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Tag: Work

  • Samsung workers strike. CEO warns of crisis

    Samsung workers strike. CEO warns of crisis

    Samsung Electronics board chairman Shin Je-yoon has issued an internal memo to employees, calling for an amicable resolution to the wage dispute. The upcoming 18-day union strike, scheduled for 21 May, is aimed at winning higher bonuses based on profits from the AI memory segment. Management warns that operational paralysis at South Korea’s largest manufacturer by revenue will hit investors, trigger an outflow of foreign capital and weaken the domestic currency. However, the key risk remains a loss of confidence from global customers and a flight to competitors at a critical market juncture.

    The escalation of this conflict reflects a deeper, structural problem in the technology sector, where workers are increasingly demanding a direct share of the profits generated by the artificial intelligence revolution. Lessons learnt from the current impasse indicate that a possible production outage will not be limited to Samsung’s internal losses. An interruption in the supply of HBM and DRAM components will immediately destabilise global supply chains, impacting the margins and schedules of leading Silicon Valley giants and delaying the deployment of AI infrastructure around the world.

    In the current situation, it is worth noting the need to revise existing incentive models to respond more flexibly to profit spikes in the most stressed divisions. It would be advisable to develop mechanisms for transparent dialogue about remuneration structure before negotiations enter a phase that makes compromise impossible. From the perspective of long-term competitiveness, it seems a sensible step to balance wage pressures with maintaining investment capacity in R&D. Ultimately, the priority remains to protect operational continuity, as this determines market position in the absolute technology race.

  • The Meta’s new strategy. Employees teach their successors AI

    The Meta’s new strategy. Employees teach their successors AI

    Inside Menlo Park, a fundamental shift in the definition of white-collar work is currently taking place. The Met, led by Mark Zuckerberg, is implementing a system that transforms the daily activities of engineers and managers into the raw material for building autonomous AI agents. The programme, called the Model Capability Initiative (MCI), is not only a new monitoring tool, but above all a signal that Silicon Valley is entering a new, aggressive phase of automation.

    According to internal company notes, MCI records mouse movements, clicks and keystrokes of employees in the US. The tool also takes occasional snapshots of the screen to teach AI models the subtleties of human interaction with the software – from handling keyboard shortcuts to navigating complex drop-down menus. What was previously an intuitive human craft becomes a training data set.

    Meta’s technical director, Andrew Bosworth, leaves no illusions about the purpose of this initiative, currently operating under the Agent Transformation Accelerator (ATA) programme. The company’s vision is of a world where AI agents do most of the work and the role of humans is reduced to that of supervisor and equalizer. To achieve this, Meta must first ‘clone’ the behavioural patterns of its top professionals.

    This strategy is inextricably linked to a deep restructuring of the workforce structure. Meta is not only planning further job cuts, but is also blurring the lines between traditional roles by introducing the universal title of ‘AI developer’. The creation of the Applied AI (AAI) team aims to create systems capable of writing, testing and shipping code independently. In this model, the software engineer ceases to be a developer and becomes a teacher of the algorithm, ultimately replacing it in repeatable processes.

    However, the initiative raises serious questions about the limits of surveillance in the white-collar sector. While real-time tracking of movements has so far been the domain of logistics staff or delivery drivers, the transfer of these methods to engineering offices sets a precedent. Legal experts point to a profound gap between the liberal approach in the US and the strict regulations in Europe. While this surveillance is legally permissible in the US, in the European Union, GDPR regulations and national labour protection laws would likely prevent the implementation of MCI on such a scale.

    Meta spokesperson Andy Stone assures that the data is not used to assess performance and that the company has safeguards in place to protect sensitive content. But for the business market, the lesson is clear: Meta is putting everything on the line. If the ‘Agent Transformation’ experiment succeeds, the company will gain an efficiency advantage that competitors may not be able to make up for without similarly compromising the privacy of their staff.

  • Samsung goes all the way and wants to block trade union strikes

    Samsung goes all the way and wants to block trade union strikes

    Samsung Electronics, the cornerstone of the global semiconductor market, has embarked on a new path of confrontation with its workers. The giant has asked the court to block the actions of its unions, which the company describes as illegal. The move is an attempt to secure production continuity at a time when global demand for artificial intelligence chips is reaching critical levels.

    The crux of the dispute centres around the 18-day strike planned for May and the methods of pressure used by the social side. While the unions accuse management of ‘declaring war’ and violating the constitutional right to protest, Samsung’s management argues that their legal intervention does not strike at the very idea of a strike, but is intended to prevent radical forms of expression, such as the occupation of production lines. For a company that has just reported an eightfold increase in operating profit to 57.2 trillion won, every day of downtime at the Pyeongtaek complex means losses running into billions of dollars.

    The workers’ frustration is deeply rooted in economic and image reasons. The market success of rival SK Hynix and the growing disparity in bonus schemes has led the workforce to demand the removal of salary caps and a closer link between bonuses and real company profits. Samsung’s record financial performance has become the unionists’ strongest argument in the negotiations, giving them the feeling that the company has capital that it is unwilling to share fairly.

    From a business perspective, the escalation of this conflict comes at the worst possible time. The global data centre infrastructure, driven by the AI arms race, is extremely sensitive to any fluctuation in the supply of DRAM and NAND. The possible paralysis of half the capacity in Pyeongtaek would instantly translate into bottlenecks, hitting sectors from automotive to consumer electronics.

    Samsung needs to act to avoid downtime and maintain growth levels, but pulling up the strings on the conflict with its employees seems a short-sighted move, given that tensions have been ongoing for several months. The company does not seem to have any idea how to resolve the conflict beyond maintaining the status quo, and the consequences, such as the occupation of production lines, could realistically affect the business. It could come to the point where the Korean giant not only has to go along with the unions, but also gifts a market ace to its competitors by being forced to halt production.

  • IT jobs for beginners: AI an opportunity instead of a threat

    IT jobs for beginners: AI an opportunity instead of a threat

    For the past few years, the technology sector has been sending a single, clear message to entry-level programmers: there is no place for you. The end of the era of cheap money, pandemic-enforced remote working and the expansion of LLM models that flawlessly generate repetitive code have almost wiped out entry-level job offers. The figures from the No Fluff Jobs and Just Join IT reports for 2025/2026 are unforgiving – the share of offers for juniors in the Polish market has fallen below 5%.

    But today, paradoxically, it is artificial intelligence, which has taken away simple implementation tasks from juniors, that is becoming their biggest opportunity to get back into the game.

    Architects instead of builders

    In the traditional development model, the junior spent the first years of his career ‘walling’ – writing simple, repetitive modules. Today, these tasks are performed by AI agents. However, experts from Kraków-based software house Miquido note that this change shifts the focus from technical skills to conceptual competence.

    Piotr Polus, Head of Technology at Miquido, argues that the line between experience levels is starting to blur. Since AI can generate project structure and write code, the key role is taken over by someone who can manage these tools. In the new paradigm, juniors no longer need to be proficient craftsmen of a particular technology stack; instead, they need to become solution architects who can think design.

    The birth of the “2030 engineer”

    The market is beginning to recognise a unique advantage for young cadres: the status of ‘AI-natives’. For the generation entering the market in 2026, working with language models is a natural reflex rather than a necessity to adapt. Companies such as Miquido, which for years restricted the recruitment of beginners, are returning to hiring juniors, but using a completely new criteria – the so-called ‘2030 engineer’ profile.

    Instead of proficiency in one programming language, interdisciplinarity, flexibility and prompting skills are sought. This strategy is based on the creation of junior-senior tandems, where young employees bring freshness in the use of the latest AI tools, and experienced experts provide the necessary oversight of business logic and system security.

    For business, the lesson is clear: investment in juniors ceases to be a form of costly patronage and becomes a way of maintaining technological agility. Those who, instead of learning the syntax of code, learn to manage the intelligence that writes that code will survive.

  • IT recruitment: why are companies losing sight of the right people in the clutter of algorithms?

    IT recruitment: why are companies losing sight of the right people in the clutter of algorithms?

    The offices of technology companies resemble finely tuned organisms. Every process has a workflow, every line of code goes through rigorous quality testing and cost optimisation has become almost a religion. However, a crack is appearing in this near-perfect landscape that cannot be patched with another system update.

    This is the moment when, despite advanced instrumentation, key positions go unfilled for months, projects drift towards delays and teams work in a state of permanent overload. The simplest diagnosis, pointing to a talent shortage in the market, becomes a convenient screen in this context, hiding a deeper, systemic decision-making paralysis.

    The scale trap in the world of interfaces

    The IT industry has built its power on a foundation of scalability. This logic dictates that every challenge can be broken down into its constituent parts and then automated. Transferring this paradigm to recruitment seemed a natural evolutionary step. If systems can be replicated, why not do the same with the people acquisition process?

    Here, however, there is a fundamental cognitive error. While technology allows for unlimited expansion of ad coverage or mass filtering of applications, in the final analysis recruitment remains an interaction between operating systems of the highest complexity: human psyches.

    Good professionals rarely react to the information noise generated by automated funnels. For them, the excess of technology in the selection process is sometimes a warning sign. Instead of the promise of modernity, they see it as an attempt to avoid direct responsibility for human selection.

    As a result, companies investing in increasingly expensive sourcing platforms are only building a facade of efficiency, underneath which lies a lack of clarity about the real needs of the organisation.

    Dictatorship of speed and erosion of quality

    In a culture focused on delivering solutions in an ‘as soon as possible’ model, time has become the only recognised measure of effectiveness. This pressure permeates HR departments, forcing a pace that excludes in-depth reflection.

    Role profiles are created in a rush, often as a compilation of the wishful thinking of various stakeholders, leading to impossible job descriptions. The speed of the process becomes a fetish that obscures its original purpose.

    However, it is worth noting that a lightning-fast recruitment process, devoid of substantive density, is completely worthless to an experienced candidate. A fast track that does not lead to concrete declarations and does not clarify the responsibility structure within the company raises rightful suspicions about the stability of the future working environment.

    When performance replaces robust fit testing, both parties enter into a relationship based on guesswork, which in hindsight proves to be the most costly strategy a business can adopt.

    Symptoms of invisible chaos

    The phenomenon of candidates dropping out at the final stage of recruitment is often interpreted as a whim of the market or the effect of counteroffers. However, an analysis of the deeper layers of this situation reveals another regularity. Top experts have an extremely sensitive radar for inconsistency. For them, contradictory messages from managers, unclear competency frameworks or fuzzy decision-making during interviews are symptoms of a sickness that is affecting the inside of the company. Here, recruitment acts as a translation service: it is supposed to translate the culture and internal chaos of the organisation into a language the candidate can understand. If the translation is sloppy, the recipient simply refuses to read further.

    The uncertainty emitted by the organisation acts as a protective barrier through which only the determined or less experienced break through. Those who have a choice treat chaos in the recruitment process as a reliable predictor of chaos in project management.

    In this way, the company, seeking to avoid risk by automating and delegating decisions, paradoxically generates the greatest possible risk: adverse selection.

    Primacy of clarity over instrumentation

    Getting out of the impasse requires a painful abandonment of faith in the ‘magic button’ for many technology organisations. The real bottleneck in recruitment is not in the tool stack, but in the conceptual realm.

    Successful talent acquisition begins where optimising Excel tables ends and precisely defining roles begins. Companies that are successful in this field invest primarily in clarity of message and the courage to make clear decisions.

    Technology should play a servant role – structuring and accelerating what has already been thought through. However, it cannot replace the thought process of leaders. Consciously reducing complexity, abandoning exaggerated promises in favour of raw specifics and restoring personal responsibility for each new person in the team are steps that build genuine employer appeal.

    Cultural stability, manifested in a predictable and logical recruitment process, is a luxury good for which professionals are prepared to pay with loyalty.

  • The job market in Poland: The most desirable qualities of candidates

    The job market in Poland: The most desirable qualities of candidates

    For years, there has been a belief in technology and business circles that hard skills are the only safe currency in the labour market. However, the latest ManpowerGroup data suggests a significant correction to this thesis. The Polish labour market, traditionally associated with a strong emphasis on specialisation, is undergoing a transformation towards a model in which flexibility and development potential become more important than the sum of current technical skills.

    The analysis shows that for 39% of Polish employers the key selection criterion is now readiness to learn. This is a signal that companies have stopped looking for employees who are ‘ready for now’ and have started investing in people capable of adapting in conditions of permanent change. Professionalism and work ethic, indicated by 36% of respondents, remain the foundation, but it is the set of soft competencies – communication and teamwork – that really closes the recruitment processes.

    IT: Critical thinking instead of knowing the code

    Of particular interest is the IT sector, which breaks out of the general pattern. While flexibility dominates the overall picture, critical thinking and problem-solving (42%) takes the lead in technology. This pragmatic approach stems from the specific nature of the industry, where technology is merely a tool and the real value is the ability to break down complex processes into their essentials.

    It is worth noting that Polish employers attribute more importance to digital competencies (25%) than their global counterparts (16%). This disparity may indicate an ongoing intensive catch-up in Poland to digitise business processes, while Western markets have already shifted their focus to relationship management and inclusivity.

    The end of the “top specialist”

    Marta Szymańska of Manpower points to a phenomenon that redefines team-building strategy. With two similar technical profiles, employment is almost always determined by cultural fit and the ability to cooperate. Companies are increasingly accepting deficiencies in a candidate’s subject-matter knowledge, as long as he or she demonstrates high proficiency in acquiring new competencies.

    About the survey: The ManpowerGroup survey was conducted between 1 and 31 October 2025 on 502 companies in Poland and 39,063 globally.

  • Microsoft halts cloud and sales hiring

    Microsoft halts cloud and sales hiring

    Microsoft has ordered managers of key units, including its strategic cloud division and North American sales groups, to halt the recruitment of new employees, reports The Information. The decision, while not corporate-wide, signals a deeper shift in resource management at the threshold of the end of the fiscal year.

    Microsoft’s move is a classic example of margin optimisation in the face of gigantic capital expenditure. The company, which employs more than 220,000 people globally, is under increasing pressure from Wall Street. Investors, accustomed to the steady growth of the Azure sector, are anxious to see record spending on the data centres and processors needed to support language models. The hiring freeze in sales and cloud infrastructure is a signal that the company is looking for savings where growth rates have stabilised in order to fund the areas with the highest potential for breakthrough.

    Importantly, the recruitment lock-in is selective. The teams responsible for developing Microsoft’s Copilot tool and key AI projects still have the green light to recruit talent. This is a clear indication that, for CEO Satya Nadella, ‘artificial intelligence’ is no longer just an add-on to the portfolio, but a new business core to which the cost structure of the entire organisation is subordinated.

    Microsoft’s actions are part of a wider ‘year of efficiency’ trend in Silicon Valley. While Meta is cutting a fifth of its workforce and Amazon is correcting pandemic-era over-expansion, Microsoft is taking the route of surgical precision. Instead of mass layoffs on the scale of its market rivals, the company is relying on budgetary discipline in traditional verticals.

    Technology companies are not only building AI for their customers, but are themselves going through a painful process of reorganisation in which human capital has to give way to investment in computing power.

  • New redundancies at Meta: company cuts costs to invest in AI

    New redundancies at Meta: company cuts costs to invest in AI

    Meta Platforms is taking another step towards a ‘year of efficiency’ that seems to have no end in sight. Last Wednesday, the Menlo Park-based giant carried out another round of layoffs, involving several hundred employees in key business units. Although the scale of the cuts is smaller than in previous years, the signal sent to the market is clear: Mark Zuckerberg’s company is prioritising resources where it sees the future, ruthlessly slashing spending in other areas.

    According to sources close to the company, the reductions have mainly affected the Reality Labs departments, the social media operations teams and the recruitment structures. This is a strategic shift of emphasis.

    While Reality Labs continues to generate billions of dollars in losses in pursuit of its metaversum vision, the Met must simultaneously fund the murderous AI arms race. Spending projections for 2026, as high as $169 billion, leave no illusions – the battle for supremacy in AI requires gigantic capital that must be raised from somewhere.

    The company’s official position is to ‘restructure regularly to achieve strategic objectives’. But for business analysts, the deeper context is more complex. The Met is struggling with rising labour costs, driven by the need to attract the most expensive engineering talent on the market specialising in machine learning.

    As a result, the company is pursuing a ’tissue replacement’ strategy: reducing staff in mature or less promising areas in order to free up budget for astronomical salaries for Llama model experts.

    With nearly 79,000 employees, the company is no longer a monolith focused solely on growth. Today, it is an organisation that is learning to operate in continuous optimisation mode. Every vacancy in the recruitment team brings the company closer to funding the next H100 processor cluster. An era has dawned in Silicon Valley in which innovation is no longer just about creating the new, but above all about daring to let go of what is no longer a priority.

  • Talent management in IT. How automation is changing the labour market

    Talent management in IT. How automation is changing the labour market

    Today’s technology industry has reached a point that goes far beyond the mere adaptation of new tools. There is a huge fascination in the market with the speed at which people with relatively little experience can deliver complex code, using generative artificial intelligence.

    However, this phenomenon creates a dangerous illusion of instant perfection. The enthralment of widespread automation, combined with the drastic reduction in recruitment for entry-level positions, is akin to taking out a high-interest mortgage on the future productivity of the organisation.

    This raises the crucial question for business continuity of who will take responsibility for strategic systems architecture in a decade’s time if the space for young talent to learn the craft is taken away today.

    Generative artificial intelligence excels as an advanced assistant, but it is a mistake to treat it as a substitute for a real expert. These tools allow lower-skilled profiles to solve repetitive problems efficiently, impressing decision-makers at first glance and having a positive impact on short-term metrics.

    However, generating a syntactically correct result is not the same as understanding it in depth. A programmer who relies solely on the prompts of the algorithm gradually loses his or her ability to make a critical assessment. It is then difficult to verify whether the proposed solution is optimal, safe and scalable in the long term.

    After all, the real value of software engineering lies not in knowing the syntax alone, but in being able to look at a system holistically and solve complex business problems.

    Market data from 2022 onwards mercilessly expose a worrying trend. The number of vacancies for junior positions is falling dramatically. Companies, in a natural reflex to optimise costs, are choosing to delegate the simplest tasks to language models.

    However, this closes a key testing ground. Technical mastery cannot simply be transferred to the human mind with a suitably formulated question.

    Proficiency is forged through hundreds of hours spent painstakingly analysing bugs, testing hypotheses and seeking answers to the fundamental question of why a piece of architecture is not working as intended. By eliminating this unimpressive early career stage, organisations are unwittingly dismantling the natural incubator in which future designers of advanced systems mature.

    In the face of these changes, the knowledge of experienced professionals becomes more valuable than ever. It is the senior experts who have the necessary business context to decide which processes are worth automating and how to integrate the fragments generated into a stable, secure ecosystem.

    However, the phenomenon of invisible work intensification arises here. When less experienced employees generate code en masse with the help of artificial intelligence, a gigantic bottleneck is created at the review stage. Instead of spending the freed up time on high-level innovation and mentoring, the best specialists are drowning in the processes of reviewing thousands of lines of code, trying to catch machine hallucinations and logic gaps.

    Working extended hours does not translate into higher productivity in this case, and the growing technological debt is beginning to overwhelm the most competent individuals in the company.

    The new definition of leadership in the age of artificial intelligence requires an understanding that digital transformation is not only about the smooth implementation of modern programming assistants. It is first and foremost a rigorous strategy for managing quality and generational knowledge within the company.

    Automation that is not accompanied by a talent reproduction plan leads the organisation down a dead end. It becomes necessary to consciously maintain mentoring programmes and space for the development of budding engineers, even if in the short term this seems financially a considerable burden.

    It is worth recalling at this point Seneca’s philosophical maxim that for a ship that knows no port of destination, no wind is auspicious. Similarly, in the technology business, artificial intelligence is only a powerful driving wind, not the ultimate goal.

    Market success will not be measured by the sheer volume of software generated or the hours saved. In the long term, the organisations that will win will be those that do not get carried away with speed, but maintain control over the quality of the products delivered, basing their structures on teams capable of critical and independent thinking.

  • Signify announces group layoffs in Piła. The reduction will cover 14% of the staff

    Signify announces group layoffs in Piła. The reduction will cover 14% of the staff

    Signify is planning a significant reduction in employment at its manufacturing plant in Piła. According to an official notice to trade unions, the redundancy process is expected to affect 295 people, which is around 14% of the total factory workforce.

    Information about the planned cuts was made public by Adam Bogrycewicz, a councillor of the Wielkopolska regional assembly, pointing to the potentially difficult material situation of hundreds of families in the Piła region. According to local government representatives, the scale of the redundancies is a signal of the worsening economic situation, which has put increasing pressure on large employers in northern Wielkopolska over the past two years.

    For the Pilsen region, where Signify remains one of the key pillars of the economy, the announced redundancies represent the most serious staffing challenge in years. Although the company argues the moves to optimise structures, local authorities fear a knock-on effect on the service sector and sub-suppliers working with the plant.

  • The efficiency paradox: Why the Meta is cutting jobs again

    The efficiency paradox: Why the Meta is cutting jobs again

    Mark Zuckerberg, who has declared 2023 as the ‘year of productivity’, clearly hasn’t put a full stop yet. According to sources close to the Menlo Park-based giant, the Met is preparing for another wave of restructuring, which could involve up to 20% of its staff. Although company spokesperson Andy Stone describes these reports as speculation, market logic suggests otherwise: the Big Tech industry is entering a phase of drastic capital shift from people to infrastructure.

    The capital-intensive pursuit of superintelligence

    The decision to potentially say goodbye to nearly 16,000 employees is not due to the financial crisis, but to a gigantic appetite for computing power. Meta plans to invest $600 billion in data centres by 2028. In a world where a single prominent AI researcher can expect a remuneration package going into the hundreds of millions of dollars, and where acquisitions of startups such as Manus cost billions, traditional employment structures are becoming ballast for the company.

    It’s a strategic turnaround after a series of stumbles. Problems with the Llama 4 models and delays in the development of the flagship Avocado project have meant that Zuckerberg has to look for savings where AI is starting to realistically replace humans. Meta’s CEO openly admits that tasks that once required entire teams are now being handled by a single talented person supported by algorithms.

    New industry standard

    Meta is not alone in this strategy. We are seeing a broader trend in which technology leaders – from Amazon to Jack Dorsey’s Block – are optimising staffing, pointing to the increasing proficiency of generative tools. Productivity measured by the number of ‘heads’ is going away in favour of process efficiencies based on automation.

    It is a risky move, but a necessary one. The Met needs to prove that it can prove the promise of super-intelligence, even if the price of doing so is a loss of internal structural stability. If the announced cuts come to fruition, it will be the ultimate confirmation that in Silicon Valley AI has ceased to be just a support tool and has become the reason why desks in open spaces remain empty.

  • Recognition deficit: Why Polish companies are losing out to silent leaders

    Recognition deficit: Why Polish companies are losing out to silent leaders

    One of the cheapest and most effective instruments for building corporate value remains drastically undervalued. Although 97% of employees declare that recognition has a direct impact on their motivation and quality of work, corporate reality paints a very different picture. The latest data from Gi Group Holding and Grafton Recruitment exposes the deep gap between the declared organisational culture and the day-to-day experience of teams.

    The problem is not marginal – more than half of employees feel that their efforts are invisible to the organisation. Importantly, this feeling does not depend on the scale of the company, but on the specifics of the department. While the marketing and PR industry enjoys high levels of emotional gratification (74%), finance and operations departments work in a kind of information vacuum. For CFOs and COOs, this is a wake-up call: lack of appreciation is not just a ‘soft’ HR issue, but a real risk of staff turnover and a decline in proactivity, which nearly one in three respondents indicate as a key effect of recognition.

    The anchronous feedback model remains a key barrier. Despite the increasing digitalisation of work, up to 50% of employees receive feedback only once or twice a year. In the dynamic business environment of 2026, such an interval makes feedback an archived statistic rather than a corrective tool. The only optimism is that the group of people receiving monthly support has increased to 21%, suggesting a slow professionalisation of middle management.

    The preference for forms of recognition itself is also evolving. The once dominant autonomy (down from 37% to 28.5%) has given way to pragmatic benefits, which now motivate 42% of respondents. At the same time, public recognition is the least desirable form, forcing leaders to move towards a direct and personalised relationship model.

    From a business point of view, the conclusion is clear: appreciation is an investment in process stability. As the experts at Wyser Executive Search and Grafton Recruitment point out, people leave organisations not just for higher salaries, but because of the sense of anonymity of their efforts. In an age of scrambling for talent, a sincere ‘thank you’ and regular quarterly feedback become a competitive advantage that cannot be easily copied, and that makes a real difference to the bottom line.

  • The end of cheap labour. Poland relies on AI experts

    The end of cheap labour. Poland relies on AI experts

    Poland’s modern business services (BSS) sector is undergoing its most fundamental transformation since its accession to global supply chains. The latest Hays 2026 Salary Report paints a picture of a market that is definitively breaking away from the label of ‘Europe’s back-office’. The era of simple, transactional processes based on pure cost arbitrage is giving way to an advanced technological ecology in which the primacy of expertise over labour volume is becoming the new paradigm.

    Algorithmic revolution in the employment structure

    Underpinning this change is the unprecedented adoption of artificial intelligence. In just twelve months, the percentage of workers in the sector using AI tools has risen from 37% to 60%. This is not just a tool evolution, but a structural upheaval. Automation is successively cannibalising simple administrative tasks, resulting in the extinction of quantitative recruitment projects. Instead of competing on the price of a man-hour, Poland is starting to bid on the quality of intellectual capital.

    The new currency of competence: Hybrid and Expertise

    Despite the ongoing transformation, the sector is not losing its growth momentum, although it is changing its vector of expansion. As many as 82% of organisations plan to actively recruit, focusing, however, on highly specialised profiles. The current needs landscape is defined by three pillars:

    • Technology: the dominance of AI, machine learning (63%) and data analytics.
    • Strategy: People management and business analysis (66%).
    • Adaptability: Ability to permanently re-skill and operate in a hybrid model.

    Investors, who only a few years ago were locating IT support centres in Poland, are now looking here for cyber-security architects and specialised software engineers. This shift is creating a specific market tension: with an increasing number of applications, as many as 41% of companies report a critical shortage of specialist competences.

    Outlook: Towards a high value-added economy

    Although the process of phasing out simple processes raises natural concerns in regions heavily dependent on the traditional BPO model, in the long term it is a healing process for the Polish economy. The shift from task execution to strategic value creation positions Poland as a mature technology market.

    Success in this new reality will depend on the synergy of the public and private sectors in the area of workforce retraining. Poland enters 2026 with moderate optimism, turning quantity into quality and cheap labour into a unique synergy of human intelligence and algorithms.

  • Where have IT jobs gone? 3 key growth areas after the 2025 wave of redundancies

    Where have IT jobs gone? 3 key growth areas after the 2025 wave of redundancies

    The year 2025 made economic history not as a year of crisis, but as a moment of great reconfiguration. According to a recent report by RationalFX, the technology sector has eliminated almost 245,000 jobs worldwide during this time. These figures, while alarming at first glance, represent only the facade of a deeper process: a sustained shift from a scale-based employment model to one driven by artificial intelligence-driven efficiency.

    Today, at the beginning of 2026, the key question for business leaders is no longer ‘how many people have gone out of business’, but ‘where is the capital that has been freed up by this transformation being invested’.

    The balance of the “Great Reset”

    Analysis of moves by giants such as Intel, which cut staff from 109,000 to 75,000 employees, and Amazon, eliminating more than 20,000 positions, indicates a move away from the ‘redundancy’ strategy that prevailed in the cheap money era. As RationalFX analyst Alan Cohen notes, last year’s cuts were different from previous waves of layoffs. They were not a short-term cost adjustment, but a permanent structural adjustment.

    Companies have stopped treating job cuts as a defensive reflex to high interest rates. Instead, they treated them as offensive groundwork for ‘AI-native’ organisations. In this context, 2025 was the end of IT as we knew it – a sector where success was measured by the number of engineers. 2026 becomes the dawn of the era of integrated IT, where value is generated by a symbiosis of human strategy and machine execution.

    Anatomy of a fallen position

    The hardest hit were the departments that for years formed the operational ‘body’ of the corporation: customer service, administration and human resources. Salesforce’s decision to reduce its support staff by 4,000 people or the massive cutbacks in data processing areas at IBM and HP are clear signals – roles involving manual data translation and repetitive interactions have been permanently taken over by autonomous agents.

    It is worth noting, however, that this elimination of roles has not always gone hand in hand with immediate success. The industry is currently facing a so-called ‘productivity gap’. Companies have got rid of old structures, but are still learning how to manage new ones. It is in this gap – between the potential of technology and its real implementation – that the new staffing needs for 2026 are born.

    New bastions of growth: the competence of tomorrow

    Although the RationalFX report suggests that the wave of redundancies may continue until the end of the first quarter of 2026, in parallel we are seeing the emergence of new competence centres. So where are the jobs being created?

    1 Orchestration and Governance AI: The massive deployment of automation at companies like Accenture (11,000 redundancies with a gigantic commitment to AI) is creating a demand for governance experts. It is no longer about programming algorithms, but about ethical and operational orchestration – ensuring systems are secure, compliant with regulations and consistent with company strategy.

    2 Value engineering and performance ‘recovery’: The market is looking for professionals who can fill the gap that Alan Cohen mentions. Companies need people capable of translating the raw power of AI into real margins. This is a new category of business-technology consultants who understand processes more deeply than old-school coders.

    3 Transformational systems architecture: The example of HP, integrating AI across all operations, shows that hardware and software are no longer separate entities. There is a growing need for architects who can design entire ecosystems of hybrid (people-machine) work.

    Survival strategies: the BT model versus shock therapy

    An interesting reference point is the UK’s BT, which has chosen a strategy of a ‘steady pace’ of job cuts until 2030. This approach stands in contrast to the aggressive, one-off cuts in the US (which have concentrated nearly 70% of global redundancies).

    There is a lesson here for business leaders: rapid downsizing, as in the case of Intel, allows for a quick financial reset, but carries the risk of losing intellectual capital. In contrast, an evolutionary model, based on reskilling (as at Tata Consultancy Services), preserves the domain knowledge needed to properly ‘feed’ AI models with data about the company’s processes.

    A new profile for the IT worker

    The year 2026 will not be a time of massive returns to old recruitment patterns. The IT job market is not shrinking in value terms, it is undergoing a fundamental metamorphosis. The place of the ‘task contractor’ is being taken by the ‘solution architect’.

    The 245,000 redundancies are a tragic event on a micro level, but on a macro level it is a huge release of talent. For smaller players and startups, 2026 is an opportunity to recruit Big Tech experts who have hitherto been out of their financial reach. It is a time of democratisation of competencies that could result in a new wave of innovation, as long as business learns from the painful lessons of the past year.

  • Why is Gen Z more afraid of AI than Boomers? Surprising findings from a survey of 35 markets

    Why is Gen Z more afraid of AI than Boomers? Surprising findings from a survey of 35 markets

    The surge in the number of job vacancies requiring ‘AI agent’ skills – by an impressive 1587% – is not just another recruitment statistic, but signals a fundamental shift in the structure of global employment. Randstad’s latest ‘Workmonitor’ report, based on analysis of more than 3 million listings and research in 35 countries, sheds light on the growing tension between technological acceleration and workforce sentiment. While companies are aggressively automating simple, transactional tasks, a clear generational and perceptual divide is being drawn in the labour market.

    Generation Z is proving to be the most vulnerable to pressure. Young workers, entering a market increasingly dominated by chatbots and algorithms, show the highest levels of anxiety about their professional future. Paradoxically, it is the baby boom generation (baby boomers) who show more confidence in surveys and are calmer about adapting new tools. Sander van Noordende, CEO of Randstad, aptly diagnoses this phenomenon, pointing to a dualism of attitudes: employees see the potential of technology, but remain sceptical about employers’ intentions. The fear that AI will mainly be used to cut costs and screw up productivity, rather than really support employees, is widespread – almost half of those surveyed believe that the only beneficiaries of this revolution will be corporations.

    The report also reveals a drastic gap in the assessment of economic realities, which can be challenging for business leaders. As many as 95% of employers anticipate growth in the coming year, while this optimism is shared by only 51% of employees. This disparity is particularly worrying in the context of global macroeconomic uncertainty, driven by trade wars and aggressive US foreign policy. For executives, the conclusion of Randstad’s data is clear: the success of AI investments, for which many tech companies are still waiting for a return, will depend not only on algorithms, but above all on the ability to bridge the trust gap between boards and employees.

  • Earnings in IT 2025: Up to £25k for a B2B senior. Who gained the most?

    Earnings in IT 2025: Up to £25k for a B2B senior. Who gained the most?

    After two years of painful correction and frozen budgets, the Polish technology sector is finally seeing a rebound. According to the latest report by Just Join IT and N-iX, the number of job offers in 2025 increased by 8.42 per cent year-on-year, exceeding 110,000 advertisements.

    However, this is not a return to the ‘El Dorado’ of mass recruitment, but an entry into a phase of mature consolidation where capital is flowing to where it can see a direct return on investment: in analytics and artificial intelligence.

    The most symbolic change took place in the technology structure. After years of undivided dominance by JavaScript, the Data category has taken over the primacy, comprising 10.78 per cent of all offerings. The dethroning of the frontend in favour of analytics, Big Data and Data Science signals a fundamental shift in business strategies.

    Companies have stopped focusing solely on building new interfaces, shifting the focus to optimising processes and learning from their resources. This trend is reinforced by the rapidly growing AI/ML segment.

    Although artificial intelligence accounts for less than 5 per cent of advertisements, this is where specialists are seeing record salary increases of 15 per cent and the volume of offers has quadrupled.

    However, the market recovery is selective and brutal for newcomers. The barrier to entry in the IT industry has reached historic highs. As many as 96 per cent of all adverts last year were aimed at seniors and mids. Juniors, with only 4.79 per cent of the market share of offers, became a statistical margin.

    Rather than investing in staff training, employers are looking for ready-made competencies that scale the effectiveness of teams from day one.

    In terms of salaries, 2025 has widened the gap between B2B contracts and employment contracts. This is most evident at the mid-level, where the earnings gap reaches 26 per cent in favour of contracts.

    B2B seniors can count on an average net salary of nearly PLN 25,000, which is attracting more and more experts to this cooperation model. Although remote working remains the standard (74 per cent of offers), managers are increasingly bold in promoting the hybrid model. The number of adverts requiring partial presence in the office increased by 29 per cent, suggesting a slow retreat from 100 per cent remote work to building an organisational culture in the ‘4+1’ or ‘3+2’ model.

    The year 2026 promises to be a time of further specialisation. The era of easy money is over, and the era of precise investment in technologies that make a real difference to companies’ bottom line has begun.

  • Engineers are too expensive to watch over servers

    Engineers are too expensive to watch over servers

    If we look back, the common denominator of almost all of mankind’s revolutionary achievements was speed. From the invention of the wheel, to the internal combustion engine, to the printing press, which radically accelerated the distribution of knowledge. The internet closed this process by introducing real-time communication. However, history teaches us that the innovation race is no longer just about running faster. In the age of digital transformation, where technology life cycles are shortening from years to months, traditional five-year strategic plans have become a fiction. Today, the challenge for business is not the speed of response to failure, but the ability to anticipate the future before it arrives.

    For the technical teams, this race took a dizzying turn as virtualisation and the cloud redefined the concept of infrastructure. First we separated hardware from systems, and then the cloud freed us from physical server rooms. In theory, this gave CIOs the tools to respond to business needs at the speed of everyday emergencies. In practice, however, it has led to one of the biggest paradoxes of modern IT.

    The duality of the CIO: Between stability and chaos

    Today’s IT director operates in a state of perpetual disunity. On the one hand, he must be an innovator implementing the latest software development models. On the other, a guardian of the ‘digital open-air museum’, keeping legacy systems that have been responsible for key processes such as payroll or customer billing for years almost intact.

    This duality between the past and the future has forced companies to manage hybrid and extremely heterogeneous architectures. Combining cloud services from multiple providers with in-house on-premise environments has become the norm rather than the exception. While the cloud model has reached a maturity that allows for cost optimisation and compliance, it has brought with it a new layer of complexity. Managing an ecosystem where each element has its own tools, security policies and cost structures is becoming an operational nightmare.

    This is where agnostic technologies such as containerisation come to the rescue. They allow this complexity to be unified, creating an environment where the key is no longer where the workload is executed, but what requirements it meets. This is the first step to regaining control. The second is a fundamental shift in the management paradigm – from reactive to predictive.

    From reaction to prediction. AI as the analyst of the future

    With the consolidation of the cloud as the dominant operating model, it seemed that we had reached the speed limit. However, the next evolution is not about going faster, but getting ahead of the facts. Reactive systems management – putting out fires after they have broken out – is a model that is too costly and has too much business risk.

    The modern approach involves the use of artificial intelligence in IT operations. It is not about simple, static rules like ‘if CPU usage exceeds 80%, add a server’. Real intelligence in the cloud involves deep analysis and correlation of thousands of logs and metrics per second. These systems learn the ‘pulse’ of a company’s digital environment, identifying anomalous patterns before they realistically affect users.

    By provisioning the cloud with intelligence, it is possible not only to automate the resolution of basic incidents, but also to predict peaks and valleys of demand or even market trends themselves. This gives technical teams something invaluable: an understanding of what is about to happen in their infrastructure. In a world where everything is moving faster than ever, prediction is becoming the only real competitive advantage.

    Unleashing talent. Technology at the service of man

    However, the business value of the intelligent cloud goes far beyond server stability. More broadly, it is a key element of a modern talent management strategy. Automation and prediction mean freeing high-calibre professionals from operational pressures and routine tasks.

    When advanced algorithms take on the role of ‘digital gatekeeper’, the talent and energy of IT teams can be redirected to initiatives of much higher strategic value. Instead of monitoring performance metrics, engineers can focus on improving the customer experience (Customer Experience), implementing new functionalities or conducting pilot tests that simply lacked time in the reactive model.

    Business transformation is inextricably linked to changing the way we think and work. We need to be aware that equipping the cloud with intelligence is the next natural evolutionary step, similar to the migration to the cloud itself years ago. It is a tool that allows people to stop being the ‘mechanics’ of the system and become its architects.

    Transformation is a process, not a project

    It is crucial to understand that digital transformation is not a one-off implementation project with a start and end date. It is a process of continuous improvement, a continuous loop of improvements.

    The introduction of prediction and automation into IT environments is precisely part of this never-ending development. It allows companies to move out of survival mode and into proactive market shaping mode. Ultimately, technology is only (and as much as) a tool. The real purpose of the intelligent cloud is to create a space where human creativity, backed by computing power, is free to build the future of the organisation.

  • Poland vice-leader in surveillance in Europe. 36% of employees feel under surveillance

    Poland vice-leader in surveillance in Europe. 36% of employees feel under surveillance

    More than a third of Polish employees feel that their work activity is closely monitored. ADP’s latest study ‘People at work 2025‘ shows that only Switzerland is ahead of us in this respect in Europe. Although globally we are far from the level of scrutiny felt in India (64 per cent), the result of 36 per cent places Poland well above markets such as Japan and South Africa.

    A detailed analysis of the data yields findings that may surprise IT and HR managers. Contrary to intuition, the feeling of being watched is not correlated exclusively with remote working and the use of activity monitoring software (so-called bossware). The percentage of employees declaring that they are being supervised is almost identical for those working from home (35 per cent) and those performing stationary duties (34 per cent). Paradoxically, the greatest freedom is declared by hybrid workers.

    Moreover, this pressure increases with career level. Senior managers complain about control far more often (38 per cent) than professionals (26 per cent). This suggests that the problem lies not in the technology itself, but in the organisational culture. As the ADP experts note, it is not ‘digital Big Brother’ that is most troublesome, but pervasive micromanagement. Frequent status meetings, the need for constant reporting and a long list of addressees in company emails create an atmosphere of mistrust. For executives, this is compounded by pressure from investors and boards, which cascades down to the lower levels of the organisation.

    The report also reveals important demographic differences that should be a wake-up call for Diversity & Inclusion departments. The feeling of being controlled is clearly stronger among ethnic minorities. Although in Poland this disparity (14 percentage points) is smaller than in Italy or Germany, it remains significant. There is also a noticeable correlation with age – the youngest employees (Gen Z and younger millenials) feel surveillance much more acutely than their older colleagues in the 55+ group, which may be due to a different definition of autonomy at work.

    For business leaders, the lessons are clear: investing in productivity monitoring tools can be counterproductive if not accompanied by a culture of trust. In the modern working environment, it is becoming crucial to move away from process verification to assessing actual results.

  • From controller to mentor. Why are ‘soft’ competencies the hardest currency in AI?

    From controller to mentor. Why are ‘soft’ competencies the hardest currency in AI?

    In classic IT, the career path was simple and predictable: whoever had the most technical expertise and the best control over processes was promoted. Expertise was the currency and planning skills were the guarantee of success. Today, this paradigm is collapsing before our eyes. In a world where algorithms analyse data faster than any analyst, and generative artificial intelligence optimises code in real time, the old attributes of power are becoming a common commodity. The real challenge for the modern manager, then, is not the implementation of yet another tool, but a fundamental change in identity. Technology is forcing a shift from task management to uncertainty management.

    Many technology leaders today face a question that would have seemed absurd a decade ago: if machines think, decide and predict, what task is left for humans? The answer lies not in the new technical certifications, but in a sphere that IT has for years treated neglectfully – attitude.

    The trap of industrial thinking in a digital world

    The paradox of today’s IT sector is that, while selling the technologies of tomorrow to customers, many companies internally still operate on the principles of yesterday. In the DACH region (and increasingly in Poland), the attachment to the industrial era model is still strong: processes must be optimised, hierarchies concretised and control is the dominant form of coexistence.

    In such an environment, artificial intelligence is often misunderstood merely as a ‘faster tool’ – turbocharging for existing structures. This is a mistake. Technology actually acts like a magnifying glass: it speeds up the flow of information, creates unforgiving transparency and changes power relationships. If a leader tries to compete with AI on control, micro-management and data processing – he or she is doomed to failure. Algorithms will always be better at it.

    Real transformation requires an understanding that the central questions in management have shifted. We no longer ask: “How can I control people more effectively?”, but: “How can I enable their development?”. This requires a redesign of leadership from a hierarchical model to an enabling model.

    Human-Ready Leadership – an attitude, not just a method

    Experts such as Pascal Bornet and researcher Niklas Volland point to the need for a new approach, termed ‘Human-Ready Leadership’. This is not another trendy agile methodology, but a fundamental attitude that combines technological competence with emotional maturity.

    In a world dominated by data, the manager becomes a translator between two worlds. On the one hand, we have machine logic – precise, based on facts, but devoid of context. On the other, we have human intuition – disordered but full of meaning and moral judgement. The role of the leader is to live with this contradiction and build bridges. Those who blindly follow data (data-driven) lose sight of the wider context. Those who trust only their intuition ignore the facts. Effective leadership is about balancing both – using AI as a powerful tool, but not a substitute for human judgement.

    In this view, leadership ceases to be a controlling body and becomes a source of orientation and trust. The manager no longer needs to ‘know everything’. Instead, he must know how to make sense of the information provided by the systems.

    Psychological safety as a foundation for innovation

    Perhaps the greatest lever available to the modern IT leader is organisational culture. Artificial intelligence excels at automating the familiar and the repetitive. However, innovation is born where we step into the unknown. AI cannot create a ‘learning space’ where experimentation is safe.

    This task is entirely up to the individual. Research clearly shows that teams are most innovative when they can work without fear. A culture of error, openness and trust are no longer a nice-to-have add-on in the IT industry. They are a hard business requirement for transformation.

    If a leader sanctions mistakes and demands perfection at every stage, it creates an atmosphere of paralysis. Employees will not experiment with new AI solutions for fear of the consequences of getting it wrong. Leadership in the digital age must create a ‘resonance room’ where ideas mature and responsibility is shared rather than enforced with penalties.

    Self-management – transformation begins in the mirror

    The most difficult piece of this puzzle, however, is not the technology or the team, but the leader himself. At the beginning of any transformation stands an awareness of one’s own limitations. In order to effectively lead people through uncertainty (and AI generates a lot of it), you must first understand yourself: your own fears, need for control and blind spots.

    “Human-Ready Leadership starts with self-reflection. It requires the courage to admit that one does not have all the answers. It requires making decisions that are not always mathematically perfect, but are ‘humanly’ right.

    Leaders who cling to old patterns of control are actually stunting the growth of their organisations. Those who are able to trust – both technology and people – are changing the paradigm. AI ceases to be a threat or a replacement for them and becomes a partner. Leadership becomes a process of accompaniment rather than dictating terms. It is here, in the realm of mentality, not in the server room, that the success of the digital transformation is decided.

    Humanity as strategic capital

    Technology is never neutral – it always reflects the values of those who use it. This gives leadership in the AI age a strong moral dimension. Managers become curators of accountability. They must ensure that decisions supported by algorithms remain transparent, understandable and fair.

    Paradoxically, the more processes are automated, the more valuable the non-programmable becomes. Empathy, moral clarity and the ability to build relationships become real competitive advantages. Companies that see ‘humanity’ as a strategic asset gain customer and employee loyalty that no artificial intelligence can simulate.

  • The 4-day working week is losing supporters

    The 4-day working week is losing supporters

    The idea of a 4-day working week , not long ago seen as the almost certain future of the market, is beginning to lose popularity. According to the latest Manpower report “The mood of the Polish labour market”, support for this solution in Poland has fallen. It is currently viewed positively by 61% of those surveyed, down 4 percentage points year-on-year. At the same time, the group of sceptics is growing (21%, an increase of 5 percentage points). The key inhibitor appears to be fear for finances – as many as 65% of employees fear a reduction in salary when implementing such a model. This is a significant increase in fear, given that a year ago the percentage was 50%.

    The Manpower report reveals clear dividing lines. Generation Z remains the biggest enthusiasts of the shortened week (71% support among 18-29 year olds), while reserve increases with age – among those 60+, only 44% support the idea. Interestingly for the tech industry, executives (53% support) and senior managers (55%) are the most sceptical of the change. Manpower experts suggest that managers, mainly held accountable for performance and meeting targets, do not see any real benefit in simply reducing hours, while being concerned about business continuity.

    Paradoxically, although Poles increasingly believe that a shorter week will improve their work-life balance (67% agree, up 5 pp), financial concerns take the upper hand. It is economic calculation that seems to be the key. The least willing to change are those on the lowest incomes (only 50% support in the group up to £3,000 net). The data suggests that they fear not only cuts in basic salary, but also the loss of key allowances or bonuses. For higher earners (60-65% support), the financial buffer is larger and the concerns are smaller.

    The data shows that the public debate about the 4-day working week is shifting from enthusiasm to hard questions about the costs and logistics of implementation. Companies, including those in the IT sector, considering the model as a way to attract talent are now facing growing scepticism from managers and real financial concerns from employees. Without strong guarantees of 100% salary retention, the idea will remain just an attractive theory for many.

  • AI will take people’s jobs – DeepSeek’s surprising pessimism

    AI will take people’s jobs – DeepSeek’s surprising pessimism

    China’s AI ‘little dragon’, DeepSeek, has returned to the scene after almost a year’s public absence – but its message was far from industry optimism. At the government’s World Internet Conference in Wuzhen, the company’s senior researcher, Chen Deli, gave a surprisingly pessimistic assessment of the long-term impact of the technology he himself is developing.

    DeepSeek became a global sensation in January when its low-cost, open source (open source) models showed performance in key benchmarks that outperformed leading US counterparts. Despite this success, the company has adopted a strategy of near-total silence. Its founder and CEO, Liang Wenfeng, has only appeared publicly once, in February, in a televised meeting with President Xi Jinping.

    Chen Deli’s speech at Wuzhen was therefore the first substantive voice from inside the company in months. While the researcher acknowledged that AI will be a “great help” to humanity in the short term, his predictions quickly became bleak. Chen warned that as early as five to 10 years out, technology could threaten jobs by taking over “some” of the tasks performed by humans.

    His long-term vision is even more worrying. “In the next 10-20 years, artificial intelligence could take over the rest of the work,” – Chen said, adding that society will face a “huge challenge”. In this scenario, he stressed, technology companies must take on the role of protector, although he himself is very positive about the technology but sees the negative impact it could have on society.

    This publicly expressed caution contrasts with the strategic role DeepSeek now plays in China. The company has become a symbol of the country’s technological capabilities and resilience in the face of US sanctions, particularly those relating to access to advanced chips. DeepSeek has become a key player in building the domestic AI ecosystem, optimising its models for Chinese hardware.

    Its software is compatible with processors from local champions such as Cambricon and Huawei. When DeepSeek announced a model update optimised for Chinese chips in August, it triggered a surge in the share prices of domestic component manufacturers.

    The sudden success of open-source models such as DeepSeek demonstrates that the barriers to entry in advanced AI are rapidly falling, forcing companies to immediately review their own technology strategy and rate of adoption. At the same time, an unprecedented warning from inside a leading lab signals that an ‘automation at all costs’ strategy is risky and requires boards to prepare viable plans to manage labour market transformation.