What, exactly, is an Africa-focused Andela?

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Mark Essien, on the dearth of good Nigerian developers:

Nigeria’s former ICT Minister, Omobola Johnson’s response:

My uninformed opinion:

While we definitely need more/better developers building local technology products, talking about an “Africa-focused Andela” completely misses the point.

Maybe @iaboyeji will correct me, but Andela does not forbid Nigerian technology companies from taking its devs. The question, of course, is whether or not their money is complete. Except you’re going to start a talent accelerator that restricts the fellows’ options to local companies after their fellowship (destroys the value prop to the devs in the first place), I don’t see how the economics work out. Efforts like @Possicon’s Switch will help place devs in local companies for a time, but what do you think will happen when those devs become “world class” and they can earn > 10x their salary by working remotely for Gigster or other companies in the US or Europe?

If I started working as a VR dev for Altspace today, and they offered me as low as $30k a year (as conservative an estimate as I can fathom), it’s cheap labor for them, but for me, who’ll be spending that money in a country with a much lower standard of living? It’s $30,000 * ₦400 = ₦1,000,000/month. Why, then, should I collect ₦250,000/month from a Nigerian company that I’ll probably end up doing more work for? And it’s not just developers. Progressive Content, a freelancing platform for writers, offers anywhere from 250 - 400 pounds ($310 - 496) per article. That’s the same amount some writers get paid per month at Nigerian companies. Why, on earth, should they open Google Docs for anybody here?

One of the side effects of the internet removing friction is that many competitive advantages that relied on supply bottlenecks (think geographic location et al) are now null. Local companies offering an online service are competing with everyone else for users’ attention. You can’t build a sustainable business on the back of “X for Nigeria” alone anymore. Konga and Jumia are both competing with Amazon for my money (and losing). More people in the US read the TechCabal Daily Digest than in Nigeria. As @lordbanks likes to say, “a laptop in Macedonia is the same as a laptop in Nigeria.”

There are no easy answers.

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There’s no such thing as an Andela for Africa and even if there was it wouldn’t be the solution. As a free market economist, I’m tempted to say that this demand for our developers is not a problem to be solved, but an opportunity to be exploited and we should try to become a country that exports software developers as a service, look at how well that has worked out for India.

But considering that India is probably one of the biggest exporters of developer talent in the world, how come they still have developers to work for their own start ups.

The first possibility is that they can compete with foreign firms for talent in terms of salary. I doubt this though, the best Indian developers (graduates from IIT, for example) can easily get jobs in places like Apple or Google. There’s a joke that if you don’t get into IIT, then you apply to MIT.

The most likely reason that India still has devs working locally despite foreign competition for devs is that they have so many devs. I’ve been working in the Nigerian ecosystem for two years and I can say I know (or at least, know the name of) 60% of the World class Nigerian devs. There are probably at most 100 Nigerian devs good enough to work for gigster.

Until our universities start churning out 1000’s of good devs every year we will continue to struggle for developers. Silicon Valley was built on the backs of talent from Stanford. A university churning out tons top tech talent is a necessary requirement for an ecosystem.

This is why I like what forloop is doing going to different universities to give talks. Switch and Hotels.ng’s internship program are also great ways to fill this gap.

However, they are all half measures, all you lovers of the ecosystem, you need to start engaging with universities to find ways to improve the flow of tech talent, private universities may be more receptive to your efforts

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Local startups must prosper. If they don’t, talent will look elsewhere. We can’t fake the means to get smart people to work for cheap. It doesn’t work that way.

We must have companies do really well. Companies that do well compensate their people well. Companies that compensate their talent compete well for talents and keep getting more of it. Companies that get the best talents keep doing well. That’s the story of Google, FB and top companies that bring their employees free haircut and gym memberships. They have built the type of company that will allow them spoil their people.

What is my point?

  1. We are having too many companies.
  2. How can we get local tech companies really prosper? That will be a start.

We need fewer ones, that will do really great. That hopefully will prosper, and can reward the talents really well and competitively.

Great guys are not made in months. And when they are made, they will always go for top money. Current will only follow path of least resistance.

The interesting thing about everything is, everything will fall in place in time. Those that will eventually rise, will rise. And the dead, to the grave. We will all be alright, at the end of the day.

An Africa-focused Andela will always be a waste of time, and quite myopic. Jason was giving a million the other day. You can never tell talented people how they choose to direct their talents and time for their own profit, and for which companies they find most aligned with their personal mission.

And this is not Engineering. With most other type of talents too, that companies may need.

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As a local company, your money cannot be complete without you completely skewing the economics of your company. Look at a company that produces local goods and sells at local rates. If they have a small team, there is no issue. If they have a big developer team and they pay at the rates of countries where the GDP/capita is 10x bigger, it means that they are paying a 10x premium per developer.

So the problem is not that the companies are not paying what they are supposed to be paying, the problem is that if companies pay that amount, they are creating something unsustainable for themselves - an economic model that will cause the company to come crashing down.

The above has happened - it is INEVITABLE. We cannot think or clever our way around it. Nigerian developers will ultimately be taken by foreign companies.

The direct implication is this - there is no point making a local company that sources its product locally, and sells locally, and that needs a tech team that is >40% of the team. The margins will be destroyed by the cost of the tech team.

Nigerian technology companies must adapt to the new reality, and construct their business around the way the market is structured. They can 1.) Build for external market 2.) Operate extremely high margin business 3.) Build business where size of tech team is small compared to other teams/operating costs.

This coming problem has opened up a new sinkhole for some startups to fall into. People who build their companies in that small area will be severely affected by this. But most other companies will not. They will simply adapt their prices to market demand, and have a 10x greater cost on technology than foreign companies have - and then keep their tech teams correspondingly smaller.

The real victims of this will counter-intuitively be the developers themselves. One does not simply leave Aptech to work at Google. To become a developer good enough to work in a $5k/month job takes 2 to 3 years of constant coding with proper structure being forced on you. Because many senior developers will be pulled out of the market, and many local companies will find tech overpriced and rather not build around tech, there will be this hump that many developers will never be able to cross to become good enough to find those wonderful remote jobs.

That means that there will just be a trickle of developers getting those jobs - the average joe on the street will never advance himself to the level that he can get those jobs (without something changing in the market).

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And we all lose.

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Funny how recently, a friend of mine was talking about a new service she wanted to build and was already writing “specifications” to be sent to India for the build…

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I agree . But I believe the last statement isn’t entirely true .

It is public universities that will actually be more receptive to efforts from external bodies.

Why ??

There’s more drive and hunger in public universities.

Guys in private universities are generally more relaxed because they’re used to the easy life.

Take for example, forLoop UI and forLoop CU . Although not as many facilitators went for forLoop UI as they were at forLoop CU, the turn out in UI was great !!! . In my school for example there are lots of people who want to go into programming but just don’t know how to get started .

If these external companies can come and invest in these guys at their young levels , they would grow up to be great developers and they’ll still have a form of loyalty to the companies . At their graduation , these devs would have at least two years experience in coding and they can work at these companies before maybe going to work for the foreign companies later.

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This is what I wrote about. We need to build tech infrastructure. In Nigeria today a N250,000 per month is a generous wage.

The problem we have in Nigeria is that we think too much money most times.

Look at why Indians florish on freelance website. They can work day and night, very dedicated give them $100 to $500 they will work on your project like mad. But for Naija devolopers no we want to hammer.

When we take jobs in Nigeria we should think how much can I survive on in Nigeria person and think N250,000 per year is not bad. Even N100,000 is not

Longer throat na him dey kill our growth.

In Europe rent or mortgage allow per month can be almost £800 to £2,500 depending on location for 1 to 3 bedroom house or flat.

National insurance
Income tax
Council tax
Insurance
Road tax
TV licence
Child care
Travel cost
Etc

So if you think £40,000 or £50,000 per year is a good deal think again

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Not to be a nitpick, but this here statement…[quote=“sayo_paul, post:7, topic:11562”]
There’s more drive and hunger in public universities.
[/quote]

…is not rooted in any data, and so, cannot be taken seriously. Your proof…[quote=“sayo_paul, post:7, topic:11562”]
Guys in private universities are generally more relaxed because they’re used to the easy life.

Take for example, forLoop UI and forLoop CU . Although not as many facilitators went for forLoop UI as they were at forLoop CU, the turn out in UI was great !!! . In my school for example there are lots of people who want to go into programming but just don’t know how to get started .
[/quote]

…does not account for the difference in student population between both schools or for the fact that one of those schools does not allow mobile phones, so information dissemination is not as frictionless. Just saying.

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I was actually thinking about this problem yesterday and right now, the best bet is what @mark said.

I don’t think it makes sense for any Nigerian startup or company to pay me what I earn working remotely, 30 hours a week on Gigster. It would be a very bad business move.

Except for maybe big boys like Interswitch. But I think it makes more sense for Interswitch to employ 10 people they’ll pay N200,000 than just snag one Timi. They’ll eventually accomplish more.

For me it’s a particularly annoying problem because I strongly believe our problems, the real problems are very very technically hard to solve. Anytime I think about solutions that will reach a large percentage of Nigerians, I always conclude that I’ll need a team of developers far better than I am.

And software, as always, is just one part of the solution.

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Amazing thread! I couldn’t resist the urge to contribute :slight_smile:

TL;DR Andela is Africa-focused

One big question that was on the minds of all Andela co-founders in our initial brainstorming stages was “How do we transform an entire continent?”

Turns out that in this age, a very potent answer to that question is “through technology innovation.” But how do we drive technology innovation?

People like Marc Andreesen and Peter Thiel answered that question a long time ago. And to summarize their answer, “wherever there is a high concentration of technical talent, massive innovation will follow”. [sorry I couldn’t find the link to the podcast to share here]

At Andela, we understand this very well. That’s why we set out to create a machine that would inject a high amount of technical talent into the continent. For now, we quantify our developer concentration goal with the 100,000 developers target that we share publicly.

Like @mark pointed out, devs need some years of hardcore practice to build mastery towards being world class. To be captain obvious, that’s why we initially set Andela up to be a 4-year commitment.

So yes, this is a hard problem to solve. And it will take time.

I’ve seen some comments about Andela facilitating brain drain. That’s inaccurate. What we are doing is more akin to “brain cycle”. Grant the brains access to environments where they can practice and groom their craft at the highest levels, while they physically remain in the local ecosystems.

For me, here’s the low-key awesome part of all this. Through their daily work, each Andelan is building a rich network of technical and non-technical global professionals, that they can easily access and deploy at any time. This implies that anyone within our local ecosystems who is connected to any Andelan, immediately has access to this network. And that’s the meta value of Andela; the network that our local ecosystems are going to have access to. But as I mentioned it’s going to take some time.

Bottom line is that Andela is Africa-focused.

As we position Africa to actualize her potential in the technology revolution, we need excellent professionals in every vocation on the continent as well. I encourage everyone to own other pieces of the puzzle to build well-rounded talent for Africa’s future. Bless up!

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What sort of trash is this?

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Its not trash… its his opinion :disappointed_relieved:

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He could also tell developers to collect minimum wage. Rubbish

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some teachers are paid ₦20,000/month… that’s ₦240,000/year…

Not all tech companies are big (financially buoyant) tech companies… some tech companies rely on donations…

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Have you hired a freelancer before in India. I do on a regular basis and am yet to be convinced about Nigerian freelancers

N250,000 per month for a full time 9 to 5 developer is a good wage. If you think it’s small tell me during interview why you deserve more.

Check

Upwork
Peopleperhour

Indians dominate why? because they can do a job $50 and do it well

You earn in Naira and you spend in Naira

I still stand by my words we get longer throat too much for Nigerian

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Don’t you think the same applies to the employer who wants a world class developer but doesn’t want to pay world class money?

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Define world class?

See you earn in Naira and Spend in Naira

Do not expect every company to pay you millions of Naira per month.

Think about it this way it’s better to have a job that pays N250,000 per month than nothing.

You can gain experience with the N250,000 per month job move your way up for 2 to 4 years and apply for your next role. Or you can sit wait for N1,000,000 or 2 per month salary

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Define world class?

See you earn in Naira and Spend in Naira

Do not expect every company to pay you millions of Naira per month.

Think about it this way it’s better to have a job that pays N250,000 per month than nothing.

You can gain experience with the N250,000 per month job move your way up for 2 to 4 years and apply for your next role. Or you can sit wait for N1,000,000 or 2 per month salary

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its just makes economic sense to outsource to india, pakistan, tunisia etc than to hire locally. they seem to work in teams, but in naija - mostly one man mopol : backend-frontend-middleend :smile:

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