Where are the African programmers?

http://nadjetey.github.io/2014/06/where-are-the-african-coders/

by nadjetey • 12 years ago

89 98 12 years ago

nadjetey.github.io

Nanzikambe9• 12 years ago

African programmer here, and left the country I was born in decades ago to find somewhere that had a demand for my skills.

You'll find there's a direct correlation between available jobs for a career and people qualified or qualifying for that career that remain there. The only places in Sub-Saharan Africa that need programmers are of the scale where they have a regional head office elsewhere in the region (ie. South Africa, where they centralise support services like IT, development, analysis etc.)

Combined with the fact that the power houses of development in Africa are about as immigration friendly to other Africans as some of them would have been to people by virtue skin colour not so long ago. To clarify, "African from a poor African nation" is the new black in South Africa/Namibia/Botswana I can't speak for anywhere in Central or Northern Africa as I've not tried them.

Nanzikambe9• 12 years ago

One other point, probably unrelated, but definitely relevant to me:

Being a geek, it's hard to live somewhere where hardware, a dead hard drive for example, costs several months salary to replace. Especially when the environment (heat & frequent loss of power) is conducive to dying hardware :)

hmsimha• 12 years ago

Hard drives are generally pretty cheap nowadays, so I'd think it would be more like 1-2 weeks of pay for a minimum wage earner, perhaps even 1-2 days pay for someone doing technical work. But even still, your point is valid.

meric2• 12 years ago

Our company is going to hire an intern from South Africa soon, I'm going to be involved deciding which applicant we accept.

"You'll find there's a direct correlation between available jobs for a career and people qualified or qualifying for that career that remain there."

It was for this reason I told my bosses it might be hard to find someone good, but they told me we're going to do it anyway, to see for ourselves, since the company plans to open an office there next year.

Do you have any advice on how to find and attract good programmers in Africa?

Nanzikambe9• 12 years ago

Sure, three tips:

1/ Make your job student friendly and don't look for the usual 5+ years of experience

2/ Keep firmly in mind that the best trait in a programmer isn't necessarily qualification, but the ability to learn fast, and problem solve quickly and effectively.

3/ When multiple candidates fit the profile (above) but you're unsure, either give a final interview round with more extensive tests to clarify their abilities in those two areas. Or else hire all of them on trial basis. Make clear that at the end only one gets a job, but the other two get some paid temporary work and a really glowing letter of recommendation. It's win win, 1 gets a job, the others get invaluable work experience that's in short supply.

If I had those opportunities, I might be somewhere with a far better climate and a much cheaper and stress free life style :)

Edit: I just noticed you said South Africa and not Southern Africa. I don't think you'll have any trouble finding qualified programmers.

richardw• 12 years ago

South African here. You'll easily find good people. Our startup culture is so-so and if you want esoteric languages you'll have to look harder, but .net, Java, Ruby, mobile, Linux etc should be fine. For interns just contact a local uni in the city you're like to be in (probably Johannesburg or Cape Town).

kabouseng5• 12 years ago

Eric,

I am a software developer in South Africa (Embedded). What skillset are you looking for?

Searching for a suitable candidate in South Africa follows exactly the same process as everywhere else in the world. If you want experienced candidates, use the headhunters or post the job on job boards. For interns the best approach is through the universities or schools.

Finding someone good in South Africa is the same as everywhere else, good developers are in high demand.

Regards.

SeanDav2• 12 years ago

South Africa is an interesting mix of 1st and 3rd world in almost every aspect of life. Education can be world class, yet many are illiterate. Medicine can be world class (the first ever successful heart transplant anywhere in the world, was carried out by a South African doctor in a South African hospital), yet HIV, tuberculosis, and other treatable/manageable diseases run riot in some areas.

IT professional from SA are likely to be world class (Mark Shuttleworth and Elon Musk for example, are South African) and in general IT and related skills are rather advanced in SA and very much first world.

nashequilibrium4• 12 years ago

Mark Shuttleworth - Ubuntu Creator South African & sold Thawte to Verisign in the dotcom boom.

Elon Musk - South African, of paypal & spacex

Roelof Botha - South African, of paypal & Sequoia

Emanuel Derman - South African, of Goldman Sachs Quantitative strategies

Amazon Web Services - South Africa

Herman Chinery-Hesse - Ghana, of SOFTtribe

OffTopic - J. R. R. Tolkien - South African, Lord of the Rings

There is a lot more where that came from: http://ventureburn.com/2014/03/20-kickass-african-tech-entre...

You could go to a lot of the Compsci departments at many Universities in African countries and find a lot of good developers or potentially good devs. This is where Accenture , microsoft etc, get their devs from in Africa.

EDIT: PLZ downvote this post, my challenge to u guys is to make my Karma go to zero! You can do it guys.

Nanzikambe9• 12 years ago

True. However all of those are, as you point out, from either South Africa or Ghana. See my points regarding the power houses of Africa in the parent post.

Outside those, the comp-sci depts. in every uni I checked with were only teaching archaic languages, even by the standards of the day, or none at all. I'll concede, that in my case, that was long ago - but given I'm just hitting middle age, I believe it's still relevant, hence the tips I later gave.

TL'DR: if you're African, and not from either of those places or outright wealthy, good luck getting in. Ghana and RSA count, in most respects, as exceptions to the rule.

ekianjo4• 12 years ago

OffTopic - J. R. R. Tolkien - South African, Lord of the Rings

Born from British parents living in the Boer province of South-Africa, a British colony, so not really South-Africa per se. And he returned to the UK eventually for and after WW1.

SeoxyS• 12 years ago

Mark Shuttleworth: white, British descent,

Elon Musk: white, Canadian/British descent,

Chris Pinkham and Benjamin Black (AWS): white,

Emanuel Derman: white,

J. R. R. Tolkien: white, British descent.

---

I'm not trying to say anything about race. But many of the examples you pointed out seemed to be of people of non-african descent. I don't think your examples say much about Africans in tech so much as it says something about people in positions of privilege having the opportunity to found companies.

I say this as a one-time white-foreigner living in South Africa, where I spent four years.

oneweekwonder• 12 years ago

Adding a name to the list Theo de Raadt from OpenBSD and OpenSSH is also from euro african descent.

mcv• 12 years ago

South Africa is one of the three richest countries in Africa (with Egypt and Morocco). There's a lot of Africa between those three corners. From your list, only Herman Chinery-Hesse is not from South Africa.

There's a lot of untapped potential in Africa that's practically invisible.

elinchrome2• 12 years ago

I follow some African programmers on twitter. They aren't totally unheard of. I suspect most emigrate to Europe or America to find work, and no longer identify as African Programmers.

Nanzikambe9• 12 years ago

A fair point, but as an African that emigrated and is naturalised, I still identify myself as very much African as opposed to anything else. I suspect most Africans have very strong identities in that respect, but I can only speak for myself.

elinchrome2• 12 years ago

I used identify in the outward sense, not the inward. I.e. in a tag-line on twitter one wouldn't have "A rails developer in Mombasa," if they were really in Antwerp.

Eduard• 12 years ago

There is an interesting crowdfunding campaign for a documentation going on right now which will provide insights into this topic: https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/africahacktrip-the-movie

Nanzikambe9• 12 years ago

That project is definitely cool enough to warrant it's own post! Why haven't I heard of this before?

xtrumanx• 12 years ago

Yet, for some strange reason, these people are virtually ghosts on the Internet.

That's not very strange in my opinion. Scott Hanselman spoke of Dark Matter Developers* who are the "Unseen 99%" who don't blog, tweet or attend conferences.

* http://www.hanselman.com/blog/DarkMatterDevelopersTheUnseen9...

tribaal10• 12 years ago

Also, attending conferences in "Africa" (such a big and diverse continent lumped together) is completely unpractical except for some edge cases: many flights will go to Europe and back (there is very little internal demand).

The price of such a flight is obviously also a problem.

yummyfajitas• 12 years ago

There are many African programmers here in India (Pune at least, I hear similar things about Delhi). The general trajectory seems to be study here because schools at home are a disaster, then move to the west because the east is too racist.

Nearly every single one wishes they could find a good job at home.

(Let me emphasize that this is all secondhand knowledge. The only racist behavior I've observed has been a Russian making a "jungle fever" type comment to me, plus standard "rip off the foreigner" stuff.)

markdown• 12 years ago

I was in a hostel with some africans (Tanzania/Kenya) in Hyderabad studying CompSci under ICCR (Indian Govt) Scholarships about a decade ago. Great guys, very sharp. Lost touch over the years.

ForHackernews• 12 years ago

For what it's worth, Rwanda is attempting to become a local tech hub: http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/the_next_silicon_va...

incision• 12 years ago

Okal Otieno [1], creator of hackershelf.com [2] a site I discovered on HN and get all kinds of value from.

1: http://justokal.com/

2: http://hackershelf.com/browse/

mhogomchungu2• 12 years ago

African programmer here from Tanzania and one of my FOSS project is zuluCrypt[1]

[1] https://code.google.com/p/zulucrypt/

tribaal10• 12 years ago

Hey cool!

What part of Tanzania are you from? Moshi here :)

mhogomchungu2• 12 years ago

Dar Es Salaam. I noticed in your other comment you said you moved to Tanzania recently, how is your Swahili :-)

Let see if you can derive meaning from the following swahili question.

Kati ya nchi zote ulizokuwa na uwezo wa kuhamia,kwanini uliichagua Tanzania?

If the above went over your head,i asked, "of all the countries you could have migrated to,why did you pick Tanzania?"

terramars• 12 years ago

Nigeria is the only African country where I'm familiar with the tech industry, they have some jobs available in Telecom and Petroleum for trained locals - though getting one of these is far from guaranteed even with a degree. Both industries require quite a few coders. There's also the computer crime industry which I suspect is one of the largest employers of programmers.

Anecdotally, Egypt produces a lot of high quality computer scientists.

hentrep• 12 years ago

Monocle did a great story last week on the female-oriented Jigeentech Hub in Dakar, Senegal (see the 2:00 point at http://monocle.com/radio/shows/the-entrepreneurs/136/). This may not be the next Silicon Valley, but it sure seems like a start in the right direction and an inspirational model for other developing nations.

pontjho• 12 years ago

I suspect I'm one of the dark matter programmers Scott spoke of. I'm from South Africa by the way

eshvk• 12 years ago

I suppose I too am an African programmer. I never thought of myself as one because I first touched a computer after I left the continent. However, here I am writing Machine Learning code.

le_meta• 12 years ago

They're all playing football.

tribaal10• 12 years ago

I moved to Tanzania recently (I'm a white western programmer with a remote job).

Some of the hurdles you have to jump over to become a professional programmer here:

- Have access to a computer (several months, sometimes years, of salary). Obviously.

- Have access to reliable power. I have 6+ hours power cuts almost daily here (and I'm in a rich town - not in the bush). Being a western Engineer, I could afford to build my own power backup system, but I'm the exception.

- Have access to the internet. Sure, I can afford broadband here, but at 60$+ a month, it's way out of reach for most people. Mobile is acccessible-ish, but most providers won't let you tether a computer (or charge through the roof for it).

- Read English well enough to understand online material. The corollary being that your family has to be rich enough to afford to send you to school (that is, primary and high-school. I'm not even talking about university here).

- Last but not least, actually learn programming (I met many westerners without any of the previous problems that fail utterly).

Once you pass all these, you still have to find a job, and that's not easy. Basically, some ISPs, some telco jobs, and very few regional things (web agencies etc...).

I hope working from home / remoting will continue to become more widespread - some very good programmers here are looking for jobs, and would love to stay.

Oh, and most of Africa shares timezones with Europe, too.

gagabity3• 12 years ago

We are here!(Tanzania) Mostly working in shy demoralizing banking IT departments. I have began looking into immigrating probably to Canada or Australia due to their immigration policies.

tribaal10• 12 years ago

Yay!

Many more Tanzanian programmers than I expected on this thread!

Out of curiosity - what kind of technologies do you use during your day job? Is it a typical choice for the banking industry in Tanzania, in your experience?

gagabity3• 12 years ago

For my day job I use mostly SQL Server and a beast of an application which is written in VB and C#.Net by some developers in another country, I am only allowed to touch the configuration and scripting layer (C#) on this one and the thousands of configuration options it contains. But I do mostly Android in my spare time if I have the energy.

twoSeats• 12 years ago

Well I'm disappointed to not see a bunch more people promoting their local tech hubs, dev communities and such if they have them. Zambia has the people over at -> http://bongohive.co.zm and a few more that aren't involved with that hub.

I know I have many "dark matter" programmers as friends. A lot of Africa in my experience as tribaal pointed out has a great many hurdles that need to be overcome in order to be a programmer. For example I have to pay the same price he does for internet access, US$60 and it's only a 512k line. Worse, service has been so bad lately I'm lucky to have more than an hour of stable uptime at a time at an average of 10kb/s.

christogreeff• 12 years ago

http://www.siliconcape.com/

infruset2• 12 years ago

A place where anyone can search programmers based on say, community, programming language, project interests, gender, age brackets etc

gender? really?

gambiting• 12 years ago

If you can search by age,then why not gender? Both should have zero influence on your abilities, and yet it's ok to discriminate against one but not the other.

infruset2• 12 years ago

I can see your point, although your age can reflect your experience, whereas your gender provides no information about your ability. I guess you could argue that for a company willing to be more diverse (like Google recently), it actually IS important to know people's gender for a kind of affirmative action.

gettingreal• 12 years ago

This is a cool project. But don't let the fact that you are building an app distract from the main goal (building a community).

I would suggest you first go to as many universities as you can, get their computer science students on-board, and then connect to their alumni network.

And start organising meetups, hackathons and other events. You need to start a small fire and it will kindle.

A simple website is good enough and you can start today. http://www.hackcampus.io/ is doing something similar in the UK.

A directory might not be so useful at this point.

I would also love to see the Tech space in Africa mature. I expect great things to come out of that continent, and building a community Is definitely a great place to start.

Put the code up on Github and I'll contribute.

ekwogefee• 12 years ago

Some African programmers like me build products from Africa... but brand our products to look American/European. I guess some Asians do that also. This move increased our sales considerably.

JacobiX• 12 years ago

Africa is a large heterogeneous continent ... I'm a software developer from north Africa (Tunisia). You can find here some regular white-collar jobs. But the startups scene is nonexistent.

Major_Grooves• 12 years ago

A lot of them in Ghana go to this school: http://meltwater.org/

abenga• 12 years ago

The dev environment in Africa (at least in Nairobi, where I live) is growing quite quickly. Co-working spaces (mostly with attached incubators) like the iHub[1], 88mph[2], etc. are extremely vibrant spaces. In the iHub, we have frequent talks by prominent figures from the technology community (Larry Wall, Marissa Mayer, and Eric Schmidt are some of the ones I knew about). IBM research opened an office in Nairobi, and I hear they're recruiting Kenyan programmers.

[1] http://www.ihub.co.ke/

[2] http://www.88mph.ac/

Edit: Fixed links.

salimane• 12 years ago

I've been asking this question for a long time...any african programmer in Berlin or Germany ? check my contact :)

jacquesm4• 12 years ago

If you're an African programmer, or even a programmer living in some country where you do have internet access but little or no local market: Please apply next time the 'who wants to be hired' thread rolls around. It's in my opinion one of the most direct ways in which HN can help you improve your situation, either by being noticed and to get hired remotely or by giving you a ticket out. Though the latter is a nice example of brain drain and evaporative cooling in action it is at the same time a very clear and direct way to get you into a substantially different situation. What you do if/when you get employed is up to you, I know plenty of stories of people that went abroad, made some money and then somehow found a way to leverage that into improving the situation for a whole slew of people back home. So I'm not adverse to this at all, in fact I think it is a good thing, it sure beats being unemployed.

ismail• 12 years ago

South African here, there are plenty of African coders/hackers. If they are not blogging does not mean they do not exist.

Though, i have personally felt that community is lacking in other countries.

I have been traveling in other parts of Africa. I usually check in on Meetup.com before traveling to see for any interesting hacker events, out of 4 countries i have been too in the last 3 months only Kenya had events i could find.

okal• 12 years ago

"Where are the Ghanaian Programmers" would have been a more appropriate title. I'm Kenyan. Articles like these presume we're operating within the same market conditions when nothing could be further from the truth. The disclaimer in the first paragraph seems to acknowledge this, but talking about "African programmers" is neither useful nor helpful IMO. All we have in common is the fact that we live on the same land mass.

liotier• 12 years ago

I'm amazed that posting this article here resulted in good discussion while posting it to Reddit's /r/programming (http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/276oxb/where_ar...) only results in downvotes... That probably says something about differences in outlook between those two forums.

mmsimanga• 12 years ago

The one point I do not see mentioned in the comments is that most Africans do not need software but probably something such as food, shelter, farming tools, books, medicine/clinics, roads, clean water.

I am a Comp Sci graduate but honestly cannot think of a software product that will make a difference to my cousins still in the village. I see software as a luxury.

ihatehandles• 12 years ago

Zimbabwean. Bootstrapping couple tech startups (some profitable) here in Africa for way over a year now.

Most (good) devs I know are self-taught. Employment opportunities pushing code are so scarce it's hopeless for most which is why most move out or go into sys admin/networking. The jobs don't pay that good as well but you can strike out well with consulting.

Thanks to the internet Git, SASS, Heroku, AngularJS, Golang, NodeJS, Docker and all other hacker goodness is adopted just as much (by the few willing) so it's not like we're making sites with bash. We also have a few tech podcasts and the occasional meetup.

Just that our communities are much much smaller and far apart that it's like we're not there at all (thanks economy). Good developers are also hard to find because most see no point in developing skills you never get to use. Things are picking up though

yawboakye• 12 years ago

The problem of "missing" developers in Africa cannot be solved with another database (there's already DevelopersInAfrica [1], and I think there could be more). What I have identified as the problem since I started running DevCongress [1] with a couple of friends and the general community of programmers in Ghana is, ironically, community and activity.

You see, Ghanaians generally a quiet people, and it pierces all our circles. It's hard to shake that dumb silence off, it's hard. Just look at participation in our Google group [3] and how it's dominated by just me. That's not what we wanted, obviously. So we set out solve the problem of programmers restricting themselves to absolute silence. That familiarity among ourselves would lessen the barrier to participation was our riskiest assumption. So we started yet another project, namely, #eXchange (you can see episodes here [4]). So far we are engaging really well via the videos, and more importantly we're exposing the humans (and their humanness) behind the big names in the programmer community in Ghana. It's been successful so far.

Last but not least of our attempts is FORGE [5]. Oh I so love FORGE! We have plans to launch before the end of June but funds (we foot all the bills ourselves) are holding us back a little. We are preparing to approach GitHub Community [6] to ask for help. Since you're in Ghana we should link up to discover even more ways that we can pull ourselves up to an appreciable, non-mediocre level.

To all non-African programmers, please consider actively mentoring us even though we can't afford to pay you. Also think about offering us internship and job opportunities without paying significant attention to our CVs because tbh, they're mostly crap.

[1] http://www.developersinafrica.com [2] http://devcongress.com [3] https://groups.google.com/forum/?hl=en#!forum/devcongress [4] https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCJdep9xo0Y8UTvKehbhey2g [5] http://forge.devcongress.com/faq [6] https://community.github.com/

Where are the African programmers?

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