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The company seems to be mixing up things that should be separate. The major challenges when you have a lot of junior developers is having enough seniors to man

The company seems to be mixing up things that should be separate. The major challenges when you have a lot of junior developers is having enough seniors to manage them and work that is appropriate for them to do. Andela raised a lot of money based on social justice capital, which is fine. The problem is that consulting is not a particularly good way to spend it. The best strategy, I think, is to combine a school, consulting company and a venture capital operation. The school may be more or less self supporting, paid for by students or with scholarships. It can be challenging keep programmers engaged as teachers, as they can make good money for less hassle, and they need to have a particular set of interpersonal and teaching skills which is rarer in programmers. Subsidy can help to set up the school and pay teachers well. The consulting company is a for-profit enterprise, and needs to have the right balance of skills, not too many juniors. The best graduates of the school may be hired by the consulting company. The VC operation funds business opportunities executed using local tech teams. The business side might be local, targeting an opportunity in Africa, or remote. The VC provides seed funds for a large number of projects, and the consulting company executes. The seed round gives them money to develop an initial product and test the market. Then they are evaluated and may get another round or shut down. If they move forward, then the developers continue working full time with the startup, otherwise they go back into the consulting pool for another project. This provides a nice, sustainable synergy between the parts. The consulting company gets a continuous stream of projects without a lot of risk. The school graduates get practical experience supervised by seniors, then a potential full time job. The seed VC gets early access to good deals, and some will work out well. The system is financially self supporting, but can take advantage of subsidies or overseas investment. The key problem in all of this is actually delivering projects with junior people, which means you need to make it attractive for senior people to get involved and stay engaged. They need to be paid well or have some significant share of the upside. With the virus, we are entering a new age of remote work which will open up opportunities for people around the world. It is difficult for companies in the US to identify, nurture and manage remote talent in emerging markets. In some sense, that's the primary value of the consulting company, but it needs to be part of an ecosystem.

paulcole 6y ago
> they need to have a particular set of interpersonal and teaching skills which is rarer in programmers This is a very Western belief and one that is rooted in a lot of bias. Maybe people who have a particular set of interpersonal and teaching skills aren’t becoming programmers because the people entrenched in the field don’t value interpersonal and teaching skills?
- jake_morrison 6y ago
  I do see the value in interpersonal and teaching skills. The best developers have them and are interested in helping others. In my experience, though, programmers tend to be introverted. One definition of introversion is that interacting with people drains them of energy. So being a teacher is harder work than just writing code and probably pays less money. That's why I said especially that it needs to be explicitly paid for in this scenario. Otherwise the developers will go elsewhere. A similar problem exists in consulting companies. It's hard to find people who are great at programming, great at managing people, great at doing sales, and great at running the business. The rare person can do it all, but you can't hire for it. Everyone like that is running their own business. So you end up with a split between the technical part of the team and non-technical managers. In this case it's usually the non-technical managers who make all the money :-)

paulcole 6y ago

> they need to have a particular set of interpersonal and teaching skills which is rarer in programmers This is a very Western belief and one that is rooted in a lot of bias. Maybe people who have a particular set of interpersonal and teaching skills aren’t becoming programmers because the people entrenched in the field don’t value interpersonal and teaching skills?

jake_morrison 6y ago
I do see the value in interpersonal and teaching skills. The best developers have them and are interested in helping others. In my experience, though, programmers tend to be introverted. One definition of introversion is that interacting with people drains them of energy. So being a teacher is harder work than just writing code and probably pays less money. That's why I said especially that it needs to be explicitly paid for in this scenario. Otherwise the developers will go elsewhere. A similar problem exists in consulting companies. It's hard to find people who are great at programming, great at managing people, great at doing sales, and great at running the business. The rare person can do it all, but you can't hire for it. Everyone like that is running their own business. So you end up with a split between the technical part of the team and non-technical managers. In this case it's usually the non-technical managers who make all the money :-)