As an African I often wonder if we are solving problems in the right sequence. The Internet makes it easy to feel like one is connected to someone in SV but the reality is we live in very different environments. I presume most people in SV have running water and pretty reliable electricity, decent roads and hospitals (yes I know there are issues with healthcare funding but the hospitals are there, in Africa we don't have the building). As a developer in Africa you have to contend with the underlying infrastructure issues and keep up with the latest JS framework :-).
One of Africa's greatest technical achievements was going "out of sequence" to go all-in on cellular Internet and mobile apps, skipping landline rollout to the home.
The "moral of the story" is hidden in a non-linebreaking long paragraph formatted as pseudocode. Most of the content of the essay is there, yet you can't read it unless you think to inspect the source code.
You probably missed or didn't take the time:
---
System.out.println (“ It's not easy being an African software developer. Don't give up and always Ask God for directions. Use the right technologies for the right tasks. The future of the African software industry lies in enabling the scattered bunches of individual hobbyist programmers. Those people who would be coding even if it didn't pay because that is what they like doing. People like that should be given a chance, should be given work to do, encouraged to stick it out. When there are enough programmers around and working as a programmer is a viable occupation that can buy a car and build a house, the industry will have grown up. Until then, it is dog eat dog -- monkey go work, baboon go chop... “);
-------
... I really want to find something positive to say.
This is why we need to be supporting open and free hardware, everything else is some form of compromise.
EDIT: Kodos for the moral, I'm on mobile and couldn't read it since the formatting is a little off, and my iPhone can't easily inspect element. See what I mean?
> A web and software developer in Africa earns from $10,000 to $20,000 dollars per annum whereas their colleagues in Europe and the US earns at least $100,000 dollars per year.
This is nowhere near true for Europe, the floor is more like $30,000, probably less in some areas.
This matches my personal experience. Developers in fully-developed countries like France, Italy and the UK are typically well under $100k USD per year on average, with a few outliers above that, at least for most companies, and falling very rapidly when you start talking about Poland, Estonia and so on. After tax incentives some of these areas are amazingly inexpensive.
I think people overestimate the compensation outside the Bay Area and India due to lack of experience, and even those in 2nd tier regions (US-TX, US-NC, ...) still overestimate European and Canadian compensation whereas they likely know very accurately what compensation for India and China looks like.
Adjusting for purchasing power of earnings in their home countries flattens out the numbers too. In South Africa, PPP is 1.63$/$, so that's actually a range of $16,300 to $32,300 in purchasing power. In Nigeria, PPP is 3$/$ so that's closer to $30,000-$60,000 in purchasing power.
In Canada the average software developer gets paid $70,000USD, which is $59,500 in purchasing power.
In many parts of Eastern Europe $20-30K USD a year is considered a fairly good salary... but then again there you can rent a place for 300 euros, and everything else also costs a lot less than in West, so that needs to be taken into the account - because after all a profit is income minus expenses, not just the income...
Replace Africa with MiddleEast and it's the same, $8500 is the average salary, only a few private companies actually pay a reasonable salary, bad education, no training, expensive electronics/internet, and non-techy bosses/clients (the worse!!)
I live in Tanzania and a salary of 10-20k USD is a pretty lux life here. You could get a housekeeper, gardener, and a gated property and still have a lot left over. Moreover, no income tax! The problem is that imported goods have a 50% tax on them, so laptops and stuff are pretty expensive.
I moved from NYC to Tanzania to help run a school that my wife founded here and Tanzania is a long long way off from becoming an information economy. I teach a computer science class and am regularly shocked by the lack of basic information my students have about technology and the world.
I'm not sure what to do about it, and really try to get my students interested in the world and ask questions. But it's hard to ask reasonable questions when you have no books and no/limited access to information.
Moreover, there aren't any unlimited data bundles and almost no one has computers at one. When I first arrived in Tanzania and began teaching I thought the solution was simple: provide free access to information via a community library we built with always on computers and internet. Unfortunately, the library became the go-to place to watch youtube videos all day long. So I had to turn the internet off and just have it when I or another teacher is there.
The approach that has worked best is guided computer use. Something like "give me a list of questions you have about something and then go find the answers in a 2 hour period."
If I was going to hire a Tanzanian developer (and I hate to say this, but I probably wouldn't), I would judge him just on his raw intelligence, not his skills. Skill/knowledge-wise, even the smartest Tanzanians are at a huge information disadvantage. You gotta just find the smartest guys (and there's a lot of untapped talent just sitting around) and train them yourself.
tl;dr: when you have a group of people who are systematically information disadvantaged, you will always be disappointed by their knowledge/skills. Instead judge them on pure smarts, and realize you will have to make a big long-term investment in them.
I'd suggest making a white list of allowed sites (wikipedia, wolfram alpha), and create a quick contact point (if there is somebody there at all times) where students can ask for whitelisting a new site.
Highly theoretical: in your position I'd set up a library and teach English rather than IT if that's the limiting factor. Books and peers are just as useful as direct teaching.
Mambo vipi? I just got back from two years in Tanzania teaching Python/SQL/web to secondary schools students in the Arusha region[0]. Interesting some of the things you say about resources, the library -- your experiences mirror my own. You're right that there is a huge information accessibility gap. I gave my top students as much self-directed access to compute and Internet resources as possible, with several successes (one could write Python programs independently, another could set up Linux, and so on) but bottlenecks (such as my time, cost of Internet, power, tragedies of the commons, etc.) prevented more of my smartest students from going as far as they otherwise could have.
I'm curious -- what region are you in, and what is your organization? I'm back in the US now, but I keep in touch with the NGO I used to work for and it's a small wazungu world over there. If you don't mind putting some contact info here I'll send you an email, otherwise I'd enjoy hearing from you -- my email is on my profile.
Do you have any thoughts on the way more and more software is accessed through the "cloud"? Do you prefer offline apps? Do cloud-based apps cause problems?
What’s wrong with people using your library to watch YouTube videos all day long?
Can you tell me you’ve never done that? There’s nothing wrong with it, even if it wasn’t the intended purpose. Maybe one of those kids would stumble upon a video that gave them so critical knowledge or sparked their passion in something?
As long as the kids weren’t displacing others or damaging the equipment I don’t see what’s wrong with it.
Aside from the lack of load shedding and decent access to cheap technology and loads of bandwidth...
I feel everything else is the same for anyone outside SV. Can't meet deadlines (but that's because everything takes longer than you think it will, even when you account for hoffstadter's (sp?) law) and trying to bootstrap stuff in your spare time is next to impossible. Not impossible, but It's right up there with the most difficult things you could try and do.
As an African, I think everything laid down in this article is applicable to any job. The main problem here imho is the economic system. Africa cannot capitalism like its Europe or Latin America. Private firms and investment will not solve our problems, this has been demonstrated for more than a century now. We just get predated over our natural resources. We don't have other countries to sack or attract a lot of qualified work from other countries. Nobody invests in Africa and if they do, intermediaries and corrupt governments steal most of it to live lavishly. And most of the highly qualified Africans just run away to have a decent living somewhere else. I feel very sad about my continent, the cradle of humanity :(
At 20K a year it would seem African developers would be a competitive outsourcing option for wealthier nations. Is there a reason they're not a well known name in outsourcing?
I'm guessing it might have something to do with infrastructure, when countries like India and China can compete at these prices but have the infrastructure to support working remotely.
TLDR; Being a developer in Africa means paying 2X-4X in hardware prices, no viable Internet packages, hard to build team, unreliable electricity, no angel investment, 10X lower salary compared to US, hard to find learning resources, ban from PayPal.
You don't understand why it's informative to hear a viewpoint on a topic from someone who has had a different experience than you? Why are you on this site?
I don't understand this comment. An enlightening list of challenges facing programmers in a part of the world we don't often hear from. How is your comment appropriate at all here? Or did you accidentally comment on the wrong post?
Unless of course you're comparing software developers' lifestyle to the refugees, nomads and slum dwellers? In which case $20k in San Fransisco is also balling out of control, when compared to the homeless guys living on your porch.
Africa is not a monolith. This is an absurd statement in the very areas where there even is a software development industry. See j'burg, akkra, lagos, nairobi, etc.
[+] [-] mmsimanga|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gowld|6 years ago|reply
wikipedia.org/wiki/M-Pesa
[+] [-] madrafi|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] thanatropism|6 years ago|reply
You probably missed or didn't take the time: ---
System.out.println (“ It's not easy being an African software developer. Don't give up and always Ask God for directions. Use the right technologies for the right tasks. The future of the African software industry lies in enabling the scattered bunches of individual hobbyist programmers. Those people who would be coding even if it didn't pay because that is what they like doing. People like that should be given a chance, should be given work to do, encouraged to stick it out. When there are enough programmers around and working as a programmer is a viable occupation that can buy a car and build a house, the industry will have grown up. Until then, it is dog eat dog -- monkey go work, baboon go chop... “);
-------
... I really want to find something positive to say.
[+] [-] nixpulvis|6 years ago|reply
EDIT: Kodos for the moral, I'm on mobile and couldn't read it since the formatting is a little off, and my iPhone can't easily inspect element. See what I mean?
[+] [-] benzoate|6 years ago|reply
This is nowhere near true for Europe, the floor is more like $30,000, probably less in some areas.
[+] [-] foobiekr|6 years ago|reply
I think people overestimate the compensation outside the Bay Area and India due to lack of experience, and even those in 2nd tier regions (US-TX, US-NC, ...) still overestimate European and Canadian compensation whereas they likely know very accurately what compensation for India and China looks like.
[+] [-] PhasmaFelis|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] emsy|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] arcticbull|6 years ago|reply
In Canada the average software developer gets paid $70,000USD, which is $59,500 in purchasing power.
[+] [-] ivanhoe|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fopen64|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] doktrin|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fellellor|6 years ago|reply
One interesting thing to note is that India has among the highest divergence between Nominal GDP and Purchasing Power Parity numbers.
[+] [-] unknown|6 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] ousta|6 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] Ahmed90|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Scoundreller|6 years ago|reply
I’m sure things vary drastically between Israel, Iran and UAE.
[+] [-] mruts|6 years ago|reply
I moved from NYC to Tanzania to help run a school that my wife founded here and Tanzania is a long long way off from becoming an information economy. I teach a computer science class and am regularly shocked by the lack of basic information my students have about technology and the world.
I'm not sure what to do about it, and really try to get my students interested in the world and ask questions. But it's hard to ask reasonable questions when you have no books and no/limited access to information.
Moreover, there aren't any unlimited data bundles and almost no one has computers at one. When I first arrived in Tanzania and began teaching I thought the solution was simple: provide free access to information via a community library we built with always on computers and internet. Unfortunately, the library became the go-to place to watch youtube videos all day long. So I had to turn the internet off and just have it when I or another teacher is there.
The approach that has worked best is guided computer use. Something like "give me a list of questions you have about something and then go find the answers in a 2 hour period."
If I was going to hire a Tanzanian developer (and I hate to say this, but I probably wouldn't), I would judge him just on his raw intelligence, not his skills. Skill/knowledge-wise, even the smartest Tanzanians are at a huge information disadvantage. You gotta just find the smartest guys (and there's a lot of untapped talent just sitting around) and train them yourself.
tl;dr: when you have a group of people who are systematically information disadvantaged, you will always be disappointed by their knowledge/skills. Instead judge them on pure smarts, and realize you will have to make a big long-term investment in them.
[+] [-] marcosdumay|6 years ago|reply
I'd suggest making a white list of allowed sites (wikipedia, wolfram alpha), and create a quick contact point (if there is somebody there at all times) where students can ask for whitelisting a new site.
[+] [-] jacquesm|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tzcs2016|6 years ago|reply
I'm curious -- what region are you in, and what is your organization? I'm back in the US now, but I keep in touch with the NGO I used to work for and it's a small wazungu world over there. If you don't mind putting some contact info here I'll send you an email, otherwise I'd enjoy hearing from you -- my email is on my profile.
[0]: https://mattjquinn.com/edu/
[+] [-] open-source-ux|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] iamleppert|6 years ago|reply
Can you tell me you’ve never done that? There’s nothing wrong with it, even if it wasn’t the intended purpose. Maybe one of those kids would stumble upon a video that gave them so critical knowledge or sparked their passion in something?
As long as the kids weren’t displacing others or damaging the equipment I don’t see what’s wrong with it.
[+] [-] james_s_tayler|6 years ago|reply
I feel everything else is the same for anyone outside SV. Can't meet deadlines (but that's because everything takes longer than you think it will, even when you account for hoffstadter's (sp?) law) and trying to bootstrap stuff in your spare time is next to impossible. Not impossible, but It's right up there with the most difficult things you could try and do.
[+] [-] m0skit0|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] xupybd|6 years ago|reply
I'm guessing it might have something to do with infrastructure, when countries like India and China can compete at these prices but have the infrastructure to support working remotely.
[+] [-] sytelus|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] marmaduke|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tstrimple|6 years ago|reply
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/updates/azure-south-africa...
[+] [-] selimthegrim|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] maouida|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] javier2|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cryptokernel|6 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] shmooth|6 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] sctb|6 years ago|reply
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
[+] [-] themoonbus|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jacobmoe|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] door5|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] segmondy|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lesiki|6 years ago|reply
Unless of course you're comparing software developers' lifestyle to the refugees, nomads and slum dwellers? In which case $20k in San Fransisco is also balling out of control, when compared to the homeless guys living on your porch.
[+] [-] djtriptych|6 years ago|reply