How was your organization impacted by the Russian invasion of Ukraine early on?
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One of the companies where I was consulting a while back was hiring people from Ukraine and Russia, especially mathematicians, and that supply was cut off. Product development was put on pause and they needed to find resources who could get up to speed so things could move ahead again. Early on, there were no answers to those challenges because there aren't that many resources available with specific skills.
One of the initial big impacts we saw following the Russian invasion of Ukraine was of course the boycotts; nobody is allowed to do any support or any more projects in Russia. We started to see some cracks in the media industry as they realized that they couldn’t support this way of telling the stories that they have to tell. We also saw support from media companies in Europe who said to Russian media, "Send your people over here and we will offer them desk space and support. They can report the news from here so that they don't have to be afraid of broadcasting the real news." There were a lot of media initiatives where radio stations that are normally in competition started working together to hold fundraisers and gather support.
Having quite a lot of people in Poland put us reasonably close to where the conflict is, but it hasn’t changed much for our company. Our markets are mostly the US and other English-speaking countries, but the situation in Ukraine affected staffing for some. There was a lot of development going on in Ukraine that was paused indefinitely for those companies, but that didn’t apply to us. Affected companies were left scrambling to look for more dev resources when the hiring market was already difficult. If the conflict escalates to a certain point, Poland could become the frontline, so we’re still watching how things develop. Early on, there wasn’t much we could do but hope for the best and keep on going.