Show HN: LaunchAfrica – Find startup and tech jobs in Africa | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: LaunchAfrica – Find startup and tech jobs in Africa

launchafrica.io

129 pointstruetaurus49 comments

Africa is _the_ underrated continent. Just as many smart and driven people as anywhere else without the capital investment.

Go Africa!

A friend has been running online training courses for some not so trivial stuff.

A large proportion of his delegates are from Europe/US but surprisingly he also had an unexpected large number from Africa.

It seems there is a lot of non profits running code camps in Africa to help with education and a way out of poverty. Also more surprising was the courses my friend is running are not your hack a nodejs app together in 24hours but some advanced Scala and functional programming courses.

I don’t know much about Africa but if they are training up highly skilled devs and not just people writing small Python/Nodejs scripts us western countries are then all the better for them.

Well done, some big names on here. Very impressive!

We've got a role we'll be advertising soon, so will defintely be in touch.

Looks like we might be the first ones advertising in Zambia!

Awesome! Which company is this? I grew up in Zambia :)

Cool, it's a great place to work!

Open Energy Labs: https://openenergylabs.co/

We teach young people how to build renewable energy supplies.

Feel free to drop me an email (in my profile)

It might be out of scope but maybe add a volunteer category? As an American I've tried to figure out how to break into the African startup scene (mostly West Africa) but I'd feel bad about taking a job there that could be done by a local. However, if there were opportunities to volunteer as an advisor or just to help out a bit that could let me get more involved, I'd be quite keen to learn about those sorts of opportunities.

Also curious why someone would choose your platform over angellist (other than their UI just being shitty)?

Great idea! Just added that as an "Employment type". And i regards to why LaunchAfrica as opposed to Angelist? Well firstly your point - the shitty interface and how they push for you to sign up and stuff like that. It is also full of other stuff and I prefer something straight to the point. Also i think its always better to focus (on Africa). I am also still trying to figure out more features that could make it stand out.

Ah, one last thing. I'm not sure how hard getting employment visas are but a selector for 'will sponsor visa' might be interesting

I already have that option in the post job page :)

Awesome! Ha, yes, somehow it's one of those platforms that seemed to get worse over time. But cool that you're focusing on Africa specifically. Best of luck!

Thanks for the feedback, if anything else comes to mind, throw it at me :)

cool site. I wish it had better scroll restoration:

I scroll down a bunch, new results are loaded. I click into a job posting and click back, now I need to scroll down a bunch again to go back to where I was.

You can open postings in a new window or you can clientside cache the responses

Good points, I shall look into this! May also go with the good old pagination with numbers.

Can be good learning experience with client-side caching :)

Just don’t be like a recent organization’s job board that I had the misfortune of visiting:

To get to page 12, you have to:

Starting on page 1, you can see pages 1-5, so go to page 5. This will allow you to get to page 6. Go to page 6, where you can see pages 6-10, click page 10. Now you can click on page 11. Now you can see pages 11-15 and can finally get to page 12.

Just goto page 2 and add 1 in front of 2 in the url.

I wish. The URL had a bajillion characters with nothing resembling anything that straightforward.

haha yeah thats quite annoying. For a quick fix I am opening the jobs in a new tab. Will then look into this further.

Feedback much appreciated too! :)

Got a startup or tech company in Africa hiring? Get in touch or post your job for free.

[Please feel free to disregard this feedback]

Small but perhaps meaningful adjustment to the hero image of the page: It might be best to use an ambiguous or darker skin tone.

Regardless, congrats on the launch! There is a lot of hunger an ambition to work at startups and this will help expose the talent and opportunities.

Design is not my forte, but eventually I will figure out something. But yes I agree with this.

Especially on how to market it/gain traction/get noticed.

Any reason you're not including salaries?

Feels like it would be a valuable addition, could make them optional when creating but nudge new job posts to include them by default.

Also a good data point when you choose to monetise

If I had to guess it's because salaries will vary WIDELY with the location and cost of living, and relative size of the tech industry in each city. Looking at the website right now I see a huge amount of job posts in Cape Town and Johannesburg.

Africa, as a category, is an immense place.

For two jobs doing exactly the same role, salaries would be very different in Cape Town and in Accra, Ghana.

That's an even better reasons to post them.

During my research phase, I was looking at job posts (in africa) on other sites and hardly any would post salaries. And also in general, most job sites dont show salaries. But a few people have asked for this and it would make sense even if just a few companies would make them available.

It's a negotiation tactic.

What I found is that extremely high performers will simply ignore posts without salary information. So it only really works if you are looking at hiring average devs.

Exactly this, not saying I'm a high performer but I have been lucky enough that I can simply ignore jobs that do not come with an upfront discussion of salary range.

Additionally if you have that data, it gives you an estimate of the average salaries people are being hired at (if you have a way to get feedback when someone is hired) and that is valuable data for better understanding the market.

Good point, yeah ill add this to the to-do list to figure out how best to do this

Yeah that's the exact reason I asked, especially where some of the jobs are remote.

Salary is a metric to compare jobs where the skills required and roles are identical, not to mention important for basic survival.

I will add the option for a salary now in fact! :)

Excellent :)

Best of luck with your launch.

They're not including them because this site, although portraying itself as an act of outreach and charity in a sense, is really just angling for even cheaper and misguided labor than is currently available in the US. (obviously, this does not apply to companies that have been founded in Africa. I'm pointing to the Amazon, Uber and MSFT listings)

We should by all means support companies in africa, Ghana is an incredible source of genuine groundbreaking businesses. I've visited and can attest to this first hand. However, the big tech co's posting here really just seems like the 21st century form of colonialism. Taking advantage of a market that unlike the US still doesn't see the less "happy" side of these huge tech companies in light of these tech companies having to put up with H1B legislation in the US that actually treats immigrant workers fairly. Which means big tech can't treat hoards of H1B's as modern day slave labor.

Go Africa! But this website left a bad - very suss taste in my mouth.

I don't get this take - the founder mentioned he grew up in Africa in one of the threads (of course this doesn't preclude him from taking advantage of folks in the African job market, it doesn't exactly scream colonial mindset) and I'm just not sure what you're talking about for the big tech co's not hiring locally. Would you rather they just hired abroad but then those people would build products for Africa? Seems worse. Or would you rather every African country build its own MSFT, Google, Apple, etc. competitor domestically?

thanks :)

Yeah I am also a very opened mined person and really don't get your comment, What would you see me do differently? Whats your main issue here? Lets find a solution together.

Nice work. Best of luck with the launch! (Sending this to a friend who runs a company in Africa)

Awesome! thanks, much appreciated as I am trying to get some good traction.

This is really cool. It looks like it’s free to post jobs; do you plan to monetize it?

That is right, its free to post for now. Limited time offer, then I plan on monetizing more with additional features such as "featuring" or so. Dont want to to be so expensive like a lot of these jobboards that i feel overcharge. Basically I need enough to pay the bills :)

But lets see what happens. Just need to continue gaining traction and figure that all out.

Africapace.com tried the same. Now defunct :/ still on twitter and linkedin

Yo, grab the "launch.africa" domain!

Way too expensive for my budget

Sudan is two countries these days :)

Yep, they are there as 2 countries: Sudan and South Sudan. I think those are the official names.

Haha yeah sorry I meant the map on the homepage. I'm a bit of a map person so it caught my eye.

ah right, stock images :) and im not much of a designer, but will look into this

majority of the jobs posted are in South Africa , there is almost zero jobs outside South Africa.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com