Offshore Software Development in Poland 2021: Developer’s Perspective

Every 4th programmer from Central and Eastern Europe lives in Poland

Eastern Europe has recently become an attractive offshore destination that the United States, the United Kingdom, and other countries choose to outsource the software development services. Poland is one of the destinations where clients from overseas can find offshore software programmer talent with a perfect price/quality ratio.

Currently, 250,000 programmers work in Poland, accounting for as much as 25% of the entire developer community in the Central and Eastern European region. Most of them live in Warsaw, Krakow, and Wroclaw.

These are the conclusions from the Central & Eastern Europe Developer Landscape 2017 survey, conducted by Stack Overflow on behalf of infoShare. These numbers show that Poland, thanks to its human capital and the scale of the labor market, is an attractive location for the development of investments in the IT industry. More and more overseas companies choose IT outsourcing services in Poland.

According to data collected by Stack Overflow, the number of programmers in the Central and Eastern European region counts 1 million people. About a quarter of them lives and works in Poland (250,000). Next is Ukraine with 166,000 and is followed by Romania (118,000) and the Czech Republic (100,000). In the remaining countries, the number of specialists engaged in coding is less than 100,000.

The study also analyzed how many specialists create code per 100 working people living in different countries. In this ranking, however, software development in Poland performs worse with a coefficient of 1.4. This is slightly more than the average for the region, or 1.3. By comparison, in much smaller Slovakia, this index is as much as 3.7.

“The results of the survey confirm that Poland is the market of talented programmers in Europe in our region. This is a clear indication that it is worth investing in here and entrusting IT processes to software development teams in Poland. On the other hand, we must remember that even the leading position in the region does not mean that the demand for specialists in this area has been met. On the contrary, according to the estimates, there are about 50,000 software developers in Poland. Therefore, further efforts are needed to encourage this field of study, as well as the continuous education of people who already have a graduate in IT education. The world of new technologies is changing so fast that only continuous training allows to keep up with it “- comments Dariusz Świąder, president of the management board of Linux Poland.

As you can read from the Central & Eastern Europe Developer Landscape 2017 survey, in most countries of our region, there is a clear concentration of programmers in capital cities. Latvia ranks first in this ranking, as many as 93% of all software developers living in Latvia work in Latvia. For comparison, in Warsaw, this number is only 29% (over 74 thousand), which means the smallest degree of concentration in the whole region. Poland is dealing with several dynamically developing IT centers, which makes the country even more attractive to investors. Another largest offshore development center bringing together programmers is Kraków (32.5 thousand programmers), followed by Wrocław (24.3 thousand), Katowice (24.2 thousand), Poznań (22.4 thousand), Tri-City (16 thousand .), and Łódź (10.7 thousand). This gives Poland as many as 7 centers that can boast a population of more than 10,000 polish software developers.

“Warsaw still remains an important center of the IT industry in our country. For a long time, however, Krakow or Wroclaw had such a reputation. With the development of the market, we are observing decentralization. The best example is the development of our offshore programmer company, which currently operates in 5 cities. Today, thanks to software outsourcing to Poland, developers can work on ambitious projects for international brands also in smaller centers such as Białystok. For many people it is also a way to reconcile career development with family life “- summarizes Marek Safiejko, CEO of 9bits.

Wrap-Up

• 25% of offshore programmer talent in Eastern and Central Europe is located in Poland.
• In Poland, 1.4 persons per 100 are software developers.
• However, there are about 50,000 software developers in Poland, and it is still not enough to keep up with the new technology challenges.
• Thanks to software development outsourcing to Poland, small towns as well as big cities got a development boost.

The article was originally published on iTWIZ. Author – Adam Jadczak.