel manager used to suffice, now five sit, and not all are engaged in recruiting. A mass of responsibilities and processes appeared, related to onboarding and retaining passengers. Up to separately designated HR managers for team building, events, and ordering barbecue to the office.

Salespeople

These folks, by tradition, don't get much sympathy. But they had to endure too.

First, they had to silence the remnants of their conscience to quote clients severely inflated prices. But negotiating with one's conscience wasn't hard — competitors were quoting no less, so there wasn't much choice. Previously you could compete by undercutting; now — by quoting a sum only 9 times the real value instead of 10. Besides, a salesperson can always justify themselves with market laws: if people are buying, everything's fine.

Second, what they really truly had to endure — negativity from clients about work quality. Obviously, the main cause was passengers, but the client can't always stratify the work and figure out who did what wrong where. So the negativity was directed at the whole crew, salesperson included.

If the salesperson has been in the game long and values their reputation, they had to be a patient one. If the salesperson is also a passenger, they have nothing to be ashamed of — right place, right time, entered "IT," made money. What to do next — they'll decide for themselves. A good salesperson won't go hungry.

Team Leads

Regardless of what this position is called in a specific place, I'm talking about the person who organizes the team's work and is responsible for results. It's not hard to guess what team leads had to endure and why.

How the heck do you deliver a product of the required quality in any reasonable timeframe when half your team is passengers who simply cannot solve tasks? They manage something, of course — something simpler, repetitive — but the team lead can't endlessly simplify tasks to a level where the passenger can digest them without bloating and constipation.

Team leads had to master the skills of slicing and distributing tasks so that the work gets done and passengers are at least occupied with something useful. And ideally — actually learn something.

So who had to plug the holes, who got all the difficult, urgent, and grim tasks? The team lead themselves and the specialists who aren't passengers.

Specialists

These are the last patient ones on my list.

For some, the extremum passed unnoticed — some specialists managed to wall themselves off from passengers, like from zombies. Either personally ("go to hell, all of you, I'm not participating in your circus, I'll work alone") or as a team ("we don't need passengers, we'll have a small good team, and if you don't like it — we all leave").

Others couldn't wall themselves off and had to endure. Some suffered in mixed teams, described above in the team lead section. Taking on the hardest, most important, and most critical work (as John McClane said in Die Hard 4.0, "simply because there's no one else"). Others felt the awkwardness of listening to passengers' conversations without being able to say what they really thought (can't do that — you have to be non-toxic, a constructive sweetheart).

A small (hopefully) number of specialists had to endure lost income. A specialist's salary was higher than a passenger's, but, as I wrote above, not in the same proportion as skills and competencies. The employer would have gladly paid the specialist more, but there wasn't enough money — passengers also needed to be fed. And there were, as you understand, quite a lot of them.

Now life should improve a bit for specialists. Passengers will be removed from the train, but whether employers will be able to redistribute resources toward specialists is a good question. They might just pocket the savings on the sly. In that case, specialists — former patient ones — will have to settle for the satisfied feeling of universal justice.