Translated material
Two million heads for the IT industry
— It is generally accepted that the IT industry is our main hope. In the sense that the development of information technology will help our economy get off the oil needle.
- Not quite like that. In 1999, the Center for Strategic Research (CSR), under the leadership of Gref, was engaged in a strategic program for the eight years of Putin’s rule (I also had a hand in this). Now CSR is again engaged in development strategy, only for 15 years. In particular, a justification is being prepared for which industries need to be developed in order to jump off the needle and generally do at least something here. Everyone understands that all current prosperity will collapse as soon as oil becomes cheaper. And there is no doubt that it will become cheaper. Nowadays it is not customary to say so; at the suggestion of Goldman Sachs (the investment bank that predicted the price of a barrel of oil would rise to $100 in 2008 - Ed. ) it is considered good form to think that oil will not become cheaper. But people in the Central Socialist Republic have no illusions: oil will become cheaper, and at the most inopportune moment, since no one has canceled the bearish market play.
Therefore, alternative options are being calculated for Russia. IT development, although not the only one, is one of the most promising alternatives. Moreover, IT services need to be developed. In the field of products - anything from processed cheese and cars to software - we, as in the joke, no matter what you do, you will still end up with a Kalashnikov assault rifle. But for services where you can’t spoil anything with your hands, and even if some kind of creativity is needed - here we can compete with anyone, and very successfully. Of course, I’m not talking about coding, this is a futile activity, but about high-level IT services. Even among Indians, coding now accounts for 8% of exported IT services, although recently it was 12%. They earn everything else in more intelligent ways.
The shortage of working heads in the world is calculated 15 years in advance for all developed countries. There are millions and tens of millions of people capable of performing sufficiently intellectual work. This is Russia's chance. We can take our place in the global market. But when I talk about this even with the most gifted Russian IT businessmen, they say: “Yes, it looks like you’re right” - and do nothing.
-What can they do?
-- Firstly, develop towards IT services. Secondly, move to the foreign market. Thirdly, to involve tens and hundreds of thousands of specialists who, it would seem, do not and cannot have a direct relationship with the IT industry. It is necessary to use engineers, geologists, lawyers, patent experts, and technologists. Processing a patent application in the US costs $35,000. A person who knows how to do this spends no more than a week on it. The shortage of such people in the United States is tens of thousands. The average Russian patent specialist with a passive knowledge of English can do this, and here, at his workplace, he does not need a visa. The same is true for many dozens of areas of intellectual activity. Modeling new drugs, extracting information from data...
- But an individual specialist cannot, alone, on his own initiative, offer himself to the American market.
- Absolutely true. They need to be organized. Create companies.
- There are examples. Luxsoft, Progresstech, Auriga.
- That's right, there is. But very often, like Luxsoft, our companies engage in the so-called. bodysailing. They sell people, not services. They do not contract work like the Indians, but simply provide specialists. For example, people from Citibank come to them and ask for five programmers who know the Java language. They give programmers with the words: here, take them, just organize and teach them yourself, and give us 10% of what they earn.
- Why did you disparage our ability to produce software products for the world market? There is, after all, a whole community of independent programmers who work only on the world market - ISDEF. There are Kaspersky, 1C, ABBYY, PROMT.
- Yes, there are exceptions that confirm the rule. I’ve been in the IT market for decades and I know how it works. It is arranged quite, I must say, logically. Imagine you have come to sell your product. So you are going to take someone else's place. You need a counter meter, an apron, a scale, an abacus. You are greeted with a reasonable statement: get out of here, guy, we can manage without you. You say you have an unprecedented variety of cherries? Then let’s get lost, we don’t need such innovations. And by the way, buy an apron with scales yourself. It’s another matter if you come with an offer of a service and ask: guys, is there any work? Do you need to sweep up the trash and wash your aprons? A completely different business model. And with a product you need money, skills, connections in the diaspora. The Russians have always done this poorly. There is no reason to believe that things will be different in the future. We won’t fit anywhere with our planes, satellites, or software. Who will invest the billions needed to bring the product to the world market? What rich person would spend money on promoting a product with the expectation that in seven years it will occupy - or not occupy - a few percent of a particular market?
-- Right. It is better to invest in Moscow real estate.
- That's what we're talking about. Therefore, our IT businessmen tell me: if we are so unlucky that we are engaged in IT, and not in Moscow housing and not in nanotechnology, then at least we will not be idiots and will continue to mow the grass where it grows. We will not take risks by breaking into unusual markets. Therefore, all the talk about Russian prospects is almost in favor of the poor. Although we have enough educated and very creative people, with whom the country could take an extremely worthy place in the global division of labor. This is not my opinion. This is what Indian Evalueserve analysts think. Irish researchers come to the same conclusion; in their opinion, Russia ranks first in the world in terms of potential for exporting high-level IT services. Just by the number of goals. Another question is that these heads are not used, they are busy with anything but the task for which they are best suited. I tried to calculate how many people we employ in the IT industry. It turned out that there was not even 300 thousand. No matter how hard I tried, I counted a maximum of 270 thousand. The study The Emerging Global Labor Market: The Demand for Offshore Talent in Services, carried out by McKinsey Global Institution, showed that in Russia only one in ten talents theoretically suitable based on his education to work in the field of export of IT services, he can actually get such a job. The remaining nine either live where there are no such jobs, or have already found a job, for example as a security guard, or drink, or are simply no longer suitable for responsible work for some other reason.
--Microsoft believes we have a million people capable of working in the software industry.
-- Correct assessment. Yes, from 1.1 to 1.4. And they work less than 0.3. There is a well-known pattern: the percentage of people capable of working in the IT industry depends on the level of education in the country. There are countries such as the USA, England, Germany, Russia, Ireland. Here, the number of people capable of working in IT is well known - 3% of the working population. We are from this group, and not from the one with India, China, Indonesia and Nigeria. Our working-age population is 65 million. Take three percent of them and you get almost two million. In all decent countries, this is the number of citizens who work in IT. But we don’t! They work somewhere else. Taxi drivers, as an option. The domestic market does not need them because the domestic market does not need information technology as a competitive advantage. The Russian economy is generally 80% built on financial speculation. From the point of view of making money, this is the only correct way, to which IT has almost nothing to do. After all, IT is functional applications, IT infrastructure and, most importantly, business process reengineering. So you can immediately forget about the main thing of the Russian company. What kind of reengineering, what kind of optimization, when you have to make money?! Applications and infrastructure are needed, yes, to a minimum. Well, you need a computer with a printer. Telephone, photocopier, air conditioning. Also Microsoft Office. Server? What is this? Oh, this is a type of archive to which all personal computers are connected. Okay, let's buy it. As for applications, those that create competitive advantages are not needed! Yes, you can’t calculate a bank’s operating day without computers, and all bankers have this application. But a software package for managing investment risks is not needed, because the success of investments does not depend on it.
This, of course, does not apply to those types of businesses that are based on IT. Cellular operators, for example, cannot live without IT.
-- Do you have any complaints about the domestic IT infrastructure? There seem to be enough computers in the country.
-- The shortage of computer technology continues to this day. In all developed markets, supply exceeds demand, but here it does not. You can’t buy a decent supercomputer today. Do you think things are different with software? We don’t make some types of software ourselves, and they won’t sell it to us.
- Give an example, please.
- I saw highly closed applications in the States when I worked at Silicon Graphics and Cray Research (companies that produce supercomputers - Ed. ). He visited the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the CIA many times. Thousands of companies are developing special software for these institutions. There is, for example, a whole class of applications - fraud management (fraud - fraud, English - Ed. ) for automatically identifying suspicious banking transactions. Or take a satellite image processing system. In the United States, 52 ground-based centers have been created for this purpose, the total computing resource of which is several times greater than the total computing resource of the European Union countries. Fraud management in US social security systems is equipped with such powerful computers that Google has never dreamed of. In our country, alas, they are trying to do the same thing on ordinary desktop machines.
But, I repeat, in addition to oil, we have a resource that can be contrasted with other countries seeking a place in the global division of labor. These are educated people. Unfortunately, we do not use this resource. We have already discussed why businessmen don’t want to. But the state doesn’t want to, because it apparently adheres to a different strategy.
— It’s strange that IT businessmen don’t want to.
- There must be ambition, a desire to earn more and more. This desire will sooner or later lead to the foreign market. But there are no ambitions. I don't know how to explain this. Apparently, low business volumes.
— Maybe because the state does not help the IT industry the way it is helped in India?
“You can criticize our government for a lot of things, but there’s nothing special to praise the Indian government for either.” They, however, did one good and important thing - they almost exempted from taxes foreign companies opening centers and IT service development centers in India. If you are a foreign IT company and you pay non-discriminatory wages to proletarians in India, you will have enormous tax preferences. This plays the role of a catalyst for the IT market.
- India is a completely different country compared to us. There, getting a job in a technology park means getting a pass to a completely different life.
- You're right. Actually, we came to the conclusion: our government has not created the main thing, namely the conditions that draw people, like into a funnel, into the IT industry. And the flow of petrodollars killed all the initiative from below.
- The picture is sad. Especially if you take into account that the growth rate of the domestic IT market - 25% per year - is falling.
- Yes, the pace is decreasing, and in all sectors of the market. But the situation is not that bad. There is one positive trend: companies’ costs for their own IT personnel and their own IT departments are growing. This can pull the industry through the development of outsourcing of IT services. Let me explain with an example.
Our paradigm for government IT projects has always been this: the contractor is selected from a small number of organizations that traditionally serve government agencies. This was the case starting with the 1980 Olympic project and ending with the Unified State Automated Information System (FSUE Atlas), which caused damage to the alcohol industry in the hundreds of millions (I don’t know of another such example of the powerful influence of IT on the economy). Recently, a decision was made to transfer the development of the Unified State Automated Information System to the tax department itself; so-called insourcing was used, and this is good. Now the tax authorities will not be able to shift the responsibility to Atlas, and they will inevitably have to outsource the work to a large, reliable company that will ensure results. The market is only better for it. The trend towards insourcing is observed in many industries, thanks to which the IT industry will develop. It will come down to a sale to IT departments. You have no idea how beneficial this is for companies. This is a multi-step. First, you create an insourcing organization, then you test the model of contractual relations with it, and then you sell it! Who will buy? Alternatively, Indians. Infosys (Indian IT company - Ed. ) will come and ask: what is the scope of services of your IT department? 200 million? Here’s half a billion, I’ll buy it and undertake to serve you. I mentioned Indian Infosys just as an example. If mergers of domestic IT companies occur, they, having enlarged, will be able to play in this market no worse. When the first such transactions occur (maybe in a year or two), the market will immediately restructure. We won't recognize him. According to my estimates, the costs of Russian companies for insourcing are at least three billion. And our entire market for IT services is also 3 billion. How powerful this resource is can be judged by the fact that the cost of services of insourcing units is four to five times higher than on the market.