The successive severe crises and the economic recession have sensitively affected almost all industries in recent years, and even the booming IT sector has not escaped their effects. Successful tech companies announced mass layoffs one after the other, and in Hungary, among others, the well-known Green Fox programming school was closed. In addition, artificial intelligence (AI) has also crept in here, further complicating the search for the future. At Codecool’s Tuesday evening meetup at the same time
several industry players were optimistic about the situation and said that in the long term it is not possible to talk about a downward trend.
Digital knowledge is the new literacy
At the event organized by the programming school, the downturn in the IT labor market in the past period was reviewed from several angles, first Balázs Vinnai, the co-founder and investor of Codecool, and the president of IVSZ, which brings together the most important Hungarian infocommunication companies, spoke about the situation. According to Vinnai, due to digitization, programming today also covers an extremely broad spectrum – most programmers no longer even work for tech companies – and the entry threshold is constantly decreasing due to new technologies.
Today it is much easier to learn to program than it used to be, and although this does not mean that anyone can put together a website – just as not everyone became an electrical engineer after the advent of electricity – it is now clear that in terms of quality of life and available information there is also a huge jump in quality for those who have digital skills. This was already apparent when Codecool was founded, which is why they set the goal of effectively bringing those who did not come from there into the digital world, he said.
Photo: Balázs Flachner / Telex
According to Vinnai, digital knowledge is essentially the new literacy, and for those who have it, AI, which is still not very good at the moment, will have an even greater impact on the elimination of well-defined professions. At the same time, the president of the IVSZ also emphasized that, in addition to technical knowledge, it is increasingly important whether a programmer understands the processes of the sector in which he works, and the so-called soft skills, i.e. communication and cooperation skills, as well as the critical thinking were also appreciated.
This was highlighted in the subsequent round table discussion, and Attila Vojtek, who works at GE’s medical technology wing, the director of the agricultural equipment manufacturer AGCO, László Filetóth, the Hungarian development director of Accedo Broadband, which travels in streaming, István Hilgert, and József Boda, the national director of Codecool, also agreed with Balázs Vinnai that the decline can indeed be observed in the IT market, there are also layoffs and layoffs, but one cannot speak of an apocalyptic situation.
There is a relapse, there is no apocalypse
Boda said that the current stagnation was a bit exaggerated, according to him, it is more about the fact that the previously very high interest has now left a little lower. In the past six months, there is of course an undeniable decline, there have been 30 percent fewer job advertisements, and there is not as much demand for IT professionals, but this is partly due to the fact that digitization has accelerated tremendously during Covid. At that time, they hired a lot of programmers, and now that there is a recession, they are cutting from them, and for the positions that open up, they naturally prefer to hire the more experienced ones.
At the same time, according to him, this downward spiral will soon turn around, and Vojtek also talked about the fact that if someone starts studying now, he will be able to arrive right at the time of the boom in the labor market. Vojtek also spoke about the fact that in the current situation the training market is also being cleaned up, those who train really good people will remain. After that, there was talk of programming schools that have been bankrupted in the past, such as the already mentioned Green Fox or CodeBerry.
József Boda said that such schools were created because the demand for IT labor could not be met by traditional educational institutions, but at the same time, in a unique way, they train a large number of specialists without state support – of course, there are also state-funded training courses, but these are moderately successful. and their implementation is not smooth either. For this reason, these courses launched in the private sector are very risky, because they have no safety net during a difficult period.
According to Boda, the closed schools were forced to take this step because the downturn lasted so long that they could no longer manage themselves.
There was also a lot of talk about artificial intelligence during the conversation, unsurprisingly, Microsoft’s Copilot, which is considered to be fundamental in more and more places, came up most often, but here too it became clear that, according to the profession, it will not replace programmers, even though they may tremble in vain according to Viktor Orbán also the programmers. Filetóth emphasized that even if you can write a code, if you cannot interpret it, you will not be able to filter out possible errors of the AI. According to Hilgert, it is currently perfectly fine for coolie work and experimentation, but for more complex, context-requiring tasks, it cannot really be used for the time being.
