Smart soul searching by Albert Mucunguzi (@albertmuc) http://bit.ly/1DVU4Pt You agree?
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“We have those who call themselves developers but can’t build anything from [the] ground-up [on their own]. They are just masters at combining a couple of hand-picked modules to get a product,” said Ronald Kasendwa, the Ugandan developer that built PC Tech Magazine’s Android app.
I agree with this totally. It’s easier to do than building from the ground up and I’m really not sure why. Maybe because it takes too long to build competence in development?
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I’ve got a detailed response to this (I hope I get round to it), but let me first leave this here.
I will come back to that link later. But a couple quick thoughts. Africa’s developers are at
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At the CcHub and iHub, Fundibots, via their bootcamp and geek club initiatives, Raspberry Pi jams and other technical skill acquisition initiatives targeted at kids.
Somehow I think that the current generation of developers will not save Africa. The ecosystem is too nascent to support much beyond transactional initiatives that allow them live from day to day. Remember Maslow’s hierarchy? Hard to innovate when there’s food and shelter and school fees to be paid.
We are going to need to entrust Africa’s future to the next generation. What we need to figure out is how to give them access to technology and expose their minds to innovative ways of thinking. And it needs to be done at scale, over the next five to twenty years.
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Before I continue to make my points I will like to attend to a quote from the article.
“We have those who call themselves developers but can’t build anything from [the] ground-up [on their own]. They are just masters at combining a couple of hand-picked modules to get a product,” said Ronald Kasendwa, the Ugandan developer that built PC Tech Magazine’s Android app.
There is absolutely nothing wrong to put modules together when building an application. Whats most important is to get the job done. Imagine there wasn’t django, nodejs, expressjs, wordpress, and so on. Then every developer will need to write is own http parser, db orm, session module, so on. The purpose of these modules is to help reduce time spent on a problem someone else has solved in the best possible way.
However, I am not in support of someone who only uses modules and doesn’t know how things work or can’t build anything at all. In my experience there aren’t many people who can use modules and can’t build anything at all because even using modules require understanding.
Still on the person using modules. Everything is stage by stage. When the time comes that guy using modules will start to build things from scratch in combination to the modules he uses.
Now on where are African developers (I will only talk about Nigeria). I think it is inaccurate to think there are not many sophisticated developers in Nigeria. There are just not many in the startup scene. If you want to see the real guys solving difficult tasks then you need to go to the enterprise and ask for their developers. However the enterprise developers that are very good are usually backend developers so they are not very good with ui n so on.
And those bad ass guys won’t apply to places like Andela because they already know shit, they probably won’t build a startup because they are scared and already used to the monthly salary.
A list of the kind of things they do.
- POS applications used by GTBank, PTSPs and so on.
- Real time stock trading applications
- Banking applications (Backend, Frontend and even mobile)
- Telecoms
- Mobile pos(similar to square) - go see them at cashenvoy.
and more…
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At some point, I’m hoping devs will have a fighting chance to get a decent exit from the companies they launch which would increase the financial incentives.
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To add to your point about the Nigeria startup world, I’m guessing that when developers have the opportunity to get decent exits from startups in Nigeria, you’ll see some of those devs in private sector enterprise more willing to take the plunge and launch their own startups. Or not. 
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You just killed me oh! I don’t believe in waiting till the next generation for anything, if we jettison this generation, the next will be doomed too.
I don’t think Africa’s developers are at Andela for now, i think in a few years many will come “from” Andela and co.
Most importantly, the dirty secret is that Nigeria doesn’t need Nigerian developers. I suspect this will be similar in other African countries, in terms of economics or skill set, etc. The Revolving Door of Developers in Nigeria | TechCabal
You will be quite surprised that many of these places you mentioned don’t really have quality Nigerian developers or they have many expatriates.
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The easiest answer to this is that many are abroad, working in Diaspora, or are doing their PhDs.
What is the definition for correct developers? When you mentioned expatriates I am sure you are talking about banks. I have worked a couple of times with Access Bank and Wema Bank and there aren’t many expatriates there. And those that are there are basically supporting tools provided by their organisation because they have been trained to support those tools. Anyways I stand to be corrected sir.
At least I have about 9 names of nigerian developers that can do scientific programming, algorithm analysis, design patterns, write compilers, even do systems programming … but you have never heard of them because they will probably never come out there other than read techcabal and techpoint and work for their primary employers.
we need like 100k of those.
when you look at it, almost no one in the bank builds anything from scratch, that is heavily outsourced.
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You’re not sure why it’s easier to work with something already existing?
Hard to innovate when there’s food and shelter and school fees to be paid.
Like Bankole said, the truth really is, we, as a society, are not there yet. We’re still struggling with basics like electricity and good, affordable education. People are trying to get by, not make a large, time-consuming, open-source framework that won’t bring them any money.
I feel like this is why many devs just kinda cobble things together, even though they’re pretty smart/decent programmers (others are just lazy and looking to make a quick buck). People do just what is necessary to get paid and nothing more. Very few people here, till today, see the value in web development beyond someone setting up a blog for them. Very few people see why they should pay hundreds of thousands of naira for their random web idea to be made a reality, so the devs in turn, who need to eat, aren’t going to go to great lengths with little reward. I can testify to this. Someone will come to you with a ten-page spec and a budget of 200k. It’s absurd.
Then there’s volume. There isn’t enough people entering the field for a myriad of reasons, one of them being that developers are not valued enough yet. Look at say, banking. It makes money. So people flock to it. Because people flock to it, there’s competition, so people go out and get certifications, improve themselves, to stand out.
There’s not much to aspire to here in tech. You can code in your sleep and have years of experience and people will still only want to pay you like 150k per month. Outside the continent, your talent would get you a decent living and a good salary.
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There is a reason for that. Find out the reason and you will know that its not because some of them can’t build it. The core banking application in GTBank was built locally.
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Heja Guys!
Hope this discussion is still active. I’m going to talk about Nigeria.
There are developers in Nigeria but not at the scale the question is premised around. In other words, we do not have enough yet to scream out that we have developers. The few ones we have don’t stay long enough in the profession. They are probably lured by better paying jobs as noted in earlier arguments.
To this question I always make reference to India. There are a few similarities between Nigeria and India. Youth Population and Education. According to http://goo.gl/fHuYPP , India will overtake the US in software developers by 2017.
Why is this possible in India and not in Nigeria?
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India has been able to commoditise technology.
Been to India a couple of times, and its crazy when they tell me to come and learn Java, Python, C++, and C# all for just 5,000 Ruppies (N15, 000). It has become so cheap to train on these technologies that you end up with many developers. (Quality is another argument). In Nigeria we don’t have that number yet. Imagine if computer village in Lagos was full of people fighting for your attention to come learn a programming language (and not buying second hand phones) for N5, 000. There are many places exactly like that in India. -
There is a need
There is the law of demand and supply. India undoubtedly has more IT service companies than Nigeria. Offcourse there are very few companies with need for original technology (built from the scratch). Interswitch, Systemspecs etc…But they are not enough to absorb as much as 100k developers. The other companies just settle for off the shelf solutions. Their excuse is that there aren’t local developers. With off the shelf solutions everywhere, there can’t be real need for software developers.
Lack of Infrastructure isn’t entirely to blame. The few developers we can point at here in Lagos live under similar conditions, they’ve just found a way around it. Resources abound on the Internet to learn programming, however, nothing beats 100 developers showing their other 100 friends how to hack at the JVM.
@lordbanks given a decade and a proliferation of code schools, we have can build the number required.
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I found a Techloy article yesterday from 2012 in which the writer complained about a lack of angels, VCs, accelerators etc. Fast-forward to today and we have all these in some capacity.
The important thing is that we are identifying the gaps and people are taking proactive steps to filling them. Obviously we need to be figure out how to scale the current solutions.
This issue is a real foundational issue; the quality of local developers will determine the types and quality of products built, how fast companies can iterate, if our products can compete globally.
Instead of just ranting, can we get suggestions on how to close this gap? Maybe an entirely different thread should be created for possible solutions.
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Where is the demand for developers.
Asides from startups with in house developers doing real software development and a few software shops, where really is the demand for developers with sound knowledge of algorithms and optimisations, machine and deep learning etc.
When theirs no demand for such micro skills, and most entry level jobs are either CMS maintenance or just demand for script integration, what encourages skill development? -
Experimentations: Nigeria leaves little room for experimental projects. Nigeria skipped over the experimentation age witnessed in most developed countries. Who sponsors open source collaborative projects in Nigeria? Who puts money into projects that have no significant business outcome but are great for engineering development? you can’t want the product and not go through the process.
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Developers and categorisation: someone here mentioned Andela. Andela developers will be no different from those produced in Aptech, NIIT etc, the difference here is fees and branding. These developers like others will still branch out to fill in available roles, taking one back to the type of developers prominently sought and thus, their skills and the possible perception of what good developers ought to be might never align.
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On reinventing the wheel: you don’t need to spin off your own Linux kernel or develop your own compiler to be a good developer. Applying yourself to solving problems is what it means to be a good developer. Developer stack knowledge acquisition is always an ongoing process, but, their problem solving skills is what sets them apart.
Will be back when I have more jare.
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I have worked with more than 5 enterprise companies in Nigeria-LeadCapital, Wema, Access, CourierPlus, and ***. I can tell you that there is some demand for developers who can solve complicated problems(may be not a lot of demand but there still is some an example is Konga).
Konga has a lot of products in their catalogue and must be facing a problem on which products to display on the home page for different users as the preferences of these users differ in order to improve conversion rate. Now thats a complicated problem that can be solved with recommender algorithms.
The major problem is with those who run these companies excluding Konga (because I don’t know much about Konga):
They are not willing to pay. Their organisational structure is also not conducive and there is just a lot wrong with their mindset on technology/developers.
Like Mr @TomiWalker suggested that we mention solutions:
- One solution to the problem to have orientation sessions with directors/MDs of these companies.
- I am also on the same page with Mr @Eddy that the more software training centres (cheap programs) the better.
- I also agree with Mr @Ttola_Odumosu that we skipped the experimental period. Part of the orientation sessions for the MDs should include encouraging projects that may not bring immediate revenue but are good for engineering.
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Developers and categorisation: someone here mentioned Andela. Andela developers will be no different from those produced in Aptech, NIIT etc, the difference here is fees and branding. These developers like others will still branch out to fill in available roles, taking one back to the type of developers prominently sought and thus, their skills and the possible perception of what good developers ought to be might never align.
This is so untrue it actually hurts to read it. First of all - no one pays to be at Andela. In fact, Andela pays them. A training program that can take someone from TV presenter to building complicated cash transfer payment systems is definitely nothing like Aptechs or NIITs.
And as an investor in Andela I have uncommon insight into how their model works and I do not believe Andela is building developers who will simply take available roles. First I doubt the local ecosystem values them enough to afford them at the price and quality they will be at in four years. Second of all, they will probably all mostly start their own companies and the program is supporting them to do so.
One thing I will tell you for free is this problem is being solved. CTIC, Andela, and lots more that are coming to Nigeria. It will take a long time but it is being solved.
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