Interviews

Should I move to a different country? To boost my career, to pursue more interesting work and a higher salary, or simply to escape a war zone? Not long ago, the world was converging, and software engineering was a tailor-made profession for a globalizing humanity: decent pay, freedom to choose between cities, countries, and projects at will. But the rules are changing at breakneck speed. The future that IT specialists were counting on looks different now — fragmented, uncertain, and in some places, dangerous.

Over two decades, the IT sector has evolved from a standalone services market into one of the key drivers of macroeconomic stability. It’s still often described as a volatile and contradictory space — dotcoms, bubbles, AI hype, promises the market doesn’t always have time to put to the test. But something else has been unfolding in parallel. The digital industry is turning into a source of innovation, foreign currency earnings, high-skilled employment, tax revenue, services exports, and the technological modernization of other sectors.

Something remarkable has been happening in Azerbaijan in recent years. Government institutions are being digitized at a pace that would have seemed unthinkable just a decade ago. A region that 10–15 years ago was considered a laggard in high technology is not simply catching up — it is increasingly looking like a success story in rolling out digitization across a state system.