Russia Is Facing a Tech Worker Exodus by captaincrunch

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Russia Is Facing a Tech Worker Exodus

POSTED BY: CAPTAINCRUNCH
UPDATED: Saturday, April 9, 2022 11:37
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Wednesday, March 23, 2022 11:55 AM

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https://www.wired.com/story/russian-techies-exodus-ukraine/

With founders and developers scrambling for the exit, the Russian tech scene is taking a major hit.

ALEKS BOUGHT A one-way ticket out of Russia on February 21, right after Vladimir Putin recognized the breakaway Ukrainian territories of Donetsk and Luhansk as independent states. A software developer working remotely for a European tech firm, Aleks—who asked that his full name be withheld—says that was a sign that worse things were coming. “I thought, Putin won't stop there,” he says. “He'd probably try to take Ukraine by force. Which is, well, basically what happened.”

Confronted with the likelihood of crippling sanctions, a plummeting ruble, and a country turning aggressively inwards, Aleks made it to the airport with his wife and hopped on a plane to Georgia, where he has some relatives. He was among the first Russian technology workers to make a run for neighboring countries at the outset of the Ukrainian war, but he soon realized he would by no means be the last. Over the past few weeks, throngs of fellow Russian techies have joined him in Tbilisi, making rents soar. “The property market is empty. You can't find anything, and if you can, it will cost you three or two times more than it used to cost a month ago,” he says. But for the time being, Aleks’s future is there. Going back to Russia scares him too much.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has precipitated a humanitarian crisis of unprecedented magnitude, with the displacement of more than 10 million Ukrainians fleeing their country, according to the UN High Commissioner for Refugees. But tens of thousands are also leaving Russia, worried that Putin’s wartime regime will destroy their livelihoods, career prospects, and individual freedoms.

Many members of this self-exiled crowd are technology workers. Because of their interconnectedness with the global digital economy, they were quick to feel the pain from sanctions and the departure of Western technology companies, and they have an easier time making a living from their laptops regardless of location.

According to RAEK, a Russian technology trade group, between 50,000 and 70,000 tech workers have already fled Russia, and 70,000 to 100,000 more could leave in April. With flights to the West canceled, they have wended their way to countries where Russian citizens can still travel visa-free.

Konstantin Vinogradov, the London-based Russian-born principal of global VC firm Runa Capital, has teamed up with other industry figures to create a “talent pool” website that helps anti-war technology workers from Russia, Belarus (which is supporting Moscow’s military maneuvers), and Ukraine find suitable jobs elsewhere.

“Mostly they are software engineers and data scientists. There are plenty of people from large Russian tech organizations like Yandex, VK, Sberbank,” Vinogradov says. “But there are plenty from smaller ones.”

Around 2,000 people have entered the pool, and Turkey Armenia and Georgia are the top destinations for those who have already relocated. A New York Times article says the Armenian government estimates that some 80,000 Russians have entered the country since the start of the war on February 24, and 20,000 of them are still residing there; the Georgian minister for economic affairs put that number at between 20,000 and 25,000, which he said was similar to 2020 figures. Many of these people plan to move elsewhere: 90 percent of the participants in Vinogradov’s talent pool indicated the UK, Germany, and the Netherlands as their preferred final destinations.

Vinogradov says that some of the Russian tech workers he has spoken to have left Russia because they are opposed to the war and to Putin on moral grounds. “You can't ignore politics anymore, because it's not even about politics: It’s about ethics,” he says.

But the descent of Russia to the status of global pariah has made it harder for technology workers to do their jobs. As companies including Microsoft, Intel, Apple, Netflix, and Meta’s Facebook and Instagram have pulled out of or limited their services to Russia—or, in some cases, have been pushed out by Moscow itself—doing business as usual has grown harder by the day.

Jacob Udodov, CEO of the Latvian team-collaboration software company Bordio, employs five Russians, two of whom have relocated from the country so far. He says that he had to provide all his Russia-based staffers with VPNs to allow them to access some services, and to make sure they’ll be able to keep working in case Russia decides to heavily censor the internet. Bordio has already had to adjust, because it runs social media campaigns for European customers, and Udodov says Russian employees became unable to work on those projects after Facebook prevented all Russia-based accounts from posting ads, on March 4. (On March 21, a Russian judge declared that Facebook’s parent company, Meta, was carrying out extremist activities.)

Paying Russian-based employees has also become harder due to Russia’s exclusion from the international payment network, SWIFT, Udodov says. “We tried several banks before we found the one which sent the money through,” he says. ”I'm not sure it’s going to keep supporting these payments to Russia—I'm not sure about April’s paycheck.”

Udodov pays his staff in dollars, which has somewhat cushioned them from the financial toll of the ruble’s 30 percent crash in value since the start of the war. Other Russian tech employees, whose salaries have options that are tied to companies' share prices, may be faring worse.

According to one Russian technology worker who has also left the country, and who asked not to be named, such a brutal, sudden hit on their livelihood is the last straw that convinced many Russian tech workers to pack it in. “For a long time there was this kind of balance where the state did horrible things, but if you didn't interact with it, if you didn't go into the areas where the state claimed dominance, you were more or less left alone. So we don't touch politics—they don't touch our money, we get to build our assets and live our lives,” they say. “By waging this war, they went into our sphere. They devalued our money, they devalued our assets, they made everything we invested in illiquid and cheap. That was a wake-up call.”

The ongoing crackdown on free speech—with Moscow going as far as outlawing calling the war a “war”—and the likely state capture of any remaining technology companies were also spurs for leaving, the tech worker says. “When the Russian state turns militarist, bad things happen to Russians,” they say.

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Can you say "Brain Drain?" Just like Stalin's time. Get rid of the people smart enough and with enough courage to dissent and what you're left with is the dullest of sheep. Perfect for an dictator. Nice one Putin! Legacy of failure preserved in stone.

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Wednesday, March 23, 2022 11:59 AM

JAYNEZTOWN

The Ex-Pat parasites will just move onto the next Singapore, Bahrain, Swedistan or Mexico or some shit

as for the Ruskie lands

Language is a barried
but?

they can bring in Mongolians, Ossetian, Lezgian, Romani, Kazakh, Macedonian, Kurds, Belarussians, Abkhaz, Vietnamese, Serb, Moldovans, Chinese or all those H1B Visa Hindu street shitters that wrote software that helped crash the Boeing Max?

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Wednesday, March 23, 2022 12:28 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK

Wired: Russia Is Facing a Tech Worker Exodus

Me: Yeah. It's funny how employees won't work for you when your bank accounts were shut down and you can't pay them.

Also Me: Looking forward to the day when the current Leftist crop of pink haired 1st Amendment hating weirdos in US Tech are seen to the door.

--------------------------------------------------

Me: "Remember Covid?"

Useless Idiots: "What's Covid, durr? Russia, Ukraine, Putin, NATO *drool*. DURRRR!!!!"

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Tuesday, April 5, 2022 10:39 AM

THG

And many of those techies G are trying to come to America. Seeing how Russians act when they enter another country, I say no way. The thing they always do is bash their adopted country and then back Putin if he wishes to invade, or wherever they are, propagate his lies.

Isn't that right comrades kiki and Signym?

T

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Saturday, April 9, 2022 11:10 AM

THG

Russia today...

T

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Saturday, April 9, 2022 11:37 AM

THG

Up to 60 Russian paratroopers from one unit in Pskov province refused to fight in Ukraine, according to independent Russian newspaper Pskovskaya Gubernia.

The troops were fired, and some were threatened with criminal prosecution for desertion or failure to comply with an order, the paper wrote on its Telegram channel.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/60-elite-russian-paratroopers-ref
used-to-fight-in-the-invasion-of-ukraine-report-says/ar-AAW1WFt?ocid=msedgntp&cvid=d828504e37b84f53ba40f8020e5853f0

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