How Popular is GitHub in Poland?

Where there is technology there is open source. And one of the most popular platforms for developing with the support of open source is GitHub. With various tools to support open source development and project management, GitHub offers an ideal collaboration and code-sharing environment. Importantly, though, GitHub requires more than just basic knowledge and skills to navigate. Today we want to see how popular GitHub is in Poland.

According to LinkedIn there are 25,000 people in Poland whose profiles mention GitHub. Not all of these are using GitHub to share code, some of them just mention the website on their profiles. Some of them have probably only logged into their account once.

There is a place in Poland for those who are just starting out learning about all things ‘Git’. The group on Facebook is familiarly called ‘Git, GitHub, GitLab I Bitbucket: pierwsze kroki’. It has 4,000 members so far. It’s not very active. Learning about GitHub needs a lot more than opening a profile.

GitHub is not just for juniors getting into software development though. It’s far more popular than that. Technology professionals across Poland are using the platform every day. They talk about it at meetups. They discuss it at conferences. It is a big thing.

The website itself attracts many contributors who work on company-led open source projects. Universities and government bodies are also using GitHub in Poland. It really is for everyone. Everyone who is involved in tech.

Importantly, many of the projects on GitHub are Microsoft-based. In Poland this is also the case. Here is an example of the most popular projects on the website right now:

Who are some of the leading figures on GitHub in Poland?

According to GitHub’s own data there are 956 users in Poland who have at least 66 followers. This is a list from one month ago. It doesn’t sound like that much. But these people are listed clearly on the GitHub website. Some of them even have pages on Twitter, or X. Consider this chap Igor Kowalczyk who has made more than 7,700 public repositories on GitHub so far:

Igor is on LinkedIn by the way. He has 10 followers or connections on the favoured platform of recruitment specialists. Probably wouldn’t come up in a search for a full-stack developer as he seems to live on Discord and GitHub mainly. Interestingly Igor only has 102 followers on GitHub. But he really does contribute a lot.

There is a big case for recruitment specialists to use GitHub to recruit in Poland. However, to get the attention of someone like Igor. A self-professed full-stack developer and Linux enthusiast. Is no easy feat. There are plenty of engineering managers or solution architects out there that probably already know about Igor in ‘their’ community.

Another big contributor in Poland is Wojciech Maj who hails from Krakow where he works as a Senior Developer at Codete.

Wojciech is a bit more active on LinkedIn than Igor. He also has far more followers on GitHub. A total of 3,100 of them. Both gentlemen had over 10,000 contributions to GitHub in the last year. A phenomenal achievement.

This leads to one conclusion. That if recruitment specialists in Poland are not using GitHub today. They should be.

Can you Identify Talented Developers on GitHub?

GitHub lists a total of 864 developers based in Poland on its page. They represent people who work at Bolt, Epam, Google, Lingaro, Lionbridge, Orange, Sunscrapers, Ramp Network and a host of other companies. Many of them are self-employed working on their own projects. It is quite a list. But it isn’t necessarily that easy to identify the real talents amongst them.

If you are anything like our teams at Verita HR you will be interested to find out more about Data Engineers. And there is a prominent data engineer from Poland listed on GitHub. Jacek Laskowski has over 12,000 followers on LinkedIn. He regularly travels across the world to give talks about Apache Spark and other topics related to data. He is only 159^th on the GitHub list in Poland but is one of the most experienced Big Data Engineers on the Polish market today. Jacek made just over 500 contributions in the last year.

Jacek is just one of the talents that you can identify using GitHub. It’s not an area that you can ignore.

Do Recruitment Professionals Use GitHub to Recruit?

The recruitment specialists at Verita HR have been using GitHub since 2016. In fact, our dedicated StartUp division even has some followers on the open source platform:

There is a small minority of recruitment specialists in Poland that are also familiar with the ins and outs of GitHub. But in the main, the recruitment market tends to focus on all things LinkedIn. This is due to several factors. One of them is the strength of market leading IT outsourcing specialist companies like Epam, Luxoft, or Sii. These firms employ in the thousands. And most of these contractors and employees are software engineers. Today these firms have the advantage when it comes to data engineers too.

This leaves the recruitment industry itself at a disadvantage. Recruitment businesses don’t have in-house tech talent whom they can talk to and get referrals from. It is much harder to create a network without going to meetups in the cold wintry Polish evenings. And when you get there, they all just talk about React or Hadoop or the newest .Net innovation. Not a level of technology that your average recruitment specialist is adept at interacting with. Or networking with attendees about.

This means that working with a recruitment partner who has a long tradition of working in the technology sector is an advantage for companies looking to find the best recruitment partner in Poland. It is also important that the recruitment partner a company chooses to help gain data or software talents needs to deliver a candidate experience that companies expect. Not only a great candidate experience, but a great client experience too. Just like one would hope to receive from a trusted recruitment partner.

How HRO Technology became HRO Digital

The team at Verita HR started out a technology specialist recruitment division under the brand HRO Technology in 2011. This brand worked on behalf of companies such as Gemius or Trustwave on software and cybersecurity roles over ten years ago. Since then the experience of the team has increased substantially. Today the HRO Digital brand has replaced HRO Technology. The HR Project Co-ordinators who work on behalf of clients at HRO Digital have a huge amount of experience and tradition to leverage.

The other reason that HRO Digital, a brand of Verita HR, is so proficient is how the candidate experience is prioritized. HR Project Co-ordinators work closely with market participants, those who use GitHub, and others who prefer to attend meetups or conferences.

Don’t you deserve to work with a recruitment partner that has the depth of experience coupled with the focus on candidate and client experience? Contact the recruitment specialists at HRO Digital today to find out how they can help your business. How you can hire the best data and software talents in Poland today.

#GitHub #VeritaHR #LinkedIn #OpenSource #Poland #Recruitment #Partner #HRODigital

See Also: