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Agony of an African Programmer (2014)
- shmooth 8y agoDon’t understand this Yes there should be world peace And?
- themoonbus 8y agoYou 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?
- jacobmoe 8y agoI 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?
- door5 8y agoSo get engaged and use your privilege to struggle for the rights of workers who have less privilege than you.
- sctb 8y agoWe're banning this account, but please email hn@ycombinator.com if you'd like to keep participating and we'd be happy to offer some feedback. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- benzoate 8y ago> 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.
- fopen64 8y agoLots of software developers (mainstream ones, but even someones that deserve way more) make no more than that in LATAM.
- enriquto 8y agowhat is LATAM? You mean the airline?
- liveoneggs 8y agoLATin AMerica
- saipardhu 8y agoYou could've simply typed it fully at first.
- uryga 8y agooff topic, but "latam" means "I am flying" in Polish, so it's a good name for an airline!
- PhasmaFelis 8y agoNot true for the US, either. I wish it was! Maybe in big coastal tech cities, and there are exceptions even there.
- adventured 8y agoThe median Web developer in the US earns close to $70,000. https://www.bls.gov/ooh/computer-and-information-technology/web-developers.htm https://www.bls.gov/ooh/computer-and-information-technology/... $100,000 however is definitely not all that typical for Web developers. You have to be in the top quarter or so. The line for the top 10% of Web developers begins at $124,000. For software developers in the US on the other hand, the median pay is up to $105,000 for 2018. The line for the top 10% (roughly 125,000 people) starts at $167,000. https://www.bls.gov/ooh/computer-and-information-technology/software-developers.htm https://www.bls.gov/ooh/computer-and-information-technology/...
- Ahmed90 8y agoReplace 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!!)
- Scoundreller 8y agoThinking of « Africa » as one place is just as poor a decision as thinking of « Middle East » as one place. I’m sure things vary drastically between Israel, Iran and UAE.
- human20190310 8y agoIsrael, Iran and UAE all have good infrastructure, health care and education levels. There probably is a lot of variation in the region but I don't think those three countries would capture the full range.
- madrafi 8y agoAfrica and the Middle East are 10-sigmas.
- Ahmed90 8y agoNot sure about Iran, but Israel got support and kind of an open market with silicon valley and it's an isolated part of the ME anyway it's not like an Iraqi dev would casually go to Isreal to work lol, UAE not really special, most of the working force in tech is imported talent so the local circumstances are irrelevant.
- shard972 8y ago> Iraqi dev would casually go to Isreal to work lol Why not? Do they not have work visas like America does? I mean considering how many undocumented people make it to America from the middle east I can't imagine it would be too hard to get into Israel.
- marmaduke 8y agoI was reading in the section about power cuts, and I was wondering if there are any data centers in Africa?
- selimthegrim 8y agoI remember reading about Cloudflare setting some up?
- Kalium 8y agoLagos for sure, Johannesburg, and maybe some others I'm forgetting?
- maouida 8y agoThere are some in Tunisia
- tstrimple 8y agoAzure recently announced South Africa datacenters are available. https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/updates/azure-south-africa-regions-are-now-available/ https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/updates/azure-south-africa...
- mruts 8y agoI 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.
- jacquesm 8y agoHighly 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.
- mruts 8y agoMy wife teaches english, but computers and internet are a big part of the reason that any kids are here in the first place. We aren't a licensed school (getting licensed requires bribes and a lot of bullshit) so we focus on pre-1st grade (theer's no state preschool or kindergarden) and after school programs for older kids. Because of this, we need to attract kids, and computers are a good draw.
- segmondy 8y ago$20k per year in Africa is balling out of control.
- djtriptych 8y agoAfrica 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.
- segmondy 8y ago$20k is a lot of money is Lagos, and Lagos is more expensive than Accra & Nairobi
- lesiki 8y agoIt is not. Source: African. 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.
- daniel-cussen 8y agoEven the homeless in SF cost the city $40,000 a year.
- mmsimanga 8y agoAs 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 :-).
- gowld 8y agoOne 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. wikipedia.org/wiki/M-Pesa
- lapinot 8y agoIs this an achievement of the locals or an achievement of Orange, Vodafone, MTN and Maroc Telecom, eg mostly non-african mega-corps vampirizing the market? Mobile networks are notoriously much more monopolistic and efficient at keeping out small actors and regulations than cabled telcos. And: mobile devices themselves also are much more blackbox-like than laptops and desktop boxes. No wonder OP laments about people not understanding "what's going on inside the tech" if the only thing they get exposed to is something based on vendor lock-in, with no file browser or text editor. (note that the same phenomenon is currently going on here in the west)
- mmsimanga 8y agoAbsolutely! I think there is also room to skip the traditional coal fired electricity generation and head straight to renewable like solar and wind. It isn't so easy to skip other infrastructure such as roads, hospitals and running water. The physical stuff.
- madrafi 8y agoThis touches close to home :')
- sytelus 8y agoTLDR; 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.
- m0skit0 8y agoAs 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 :(
- thanatropism 8y agoThe "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.
- nixpulvis 8y agoThis 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?
- arcticbull 8y agoSkimming, the salient point to me was that the perspective of people there is "hardware comes in a box" rather than (in my words) "coming from the ingenuity and hard work of engineers, who are just normal people with experience in building things." It's easy to overlook, though I can point to that moment for myself when I realized this was something I loved doing: 10-year-old me going to a camp where they showed us how we could use qbasic plus some breadboards to build security systems, launch rockets, make a musical instrument -- with electronics. That's what showed me both that people make it, and that I could make it too. Whether hardware is totally open or not, if you don't have that spark, the moment that connection forms, it doesn't matter. The technology that got me going was far from open, ti was some 1990s era Compaq with a parallel port break-out most likely. I think Arduinos are 10X more powerful for getting people into this world than an open computer they couldnt even begin to understand. That's learning to sprint before you can crawl. Both matter, though.
- javier2 8y ago2014? Would be cool with an update
- cryptokernel 8y agoJust leaving this here. Do tasks. Get paid. https://coincircle.com/l/50VVxbObg3 https://coincircle.com/l/50VVxbObg3
- james_s_tayler 8y agoAside 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.
- xupybd 8y agoAt 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.