Over the past year, I’ve had a very strange feeling about the Russian IT job market.

On paper, everything still sounds upbeat: digitalization, import substitution, artificial intelligence, shortage of specialists, talent deficit. And formally, there is some truth to it. Russia still has very low unemployment, and in spring 2026 the Central Bank openly said that labor market tension remained high, even though the staffing shortage was gradually easing.

But there is one problem.

When you actually enter the market yourself and start looking for a job in IT, you do not feel like a person whose skills are in demand.

You feel like someone knocking on closed doors. Not even just closed doors, but doors barricaded from the other side.

And that feeling does not come out of nowhere. According to hh.ru data and market breakdowns published on Habr, by February 2026 compared with February 2025, the number of IT vacancies in Russia had fallen by 36%, the number of resumes had risen by 30%, and the hh-index in IT had gone up from 9.6 to 19.6. In a broader January–February 2026 versus January–February 2025 comparison, the trend was the same: fewer vacancies, more resumes, higher competition. According to hh.ru, across the labor market as a whole, by February 2025 active vacancies were down 27%, while active resumes were up 42%.

Translated into ordinary human language, this means something quite unpleasant: there are more people who need work, and the market has become much more eager to filter people out than to hire them.

And this is exactly where all the polished rhetoric about a talent shortage starts sounding very far removed from reality. Because at the everyday level, what you see is something completely different. You open a job description, and they are not just looking for a specialist. They are looking for a one-person orchestra. Someone who can do backend, frontend, analytics, integrations, DevOps “at a basic level,” already understands AI, is not afraid of legacy systems, knows the business domain, and ideally is also psychologically convenient, loyal, inexpensive, and asks no difficult questions. And let’s not forget the requirement for a university degree and ten years of experience. At the same time, nobody is actually willing to pay for that level of experience.

That feeling also matches the broader picture. By 2026, IT had stopped being one unified space where “there’s plenty of work for everyone.” The people feeling it most are juniors and mids in mainstream areas, specialists without rare technologies, without strong domain specialization, and without a very carefully packaged background. At the same time, demand remains more stable in cybersecurity, complex engineering, and AI-related roles. Even RBC Trends pointed out separately that the pressure is no longer felt only by newcomers: more hiring stages, more comparison, less tolerance for imperfection.

There are polished resumes that look impressive, until a call reveals that the person is better at selling the image than at doing the work at the same level. There are portfolios that feel strong because the market has long since learned how to package itself aggressively. There are resumes that sound senior on paper, while in reality they are often just examples of very strong self-presentation.

And then there is the reverse situation: an honest, capable specialist with real but not glossy experience starts to look too ordinary in comparison. Not because they are weaker, but because the market increasingly evaluates not only the ability to work, but also the ability to match an expectation beautifully.

There are job postings that seem to exist almost as a ritual. There are interviews after which you get the feeling that the decision had already been made and you were simply walked through a formality. There are internal referrals, “our people,” former colleagues, old teams, internal transfers — and in a calmer market that is just one hiring mechanism among others, but in a tight market it starts to feel like yet another door that was closed before you even got there.

That also matches how the market describes itself. In its 2026 reviews, hh.ru wrote directly about the shift away from hyper-demand and mass hiring toward strategic planning, retention, internal development, and internal mobility instead of simply expanding headcount. And that explains a lot: the market has not died, but it has become far more closed to people coming from the outside.

There is another thing the market has changed dramatically over the past few years: the feeling that you can simply “land in a project” has almost disappeared.

Before, even when the market was uneven, there was still the sense that somewhere there was a living product, a small team, a startup, a growing company that might take you not only because your stack matched perfectly, but because you were sharp, fast, and clearly had potential. That feeling is mostly gone now.

There are fewer startups not just emotionally, but structurally. Russia’s venture market declined in 2025: according to Kommersant, the total volume of venture investment dropped by 18%, and the number of deals fell by a quarter; RBC Trends also wrote that the mere presence of AI is no longer enough to impress investors. This does not mean everything disappeared. It means that the room for accidental entry has narrowed.

At the same time, a large share of the living money, stable processes, and serious infrastructure has shifted toward major players — especially fintech and ecosystem companies. In 2026, the FinTech Association spoke directly about the Russian market moving toward large ecosystems, while industry reviews recorded the consolidation of fintech and the growing role of big platforms. For a job seeker, that means something simple: the market looks less and less like a scattered field of possible entry points and more and more like a set of large institutional structures with their own logic, their own requirements, and their own internal selection mechanisms.

And in that kind of structure, you can no longer just “jump into a project.” Companies are not so much looking for you as checking whether you fit with extreme precision. Not “is this a generally good specialist,” but “does this person fit this exact pain point, this stack, this culture, this team, ideally with no need for adaptation.”

That is why it becomes so hard to keep a healthy internal perspective.

Because when you spend a long time looking for work, it becomes very easy to start thinking the problem is you. That you are weak. That you are late. That you did not measure up. That you chose the wrong stack. That you should have gone into data, AI, security, enterprise, fintech — anywhere except where you are now.

Even though the problem is often bigger than that.

The real problem is that in 2025–2026, the Russian market became overheated, anxious, and extremely selective at the same time. At the macro level, people can still talk about a staffing shortage and low unemployment. But at the level of an individual person simply trying to find a job, it no longer feels like a shortage. It feels like harsh selection. According to hh.ru, in 2025 each IT vacancy in Russia received around 12 to 15 candidates on average, and by 2026 even experienced professionals were feeling the pressure: more competition, more hiring stages, less tolerance for an imperfect background.

As for me, my own feeling is that over the past few years the market has become especially exhausting. The number of interview stages seems to increase by one every year. First one interview, then two, then a technical round, then another technical round, then a “final meeting,” then a conversation with the manager, then something else “to align expectations.” And all of this is happening in a market where the number of real vacancies and real projects feels like it is shrinking, while my own experience, on the contrary, keeps growing.

There is something especially unpleasant about that imbalance. Logic suggests it should work the other way around: the longer you work, the easier it should be to find your next project, because you have more understanding, more perspective, more real cases, more mistakes you have already been through and learned something from. But in practice it feels like the opposite. You become more experienced, while the market behaves as if that still is not enough.

Probably the most important thing here is not to let this break your sense of professional value. Because a market like this very quickly starts replacing your inner foundation with external signals: the number of replies, the number of rejections, the number of interview rounds, the long silence after an interview. At some point, a person stops seeing themselves through what they actually know and can do, and starts seeing themselves through how the hiring process is reacting to them right now.

I do not think it is a good idea to fall into that trap.

If you are stuck in this grind too, it is worth reminding yourself from time to time of one very simple thing: a long job search does not always mean you are a weak specialist. Sometimes it simply means the market is heavy, anxious, and distorted. Which means that alongside sending applications and going through interviews, you also have to protect your own head a little: do not measure yourself only by other people’s silence, and do not forget that the market is not an objective final judgment of your value.