It’s been great reading everything here so far. Took a few days though. lOl
It is not news that we are losing talents everyday to other countries or to remote jobs and once a dev goes remote (starts earning forex ), that guy will almost not take on any local projects again.
Devs have also become alarmingly expensive and they also know that they can’t be working with startups for “ordinary stakes” anymore. and we may not realize this now, but GDP will suffer greatly!
To this end, I am working very closely with Findworka, Stutern, Printivo, and many other Startups in the ecosystem to train the new generation of talents using Basecode Academy.
Basecode will train, Findworka and Stutern will provide mentorship and grooming and we will throw these guys into the ecosystem to start taking on projects - we know they won’t be topnotch as beginners but it is a start. - I also call for more collaboration in this space. Not everytime, competition. haba! - If we check closely, we all are working in silos in different bits towards the same goals.
@Jaiye Normally, this shouldn’t be an issue if we have more influx in the talent pool. Our talents should be recognized globally. Is it really a problem? If yes, i think It’s a good problem.
It’s a good problem until Europe, America and Asia are driving electric cars in 5 years but we’re still queueing up for fuel at NNPC filling stations because of scarcity.
And I don’t blame the guys that work remotely or move abroad either. A much older acquaintance had to get money from practically everyone he knew in order to raise 300k to learn Java. He learnt Java and started looking for Nigerian gigs, but typical Nigerians also wanted php, SQL, some Python, js and graphic design skills to boot. He simply packed his bag and moved to India. The rest is as they say.
You also seemed to miss this " 80% of developers in Nigeria are trainee developers"
Imagine we harvest 10 Pieces of maize, but just 2 are of the quality we’d like, and someone has already taken 1.5 of the 2 before we even finished harvesting, so we keep complaining of a shortage of maize.
The key to solving the talent problem in my opinion is pushing the quota from 80/20 to 50/50 or there about. Only then will they be enough accomplished developers and foreign emmigraton would stop being a problem to the local ecosystem. That or we match the remunerations of foreign firms.
Okay, I understand. How do you even determine those that are quality developers? Have you also wondered the kind of trainings these top guys get? Who taught them and where did they learn the skills? We have to discover and address the fundamental problems here, one which is, increasing the population of talents coming in. Also discovering the hidden talents. You’ll be amazed at the results we’d get. Let’s take the india you mentioned as a case study. No matter how much indian devs work in the US, they still have some fantastic devs in their home country. The game is numbers. While your point is valid, let’s work on that numbers too. As for graduate trainees, they are the ones that eventually become superstars. The other pillars in the manifesto will also help us achieve this feat by creating enabling environment for talents to thrive. Putting proper infrastructure, funding and others in place will help us all grow and achieve the 50/50 you proposed. Still, thank you for mentioning this. We have a long way to go but what is even good is, we have started.
I agree with you 100%. Numbers is the key here and we need to boost those numbers. Identifying the problem is half of the solution, so we have started.
@Jaiye Good point you have here, emigration might be a problem.
My angle however would be that; if we have successful startups making consistent profits and with revenues of $1million and above, they would be able to pay devs almost as comfortably their counterparts across borders.
Like @delebakare mentioned, the value is in numbers, the more successful companies we have, the higher the number of youths who would want to learn code, the higher the quality of our developers and higher numbers would mean we don’t have to worry about emigration.
To make this happen though, we need to continually find ways to improve the ecosystem and create more success stories.
This seems to be a chicken and egg situation really. We need more developers to build more successful companies and more successful companies in order to create more developers. But I’d personally prefer if the developers come first.
It has been an absolute thrill reading the comments and contributions made to the Talent pillar of the manifesto. It goes to show our depth of thought and our yearning for progress.
The great ideas proposed, if properly implemented, can truly grow our tech ecosystem and greatly increase the quality of products.
What are the next steps?
Over the next week (Aug 7th - Aug 18th), the volunteer committees for each team, coordinated by pillar leads would collate all the suggestions made here and across social media. They would refine it and make the additions to the existing draft.
We are using this opportunity as well, to ask people who are interested in being volunteers for each pillar to do so by dropping their email addresses. You would be contacted by the pillar leads.
After the collation of all elements of the manifesto, the committees would create a sample implementation plan for executing the ideas we have proposed during this process.
Simultaneously, Dele Bakare and his team would create the website that would house the manifesto.
Further information about the progress of the manifesto would be provided as time goes by.
Shoutouts to everyone who contributed to this thread; @derin@chukwuudi@daviruz@simioluwatomi@Chikere@Jaiye@Psalm@sanyaele@jidewils@utee and everyone who contributed (radar allows a max mention of 10:confused:) , if possible I would advise we indicate interest to be a volunteer and take a part in seeing these ideas to fruition!!
), that guy will almost not take on any local projects again.
and we may not realize this now, but GDP will suffer greatly!