How Joel on Software’s helped shape the Ukrainian IT industry
This is a text version of a talk I gave at Business of Software Boston, Sept. 2016.
The story starts in year 2000. This is me (below), happily coding away. I just moved to Kyiv and got my first job as a developer, straight out of university. My salary was $150/mo and I was more than happy to take it since the best offer I could get in my hometown was like $40/mo.
Same year this random guy on the internet Joel Spolsky writes this article, The Joel Test. I don’t recall when or how exactly I found it but I was hooked immediately and became a reader. I was checking the site often to see if there are any new blog posts.
Few years later I left my full-time job to become basically a free-lancer. I was working from home, remotely, mostly for US and some European companies. Now I was paid around $1000/mo, obscene amount of money in Ukraine at the time. I was able to afford my first ever laptop, and a cell phone.
Life was good but I felt kind-of lonely at times. I missed my friends and co-workers and so I started hanging out online. Since I was a reader of Joel’s blog I found the link to the forum, Business of Software. It was great but there were few Ukrainians and discussions were often focussed on topics I didn’t care much about.
I wanted something different so I went ahead and created a Google Group. In my very first post to the group I specifically said that I wanted something akin to Joel’s forum but for those who work and live here in Ukraine.
I invited my friends to join and tried to promote the group further but it was hard. So I had an idea. I bought a domain developers.org.ua and setup a WordPress site. I become a blogger, just like Joel was. The idea was that users will find my blog, see a link to the Google Group and join the discussion.
That didn’t work that well. The site barely has like a 100 visitors a day. But then a different idea came. This was the time in Ukraine the salaries were growing fast and everyone wanted to know how much to ask during job interview. I built a simple form, where you can submit your salary anonymously and see what others are saying.
We launched company reviews, where you could share (again, anonymously) your experience of working at different companies. This was 2006, at least a year before Glassdoor was launched, btw. After these two features site got a life of its own.
Soon I started selling banner ads and got our first two (part-time) employees. We eventually launched a Jobs section, which now receives more than 2,000 job posts monthly from hundreds of companies.
Today we have almost 150,000 registered users on the site, the team grew to 7 people, we’re doing tens of thousands of dollars in revenue. We are the biggest tech and job site in Ukraine for developers. And yes, we changed the name to DOU.ua.
The rest of the country wasn’t so lucky. For several months in 2014 it looked like we can lose everything and my country itself could fall apart. It was scary. Luckily we survived. We want to participate in rebuilding new Ukraine. Since 2014 we’ve donated more than US$50,000 for army, education and various social causes.
In 2013 we also launched Djinni, a job site for developers with a twist.
Remember I said the salary at my first job was $150/mo? Well, today the average salary for a developer in Ukraine is $2000 per month and the best are paid $4000 or more.
And here is the global scorecard. The latest StackOverflow survey puts Ukraine #3 globally based on purchasing power parity for developers.
I like to think that at least some of that is because DOU and Djinni exist and DOU happened because I found Joel’s on Software blog fifteen years ago.
So if you wanted to hire developers in Ukraine and wondered why they are so expensive — well, you should blame Joel Spolsky for that.
Thank you.
P.S.: many thanks to Alexander Zaytsev (@nqst) for the help with the slides.
