Ukrainevsthe United Kingdom
ウクライナとイギリスUAUK
Seen from Ukraine: each line below describes the United Kingdom relative to Ukraine.
Culture Map: eight scales
Erin Meyer's eight scales, sorted by how far apart Ukraine and the United Kingdom sit, largest gap first.
Filled dot: Ukraine, where you are looking fromHollow ring: the United Kingdom
Not placed8 scales
These scales are left unmarked: either Meyer leaves a country off the scale or no source places it, and drawing it anyway would be guessing.
- Communicating, Evaluating, Persuading, Leading, Deciding, Trusting, Disagreeing, SchedulingNo source places Ukraine on these scales
Hofstede: six dimensions
Scores from 0 to 100, sorted by the gap between Ukraine and the United Kingdom. They describe national averages, not either country's character.
Uncertainty avoidance
The United Kingdom scores 60 points lower than Ukraine (35 against 95)
Ukraine 95, the United Kingdom 35, on a line from 0 (Tolerant of ambiguity) to 100 (Avoids ambiguity).
Power distance
The United Kingdom scores 57 points lower than Ukraine (35 against 92)
Ukraine 92, the United Kingdom 35, on a line from 0 (Low power distance) to 100 (High power distance).
Indulgence
The United Kingdom scores 55 points higher than Ukraine (69 against 14)
Ukraine 14, the United Kingdom 69, on a line from 0 (Restrained) to 100 (Indulgent).
Motivation towards achievement and success
The United Kingdom scores 39 points higher than Ukraine (66 against 27)
Ukraine 27, the United Kingdom 66, on a line from 0 (Consensus-oriented) to 100 (Decisive).
Individualism
The United Kingdom scores 21 points higher than Ukraine (76 against 55)
Ukraine 55, the United Kingdom 76, on a line from 0 (Collectivist) to 100 (Individualist).
Long-term orientation
The United Kingdom scores 9 points higher than Ukraine (60 against 51)
Ukraine 51, the United Kingdom 60, on a line from 0 (Short-term) to 100 (Long-term).
What the sources say, theme by theme
Entries for Ukraine and the United Kingdom, side by side on wide screens. Each keeps its own confidence label and citations.
Design & quality
Ukraine2 claims
At the ICPC World Finals, Lviv National University placed fourth in 2008 and Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv placed fourth in 2010, both winning gold medals.
Attested1 source2026ua-design-1
Ukraine's Hofstede uncertainty avoidance (UAI) score is extremely high at 95. The outsourcing firm N-iX (2019) links this to a preference for detailed plans and background explanations. The article is written from the seller's side.
Attested2 sources2026ua-design-2
United Kingdom3 claims
The GDS Government Design Principles (published 2012, updated 2025) include "Start with user needs," "Do less," and "Iterate. Then iterate again." Iterative development is an official principle of the public sector.
Well attested1 source2025gb-design-1
Point 8 of the GOV.UK Service Standard is "Iterate and improve frequently." It states that a service is never finished and that maintenance such as bug fixes is not enough.
Well attested1 sourcegb-design-2
According to a 2023 NAO report, there have been 11 cross-government digital strategies in the past 25 years. The Police National Computer, introduced in 1974, is still in use.
Well attested1 source2023gb-design-3
Failure & risk
Ukraine4 claims
In a July-August 2024 Deloitte and AmCham survey of 139 executives at member companies, 76% said prolonged blackouts affect their operations. At the same time, 88% said they were prepared for outages and 94% had or were developing a business continuity plan.
Attested1 source2024ua-failure-1
IT companies are reported to have handled blackouts by setting up coworking spaces with generators and Starlink and by subsidizing employees' backup power.
Thin1 sourceua-failure-2
Central bank figures reported by AIN.UA show IT service exports peaking at $7.3 billion in 2022 and falling to about $6.4 billion in 2024 (down 4.2% year on year). According to dev.ua, exports recovered slightly to about $6.66 billion in 2025.
Attested2 sources2026ua-failure-3
An article by the outsourcing firm Alcor, citing DOU surveys, says 38% of IT workers feel burned out at work. Thirty percent of IT specialists serving in the army receive payments from their IT employer.
Thin1 source2026ua-failure-4
United Kingdom4 claims
The GDS Way incident management standard requires incident reviews to follow a blameless post mortem culture.
Well attested1 sourcegb-failure-1
GOV.UK publishes incident reports, such as one on increased error rates on 5 January 2022. A former GDS staff member wrote in 2018 that publishing them builds trust and an atmosphere where people can learn safely.
Well attested2 sources2022gb-failure-2
In a 2019 blog post, the London fintech Monzo explained that it runs on-call with two people and records every incident. The Pragmatic Engineer warns against "blameless buck-passing," where blame is shifted while claiming to be blameless.
Well attested2 sources2019gb-failure-3
In the Post Office Horizon scandal, testimony that Horizon was "robust" was used despite bugs in the Fujitsu system, and more than 900 people were wrongly convicted. The Court of Appeal found that the Post Office had in effect reversed the burden of proof.
Attested2 sourcesgb-failure-4
Feedback & code review
Ukraine2 claims
The outsourcing firm N-iX (2019) writes that Ukrainian engineers speak their minds on important technical decisions. This is a seller's claim, and no independent study was found.
Thin1 source2019ua-feedback-1
The recruiting firm unicrew (2026) writes that unless expectations are made explicit, developers may not push back hard on poor technical decisions.
Thin1 source2026ua-feedback-2
United Kingdom3 claims
Meyer writes that the British deliver negative feedback less directly than Americans and far less directly than the Dutch. She describes frequent understatement using downgraders such as "a bit" and "slightly."
Attested1 source2014Datedgb-feedback-1
The Anglo-Dutch translation guide that Meyer cites reads "With all due respect" as "I think you are wrong" and "Very interesting" as "I don't like it." The guide is half a joke, and its authorship is disputed.
Attested2 sources2014Datedgb-feedback-2
A study of 44,000 pull requests across 20 projects that compared acceptance rates with the developer's country HDI (Furtado et al., 2020) placed UK developers in the group with the highest acceptance rates.
Attested1 source2020gb-feedback-3
Hierarchy & decisions
Ukraine2 claims
Ukraine scores high on both Hofstede power distance (PDI 92) and uncertainty avoidance (UAI 95). Edge Executive Services (2024) links this to multi-layered organizational hierarchies and a large number of rules.
Attested2 sources2026ua-hierarchy-1
The outsourcing firm Jappware claims that Ukrainian IT companies were early to drop rigid hierarchy and formal communication.
Thin1 sourceua-hierarchy-2
United Kingdom3 claims
In Meyer's 2017 HBR chart, the United Kingdom sits in the same egalitarian and top-down quadrant as the United States, Canada, and Australia.
Attested1 source2017gb-hierarchy-1
In the public sector, the service assessment against the Service Standard acts as a de facto gate. According to DfE guidance, a service can fail its assessment if it does not publish new source code without a good reason.
Well attested1 sourcegb-hierarchy-2
The NAO (2023) identifies as a problem that many digital decisions in government are made by generalist leaders without technical expertise.
Well attested1 source2023gb-hierarchy-3
Communication & docs
Ukraine2 claims
An Alcor article citing DOU surveys says 66% of IT workers work fully remotely.
Thin1 source2026ua-communication-1
N-iX (2019) says formality at first meetings is a sign of respect, and that the one-to-two-hour time difference with Europe makes it easy to overlap working hours. This is a seller's description.
Thin1 source2019ua-communication-2
United Kingdom3 claims
According to a book summary, the United Kingdom is on the low-context side of Meyer's Communicating scale but relies on context more than the United States, Canada, Australia, the Netherlands, and Germany.
Thin1 sourcegb-communication-1
"Make things open: it makes things better" is one of the government design principles, and publishing new source code is point 12 of the Service Standard. GDS explained the benefits of coding in the open in a 2017 blog post.
Well attested2 sources2017gb-communication-2
In 2015, Inside GOV.UK published a blog post describing what happens when something goes wrong on GOV.UK.
Well attested1 source2015Datedgb-communication-3
Work & careers
Ukraine3 claims
In DOU surveys, the share of IT workers registered as FOP (sole proprietors) fell from 87% (2022) to 70% (2024), 57% (2025) and 49% (2026). Workers are moving to Diia.City gig contracts and employment contracts.
Well attested2 sources2026ua-work-1
Diia.City gig contracts, introduced in 2022, carry 5% personal income tax, a 5% military levy and social contributions of 22% of the minimum wage. As of October 2026 the regime had more than 4,600 resident companies covering about 217,000 specialists.
Attested2 sources2026ua-work-2
In DOU's December 2025 survey (4,522 responses), the median developer take-home pay was $3,450. A study by the law firm Juscutum and the Diia.City Union found that about 20% of IT professionals work from abroad.
Attested2 sources2026ua-work-3
United Kingdom4 claims
According to the ONS, full-time workers averaged 36.6 actual hours per week in 2024. The figure covers all occupations, not only engineers.
Well attested1 source2026gb-work-1
In the Stack Overflow Developer Survey 2025, 31.9% of UK respondents work fully remote and 25.8% work hybrid leaning flexible. Median salaries were $136,141 for engineering managers and $108,913 for back-end developers, about 60 to 70% of US levels.
Well attested1 source2025gb-work-2
Making 20 or more people redundant requires collective consultation. Consultation must start at least 30 days before the first dismissal for 20 to 99 redundancies, and at least 45 days before for 100 or more.
Well attested1 sourcegb-work-3
In a 2022 four-day week pilot (61 companies, about 2,900 employees), 56 companies continued afterward and 71% of employees reported less burnout. Most participants were small companies, and the pilot was not limited to tech.
Attested1 source2023gb-work-4
Open source & community
Ukraine3 claims
GitLab is an open source project that Dmitriy Zaporozhets started at his home in Ukraine in 2011. In 2014 he turned it into a company with Sytse Sijbrandij from the Netherlands.
Attested1 source2022ua-oss-1
Grammarly (a product, not open source) was founded in Kyiv in 2009 by Max Lytvyn, Alex Shevchenko and Dmytro Lider. Its largest engineering hub is still in Kyiv.
Attested2 sources2022ua-oss-2
The developer community DOU.ua's annual survey "Портрет айтівця 2026" (Portrait of an IT specialist) drew 14,631 respondents. The community publishes its own pay and contract data every year.
Well attested1 source2026ua-oss-3
- DOU: Портрет айтівця 2026 (2026)
United Kingdom3 claims
According to Octoverse 2024, the UK has more than 4 million developers on GitHub, up 19% year over year. Octoverse 2025 projects about 11 million by 2030.
Well attested2 sources2025gb-oss-1
- GitHub Octoverse 2024 (2024)
- GitHub Octoverse 2025 (2025)
An estimate by the industry body OpenUK (2023) attributes 27% of the UK tech sector's gross value added in 2022 to open source.
Attested1 source2023gb-oss-2
The public sector has made publishing code the default. The Skills Funding Agency reused GOV.UK's Smart Answers code and finished in under a week work that would otherwise have taken at least two months.
Well attested1 source2017gb-oss-3