IT is no longer a "borderless" industry ❌

Two seemingly unrelated news items from the past week that perfectly fit together like pieces of a puzzle, showing how reality looks now.

1️⃣ Since May 5, graphs from independent monitoring services (like OONI) show an increase in anomalies when accessing GitHub from Russia. Standard complaints: release downloads fail, technical domains are down, git clone and git pull hang.

Officially, Roskomnadzor states that the resource is not restricted. And technically, they are probably not lying. In practice, we see the classic consequences of carpet bombing: in attempts to block certain subnets or CDNs (like Fastly), the platform's infrastructure gets caught in the crossfire.

2️⃣ While developers fix connections to repos, businesses are "fixing" hiring processes. The share of companies willing to hire relocants has collapsed from 9% to 4% (according to Gazeta.ru). At the same time, overall competition has risen to 9.6 resumes per vacancy.

Why is that?
First, the public sector and fintech (the main talent vacuums now) have introduced an unspoken but strict filter for "reliability." Second, tax status. HR and accounting departments don't want to deal with administering your personal income tax and figuring out whether you are a resident today or not, when there are five other candidates of the required grade with clear registration waiting in line.

If you are just a decent specialist from, say, Tbilisi, for a Russian company you are no longer a "digital nomad." You are an extra tax and infrastructure risk with an inflated price tag. It's easier to hire someone from a region inside Russia who will be reachable tomorrow without ping issues.

Location, Location, Location!