Someone in a Polish small-business group recently posted: "Looking for an IT person. Anyone know someone? Doesn't need to be a specialist, but good if they know code, online stores." Zero specifics, plenty of hope that one person will handle everything. If you've got a similar draft job posting sitting somewhere — before you publish it, work out whether you actually need a full-time hire.
Where this kind of posting comes from
Posts like this don't come from laziness. They come from accumulating mess: the website doesn't quite work, the online store throws errors on checkout, someone keeps manually fixing a spreadsheet because an integration "breaks". At some point the owner concludes they need "someone for computers". The problem is that this isn't a job description — it's a description of a hole that needs plugging, and nobody has checked exactly what's in it.
"Looking for an IT person. Anyone know someone? Good if they know code, online stores." — paraphrased from an anonymous post in a small-business Facebook group
The real cost of a full-time IT hire at a small company
A full-time IT hire at a small Polish company today runs 8,000–15,000 PLN gross per month — 96,000–180,000 PLN a year. On top of that sit costs that are easy to forget while drafting the ad: recruiting (4–8 weeks on average), hardware and licenses, holiday and sick leave, and turnover — a good IT generalist at a small company with no team and no growth path typically stays 12–18 months before the search starts again. For that price you're buying 160 hours a month. The question is how many of those hours turn into real work, versus waiting for the next ticket.
The decision framework: three questions
Before you publish the ad, answer three questions:
- Is this a one-off task or a recurring one? One-off (a data migration, rolling out a new system) is a project, not a hire. Recurring (daily order handling, weekly reports) is a hire candidate — but only after you check the third question.
- Does it require your presence, or just the outcome? If what matters is the result ("the data needs to be in the sheet by 9am") and not who delivers it or how — that's work to automate, not to hire for.
- Has someone already solved this with an off-the-shelf tool? Order syncing, contact imports, automation monitoring — these all exist as ready-made solutions costing a fraction of a salary.
If the answers are: one-off + outcome matters + a ready tool exists — you need a project or an automation, not an employee. If: recurring + needs your presence + unique to your business — then, and only then, a full-time hire makes sense.
When it genuinely is a full-time role
To avoid sounding like someone who sells automation as the answer to everything: there are situations where hiring is the right call. When a company is growing fast enough that new systems appear every month and someone needs to understand the whole picture, not one process. When customers or the team need response times measured in minutes, not days. When tasks are varied enough that no automation covers them — user support today, network configuration tomorrow, a vendor call the day after. In companies like that, one "IT person" genuinely pays for itself.
What a "what can actually be automated" audit looks like
Before deciding, it's worth counting instead of guessing. A short operational audit means listing every recurring task someone currently does by hand, or plans to hand to a future employee, and running each one through the three-question framework above. In practice, such lists tend to split roughly in half: part genuinely needs a person on-site, part can be closed in a week or two as an integration or automation (the kind of thing bāApps Beacon monitors, so nobody finds out about an outage from a customer) — at a fraction of one month's salary.
- A "handle my IT" job posting usually describes an unanalyzed problem, not a real role.
- A full-time IT hire at a small company costs 96,000–180,000 PLN a year in salary alone — plus recruiting, hardware, and turnover.
- Three questions before deciding: one-off or recurring, presence or outcome, does a ready tool already exist.
- 80% of these needs at small companies turn out to be 3–4 recurring tasks that can be automated in a week.
You don't need a finished answer to start. Just write down the 3–4 tasks that are bothering you most right now, and run them through this article's framework. If you still come out needing a full-time hire — good, at least now you know what kind. If you come out with something else, that's exactly the moment to talk about an audit, before you pay a first month's salary.