I am a developer at The Washington Post and I help build newsroom facing tools. I also am the Chair of the DC chapter of ACM and produce a podcast called DC Tech Stories.
What do you think tech folks around the world could learn from the local scene in Kiev? What is the local tech community there struggling with the most?
Engineer at Mapbox, creator of Leaflet, open source enthusiast, algorithms geek, speaker, singer-songwriter (Obiymy Doschu), father of twin girls, Ukrainian
Kyiv is one of the biggest and fastest growing tech hubs in Europe, and one of the leading IT outsourcing hotspots in the world. Here's a good overview of the reasons, but I feel it comes down to two things:
Affordable, heavily STEM-focused education system, with multiple world class universities in the city. While it can feel pretty outdated at times, it gives a very strong foundation (e.g. mathematics), which eventually produces many top-talent engineers.
Abysmally low taxes, living and operational costs for engineers. It's very cheap to set up a startup team here compared to most other countries.
Kyiv is also a pretty comfortable, walkable city with lots of greenery, great food, awesome subway system, tons of coworking spaces.
The struggles are there too:
A LOT of the top talent immigrates to Europe and US. Mostly due to corruption, inadequate government, bad social security and unstable economy. Hundreds of my Ukrainian ex-colleagues now live in Berlin, Amsterdam, London, SF & Bay Area.
You'll find the diversity quite lackluster compared to the West — engineers are predominantly male, and there's a lot of gender bias (e.g. many people from the older generation think that girls don't need STEM education and instead have to find a husband and raise kids, cook and clean at home all the time). The situation is steadily improving every year though.
Most of the tech scene is outsourcing — Kyiv is heavily lacking in product startups, although this gets better too.
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What do you think tech folks around the world could learn from the local scene in Kiev? What is the local tech community there struggling with the most?
Kyiv is one of the biggest and fastest growing tech hubs in Europe, and one of the leading IT outsourcing hotspots in the world. Here's a good overview of the reasons, but I feel it comes down to two things:
Kyiv is also a pretty comfortable, walkable city with lots of greenery, great food, awesome subway system, tons of coworking spaces.
The struggles are there too: