Russian Programmers Will Probably Have An Official Professional Holiday Soon

Here in Russia we have very strong traditions of celebrating professional holidays. For example, as soon as we go to school, we learn to celebrate the Teachers’ Day when we give presents and flowers to the teachers we will spend the next 10 years with at school. Representatives of almost every profession have a professional holiday of their own - many of them official, i.e. designated by the government and included in the official calendars.

And even though these holidays are always working days, they are still celebrated widely. I remember perfectly well how huge a celebration was on aviation day when I worked in aviation marketing (though I don’t remember celebrating any day of marketing professional - so I am not sure if it exists or not).

When I moved to internet marketing, in the companies I worked in I quickly learned there were dedicated holidays for system administrators and for programmers - these days I remember giving all the guys in the team some small geeky (obviously) presents. But these holidays were never official - until now.

Today’s news is that the Ministry of Communications has submitted a bill to the President of the country for consideration with this bill intended to validate the Programmer’s Day as an official state holiday.

The bill was prepared following the request from a Russian software developer last Autumn (the holiday is celebrated on the 256^th day of each year, i.e. on September 12 or 13 depending on whether this is leap year or not). The idea is that the profession is becoming more and more important in Russia given that the IT industry is supposed to offer a significant contribution to the overall economy of Russia in the future as the politics now is to refocus from natural resources-oriented industries to high tech.

The irony is that no one in the programming community seriously considered the idea of making the usual holiday celebrated for many years now an official one: the request was submitted by one developer simply because he has found out that the contact form on the official website of the Russian President was actually working - so he decided that the experiment was worth it and submitted a question about the holiday. Imagine how surprised he was when he received an official reply that the idea is being reviewed and how surprised he must be now that the idea has actually turned into a bill that will probably be approved by the President.

And I’d imagine that the bill will be approved and this September the holiday will be official given the devotion of President Medvedev towards the internet and his huge reliance on the web to communicate with the younger generations of the country. The problem is, however, that this new holiday will not change the landscape for the software and web companies at all as this is certainly not the support they’d want to see coming from authorities in this hard economy.