Where are the African programmers? | Hacker News Reader

Where are the African programmers?

nadjetey.github.io

89 pointsnadjetey98 comments

African programmer here, and left the country I was born in decades ago to find somewhere that had a demand for my skills.

You'll find there's a direct correlation between available jobs for a career and people qualified or qualifying for that career that remain there. The only places in Sub-Saharan Africa that need programmers are of the scale where they have a regional head office elsewhere in the region (ie. South Africa, where they centralise support services like IT, development, analysis etc.)

Combined with the fact that the power houses of development in Africa are about as immigration friendly to other Africans as some of them would have been to people by virtue skin colour not so long ago. To clarify, "African from a poor African nation" is the new black in South Africa/Namibia/Botswana I can't speak for anywhere in Central or Northern Africa as I've not tried them.

One other point, probably unrelated, but definitely relevant to me:

Being a geek, it's hard to live somewhere where hardware, a dead hard drive for example, costs several months salary to replace. Especially when the environment (heat & frequent loss of power) is conducive to dying hardware :)

Hard drives are generally pretty cheap nowadays, so I'd think it would be more like 1-2 weeks of pay for a minimum wage earner, perhaps even 1-2 days pay for someone doing technical work. But even still, your point is valid.

Ok, this is anecdotal, but it paints a picture I'm familiar with in a sub-Saharan African country on the lower end of the development index.

A former colleague of mine, doing network hardware + infra installations presently earns $200-300 a month, and lives in a township. That's more than triple what we earned when I worked with him in the early 90s, here's his situation:

1/ After expenses he has not enough to buy even the cheapest hard-disk on the market, not when 100% duties on luxury goods (computers count as this) are imposed. So, yep, it's a project that warrants saving for.

2/ He can program in Perl, Bash, KSH and C, has a good understanding of Linux, FreeBSD + the extinct Unices (SCO, etc), the last I spoke to him he was learning several others. He has never held a job using any of those skills, and doesn't call him self a programmer.

3/ He has a computer, it's a laptop that was going to be trashed considered beyond repair that he repaired, and he leaves it at his workplace, because he can't afford to replace it and in the township theft is a certainty at some point. He arrives at work at 6am and, if he's anything like I remember, leaves at after 10pm, because that's where his computer is.

4/ He's given up trying to emigrate, because as long you intend to do things legally and you don't hold relevant university degrees, it's impossible. And none of us geeks that were in our lates teens/early twenties in that period do - there were no meaningful compsci courses. His only qualification is something to do with agriculture, which was the topic de jour of the era.

Why is his story relevant? Because he's the only one of the aforementioned Afican geeks of that generation still unlucky enough to be there. The rest of us all left. And if he had the correct degrees, or was lucky enough to have an opportunity, he too would be long gone.

Our company is going to hire an intern from South Africa soon, I'm going to be involved deciding which applicant we accept.

"You'll find there's a direct correlation between available jobs for a career and people qualified or qualifying for that career that remain there."

It was for this reason I told my bosses it might be hard to find someone good, but they told me we're going to do it anyway, to see for ourselves, since the company plans to open an office there next year.

Do you have any advice on how to find and attract good programmers in Africa?

Sure, three tips:

1/ Make your job student friendly and don't look for the usual 5+ years of experience

2/ Keep firmly in mind that the best trait in a programmer isn't necessarily qualification, but the ability to learn fast, and problem solve quickly and effectively.

3/ When multiple candidates fit the profile (above) but you're unsure, either give a final interview round with more extensive tests to clarify their abilities in those two areas. Or else hire all of them on trial basis. Make clear that at the end only one gets a job, but the other two get some paid temporary work and a really glowing letter of recommendation. It's win win, 1 gets a job, the others get invaluable work experience that's in short supply.

If I had those opportunities, I might be somewhere with a far better climate and a much cheaper and stress free life style :)

Edit: I just noticed you said South Africa and not Southern Africa. I don't think you'll have any trouble finding qualified programmers.

> 2/ Keep firmly in mind that the best trait in a programmer isn't necessarily qualification, but the ability to learn fast, and problem solve quickly and effectively.

This is so true. In fact, it is worth underlining that this probably holds worldwide, not just for Africa. Given the choice between someone with the qualifications but without those traits and someone that is not qualified but eager to learn and has a good ability to solve problems (even if they are non-programming problems) I'd most likely hire the latter.

I love your 'glowing letter of recommendation' idea, there is a small downside to that though, which is that your letter will set expectations rather high when the person that you let go will apply somewhere else and that will lead to those recommendations being less valuable than if they are honest. Feel free to highlight the good sides of the person and simply to omit the downsides (so they can work on improving those without having them committed to a piece of paper). In my experience those are the best, they help to guide and inform rather than that they raise expectations to the unrealistic.

> If I had those opportunities, I might be somewhere with a far better climate and a much cheaper and stress free life style :)

There is an opportunity right here now, once every month, the 'who wants to be hired' thread. I encourage you to post there when it rolls around next month, who knows what you'll land.

> ... the 'who wants to be hired' thread.

I don't think I've come across any such post before. Perhaps they get pushed off the home page before I come around to check HN?

Any way to create a sticky of such posts like in a public GitHub repo where one can browse the links for the current month?

Let me find it for you, one second.

edit: here you go: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7833250

Monitor the account that posted that thread around the beginning of July and you won't miss it.

   I love your 'glowing letter of recommendation' idea, 
   there is a small downside to that though, which is that
   your letter will set expectations rather high

True, honesty is certainly a must, I should have stated that by glowing I meant only a cut above the usual dry business tone of such things. In my experience the letter of recommendation, like the rest of a CV, just gets your foot in the door - after that it's down to you to shine. But for an inexperienced candidate, getting a foot in the door is a big thing. I got my first real job in Europe purely based on a recruiter who got me telling my manager-to-be "you have to meet this crazy African kid, he has no qualifications but has hacked every device he's laid hands on since age 8, and set up an ISP" or words to that effect, with an endorsement like that, I was bound to get at least a trial.

   There is an opportunity right here now, once every
   month, the 'who wants to be hired' thread. I encourage
   you to post there when it rolls around next month, who
   knows what you'll land.

Thanks for that! Monitoring the thread, more out of curiosity than anything else, I suspect I'm probably no longer ideal for that sort of thing. As I think we've discussed before (you've seen my CV, we met at another HNer's wedding, and chatted by email a number of times) I've since changed the focus of my career, and working for any sort of large company and probably within any sort of formal structure really isn't on the books for me. I did that for far too long, and got far too jaded by the experience to approach it any sort of good attitude. These days I prefer to tinker and hack all things as interest takes me. I've spent the last year writing + renovating & automating a house beyond reason, I think next I want to try a boat of some kind :)

Haha, that's you :) I did not realize this was your HN handle, super nice. Great to be in touch with you again.

South African here. You'll easily find good people. Our startup culture is so-so and if you want esoteric languages you'll have to look harder, but .net, Java, Ruby, mobile, Linux etc should be fine. For interns just contact a local uni in the city you're like to be in (probably Johannesburg or Cape Town).

Eric,

I am a software developer in South Africa (Embedded). What skillset are you looking for?

Searching for a suitable candidate in South Africa follows exactly the same process as everywhere else in the world. If you want experienced candidates, use the headhunters or post the job on job boards. For interns the best approach is through the universities or schools.

Finding someone good in South Africa is the same as everywhere else, good developers are in high demand.

Regards.

We're going to be hiring an intern for web development via aiesec (https://www.aiesec.org/#/news), I'm going to try look for someone who's good with linux, can write python, and strives to write excellent code. Going to bring them to our Sydney office. If it works out well when we start an office in South Africa we'll hire developers there too.

Eric, I can put you in touch with a couple of the local headhunters. They should be able to help you. Drop me an email if your interested.

kabousvlieg at gmail

South Africa is an interesting mix of 1st and 3rd world in almost every aspect of life. Education can be world class, yet many are illiterate. Medicine can be world class (the first ever successful heart transplant anywhere in the world, was carried out by a South African doctor in a South African hospital), yet HIV, tuberculosis, and other treatable/manageable diseases run riot in some areas.

IT professional from SA are likely to be world class (Mark Shuttleworth and Elon Musk for example, are South African) and in general IT and related skills are rather advanced in SA and very much first world.

Mark Shuttleworth - Ubuntu Creator South African & sold Thawte to Verisign in the dotcom boom.

Elon Musk - South African, of paypal & spacex

Roelof Botha - South African, of paypal & Sequoia

Emanuel Derman - South African, of Goldman Sachs Quantitative strategies

Amazon Web Services - South Africa

Herman Chinery-Hesse - Ghana, of SOFTtribe

OffTopic - J. R. R. Tolkien - South African, Lord of the Rings

There is a lot more where that came from: http://ventureburn.com/2014/03/20-kickass-african-tech-entre...

You could go to a lot of the Compsci departments at many Universities in African countries and find a lot of good developers or potentially good devs. This is where Accenture , microsoft etc, get their devs from in Africa.

EDIT: PLZ downvote this post, my challenge to u guys is to make my Karma go to zero! You can do it guys.

True. However all of those are, as you point out, from either South Africa or Ghana. See my points regarding the power houses of Africa in the parent post.

Outside those, the comp-sci depts. in every uni I checked with were only teaching archaic languages, even by the standards of the day, or none at all. I'll concede, that in my case, that was long ago - but given I'm just hitting middle age, I believe it's still relevant, hence the tips I later gave.

TL'DR: if you're African, and not from either of those places or outright wealthy, good luck getting in. Ghana and RSA count, in most respects, as exceptions to the rule.

Just seen the full list, and there're a fair few from other countries - but given the relatively tiny number of names involved, I stand by my opinions

> OffTopic - J. R. R. Tolkien - South African, Lord of the Rings

Born from British parents living in the Boer province of South-Africa, a British colony, so not really South-Africa per se. And he returned to the UK eventually for and after WW1.

What amazes me is that you so confidently post that quote without realizing how terrible your understanding of it is. This shows utter ignorance, go visit the place and understand the history. I kind of want to go on a long explanation, but its just not worth it, people will remain ignorant until they choose to educate themselves of the facts.

ps. If the Mayflower ship brings British settlers to the U.S. and they have a kid in the U.S, is that kid not American? A boer colony is just a place where early Dutch settlers settled in South Africa, just like those people arriving in the U.S. on the Mayflower.

Believe what you want.

> The Orange Free State (Dutch: Oranje-Vrijstaat Afrikaans: Oranje-Vrystaat) was an independent Boer sovereign republic in southern Africa during the second half of the 19th century, and later a British colony and a province of the Union of South Africa.

EDIT: I noticed you changed your first message without any "EDIT" notice after I posted this answer. This is not very well viewed on HN.

> ps. If the Mayflower ship brings British settlers to the U.S. and they have a kid in the U.S, is that kid not American?

Irrelevant example. South Africa was a British colony during Tolkien's youth, and I have never heard him being refered as a "South African" - he is born from British parents who happened to live in South Africa for a while, and is clearly identified as a British writer everywhere I know. It's extremely strange to call him "South African" and I do not know where you even got this notion. Even Tolkien refered himself as being English in terms of ethnicity. Check his writings before calling people ignorant.

"The Orange Free State (Dutch: Oranje-Vrijstaat Afrikaans: Oranje-Vrystaat) was an independent Boer sovereign republic in southern Africa"

This was Recognized by who? Only crazy Boers, South Africa was there before that. History books after apartheid have been re-written exactly for this reason, the apartheid regime told an apartheid version. Go and look at the differences, i have studied the history. Take your feet, visit the place, talk to the people, understand the history, don't be a "Wikipedia keyboard warrior"!

Feel free to modify Wikipedia and cite your sources then, if it's all fantasy.

The point is that JRR Tolkien was an Englishman, not a South African—even though he was born in SA.

Mark Shuttleworth: white, British descent,

Elon Musk: white, Canadian/British descent,

Chris Pinkham and Benjamin Black (AWS): white,

Emanuel Derman: white,

J. R. R. Tolkien: white, British descent.

---

I'm not trying to say anything about race. But many of the examples you pointed out seemed to be of people of non-african descent. I don't think your examples say much about Africans in tech so much as it says something about people in positions of privilege having the opportunity to found companies.

I say this as a one-time white-foreigner living in South Africa, where I spent four years.

Having lived in South Africa, you will also know that South Africa houses an indigenous white population that has settled in the country ~ 400 years ago, roughly the same time that Europeans settled in America, and also the same time that the black tribes also migrated and arrived in South Africa (Zulu's, Xhosa's, Sotho's etc.)

But now for some reason "African" refers to only black people, and white Africans are priviledged and not worthy of mention. Would you follow that same logic for Americans?

*For technical correctness the Khoi-San settled in South Africa ~2000 years ago, but is a minority population in South Africa.

Thanks for this kabouseng. As a white South African whose ancestors arrived ~300 years ago, I was wondering how much longer before I was allowed to identify as "African".

It's not like I have anywhere else to call home.

People are reluctant to recognize the racism against white people. Maybe it will change with the time.

I'm a white South African Software Engineer, too. Family arrived here +- 200 years ago.

If that doesn't make me African, what does? I can promise you that if I go to Europe, I won't be considered European!

Here is the thing. For whatever reasons, right or wrong, most people understand 'African' to mean 'black'. Sucks. Egypt is not populated by black people, and people think of that as part of middle-east.

Most people are only consciously politically correct.

I usually take accusations of reverse racism with a pinch of salt, but there was recently a discussion on Twitter where a popular ex-radio host (Kay Sexwale, @kaysexwale), stated that whites cannot be Africans, nor can they lead political parties in Africa. Ordinarily someone like that would be regarded as a kook, but she in the last week, almost got a job as Chief of Staff to the Premier of Gauteng province. Also her assertions were not really questioned by black Africans on Twitter, if I recall correctly (some whites were, rightfully, quite offended).

There is a strong degree of vigilance required. However, it should also be admitted that many white South Africans don't make much of an effort to integrate, or to be constructive, instead resorting to constant belittlement, obstructionism and moaning. This combination of white intransigence, and nascent black African supremacism doesn't bode well for the future.

If giving up control over your country of birth without any form of violence doesn't show the most absolute effort to integrate, then I don't know what measures will convince you otherwise?

For what it's worth, the original title was asking where all the African developers are, and the top threads all so far talk about South Africa.

We're particularly myopic in the Northern Hemisphere when it comes to Africa, often seeing the Mediterranean coast and South Africa and skipping that middle part...

So while it truly is interesting to hear that there's a solid development community in South Africa, it doesn't speak to the larger question on why we see so little coming from the rest of the continent.

I work with a really great Nigerian programmer, if that helps, and one of our project managers is from Mauritius. My boss (CIO) was born in Tanzania, but is of Indian descent.

I work with a really great Nigerian programmer, if that helps, and one of our project managers is from Mauritius. My boss (CIO) was born in Tanzania, but is of Indian descent. I previously hired a South African coder.

The one thing all those people have in common: every one of them left Africa for better opportunities elsewhere (US, France, Brazil).

I can't really speak for anything north of the equator, but I have travelled fairly extensively in the southern half of Africa.

The impression I get as a visitor to many of these countries is that except for a few big cities it is just too difficult to guarantee power and telecoms access to bet your job on it.

Most people will find a job locally doing "boring" software since there is less risk. Working remotely for a company in the US/Europe requires them to understand your (african) problems which is always difficult.

If I am at the office and we have no power, my boss understands; If I am remote-working, will my "American/European" boss understand why I just lost a day?

The advantage of staying here (in SA) means that even if you are doing boring software, your salary is probably good enough to give you spectacular buying power compared to 99% of the planet.

As you move to more remote places, the salaries just keep increasing. I was recently looking at a job in Tete (Northern Mozambique) which paid around USD450k p.a.

So, I guess that doesn't really answer your question, but I think Africa is quiet mostly because the "boring" jobs pay disproportionately well --- the incentive to be an entrepreneur is mostly gone. (I say this as someone working at a startup of sorts)

I concur - setting up a power backup system was my first task when moving here (Tanzania), and it isn't a simple nor cheap barrier to overcome.

That is a pretty impressive salary, even for western standards! Maybe I should consider moving to Mozambique :)

Tete is a shithole though --- maybe if I was young and single, but definitely not a place to raise a family.

I'm extremely interested in working somewhere remote/strange in Africa/other underdeveloped areas of the world (not even looking for anything notably well paying). I've tried a couple of times to search for relevant job boards and the like but haven't been able to find anything halfway decent. If you could go into a bit more detail about where one would look for that sort of thing/what the typical process is in that part of the world or shoot me an email at public at disastero.us, I would be tremendously grateful.

Thanks!

Edit: The bigger the shithole the better, really. I've been trying to find a method for searching for jobs in adverse environments for a while, but haven't been in any way successful.

A few notes/tips:

- If you live in a western country, try to get a remote job. Spend a few months in your remote position and see how you like it. If you like it, you can talk to your manager and ask if moving to wherever you like is feasible. Make sure you get good enough internet when you go, and learn enough about batteries and inverters to buy a power supply system (solar 12V batteries and a chinese power inverter will set you back 200USD and last for a good year at least).

- Send you resume to NGOs. Forget the startup crowd for a bit. Most people applying to NGOs are people with social/education/medical backgrounds, and IT skills are in very high demand, because nobody with IT skills ever applies to be sent to a remote place. I'm pretty sure almost any NGO will hire you if you can teach IT-related topics (programming, networks, systems...). Pay isn't great in general, but the experience makes up for it (also, the countries you'll visit are, by definition, not expensive to live in).

If you need contacts, I can give you some in Tanzania and Senegal even if my network here is a little more limited (finding my contact info is left as an exercise to the reader).

So if you want to move somewhere off the beaten track your job choices are going to be:

1) Mining 2) Power/Electricity 3) Support for the above.

Most companies don't hire in the countries they operate in, since the skills just don't exist. Most sites are populated by a mix of European/South African/Indian expats who are there for a limited period (typically < 5 years)

The way to get into these types of jobs is to get hired by the European or South African companies that operate in these areas, and then ask for placement at your shithole of choice. The current rule of thumb is to ask for your SA salary * 4 or * 5 depending on how bad the place actually is.

At the moment there is is a lot of activity in Northen Zambia (copper) with companies like Yokogawa/Siemens/ABB looking for people.

Northern Mozambique is pretty active (coal/gas) with Vale/Jindal being the major mining houses and ABB/Siemens etc. providing the tech.

On the power generation side - South Africa has quite a lot of activity on the renewable side with Spanish and Danish companies taking the lead (Abengoa for solar esp.)

There is currently also a bit of a power generation boom in Ghana and Benin, but I don't know anyone directly involved.

Most of the work is in hardware, project management, or process control though. It is going to be much harder to find software only work.

EDIT: I forgot to mention - there might be more opportunity for software only work in banking. I know Barclays is currently busy with a big push up into Africa, but I am not very familiar with that industry.

I used to work in the UK for a company founded by Mo Ibrahim[1]. I got to travel to SA a few times and to Tanzania as well as Egypt and various middle eastern countries, as well as Europe and further afield. Part of that company still exists under a different name[2]. There aren't a lot of jobs in telecoms in Africa, but the ones that do exist are interesting and will get you around a lot.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mo_Ibrahim [2]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celtel

Not OP. The difference between the American and South African situations is that no one thinks there's a good chance of the majority non-white population expelling the white population of America or making life so unpleasant all that stays is a tiny merchant minority.

If South Africa does not do that it will be yhe first African country not to do so. Kill the Boer, Kill the Boer and all that.

Also, if this does happen the white South Africans should expect all the sympathy and aid the white Zimbabweans who didn't leave got, none. If you do not fit the narrative sorry, should have packed for Perth.

Lets not forget that this narrative was forced upon white South African's by the liberal west through sanctions and boicots. So if there is a genocide, it will fall squarely on the west's conscience.

Lets also not forget that the reason why America and Australia does not have majority non-white populations is because they exterminated their native populations. An inconvenient fact (google general Custer and aboriginea hunting permits).

Edit - spelling

And yet most white people in South Africa only have a South African passport and are not citizens of any other country. How does that not make them African?

Have you looked back 300 to 400 yrs of South Africa's history before labeling all these people not African? If this is true, then American whites are not American. You can be white and be African.

You are being racist. People born and bred in Africa are of African descent. Skin color is irrelevant and to think that skin color makes a difference to how "african" you are, makes you racist.

Adding a name to the list Theo de Raadt from OpenBSD and OpenSSH is also from euro african descent.

South Africa is one of the three richest countries in Africa (with Egypt and Morocco). There's a lot of Africa between those three corners. From your list, only Herman Chinery-Hesse is not from South Africa.

There's a lot of untapped potential in Africa that's practically invisible.

I moved to Tanzania recently (I'm a white western programmer with a remote job).

Some of the hurdles you have to jump over to become a professional programmer here:

- Have access to a computer (several months, sometimes years, of salary). Obviously.

- Have access to reliable power. I have 6+ hours power cuts almost daily here (and I'm in a rich town - not in the bush). Being a western Engineer, I could afford to build my own power backup system, but I'm the exception.

- Have access to the internet. Sure, I can afford broadband here, but at 60$+ a month, it's way out of reach for most people. Mobile is acccessible-ish, but most providers won't let you tether a computer (or charge through the roof for it).

- Read English well enough to understand online material. The corollary being that your family has to be rich enough to afford to send you to school (that is, primary and high-school. I'm not even talking about university here).

- Last but not least, actually learn programming (I met many westerners without any of the previous problems that fail utterly).

Once you pass all these, you still have to find a job, and that's not easy. Basically, some ISPs, some telco jobs, and very few regional things (web agencies etc...).

I hope working from home / remoting will continue to become more widespread - some very good programmers here are looking for jobs, and would love to stay.

Oh, and most of Africa shares timezones with Europe, too.

There are many African programmers here in India (Pune at least, I hear similar things about Delhi). The general trajectory seems to be study here because schools at home are a disaster, then move to the west because the east is too racist.

Nearly every single one wishes they could find a good job at home.

(Let me emphasize that this is all secondhand knowledge. The only racist behavior I've observed has been a Russian making a "jungle fever" type comment to me, plus standard "rip off the foreigner" stuff.)

I was in a hostel with some africans (Tanzania/Kenya) in Hyderabad studying CompSci under ICCR (Indian Govt) Scholarships about a decade ago. Great guys, very sharp. Lost touch over the years.

> Yet, for some strange reason, these people are virtually ghosts on the Internet.

That's not very strange in my opinion. Scott Hanselman spoke of Dark Matter Developers* who are the "Unseen 99%" who don't blog, tweet or attend conferences.

* http://www.hanselman.com/blog/DarkMatterDevelopersTheUnseen9...

Also, attending conferences in "Africa" (such a big and diverse continent lumped together) is completely unpractical except for some edge cases: many flights will go to Europe and back (there is very little internal demand).

The price of such a flight is obviously also a problem.

African programmer here from Tanzania and one of my FOSS project is zuluCrypt[1]

[1] https://code.google.com/p/zulucrypt/

Hey cool!

What part of Tanzania are you from? Moshi here :)

Dar Es Salaam. I noticed in your other comment you said you moved to Tanzania recently, how is your Swahili :-)

Let see if you can derive meaning from the following swahili question.

Kati ya nchi zote ulizokuwa na uwezo wa kuhamia,kwanini uliichagua Tanzania?

If the above went over your head,i asked, "of all the countries you could have migrated to,why did you pick Tanzania?"

Ninajifunza kiswahili pole pole :) (Your question did go over my head, but it did allow me to learn many new words :) Asante sana!)

My wife and I chose Tanzania for various reasons, including:

- We knew Moshi from some years ago (we climbed Mt. Kilimanjaro), and have sentimental attachment to the place (I asked my wife on Uhuru peak).

- We knew our son (1 year old) would be safe (good medical care, few mosquitoes and nasty animals, varied food). He made friends with our neighbourhood kids pretty fast :)

- She had some connections with a local NGO and so could work as a volunteer here.

- We remembered Tanzanians to be the most welcoming and friendly people we've ever met (and we had the chance to travel a lot). We were wrong BTW, Tanzanians are even more welcoming than we remembered :)

- Kiswahili is a challenge to learn, but we like learning new languages (we take lessons bi-weekly)

- It's much more attractive than most places for our family to visit during their vacation ;)

- I always echoed Mark Shuttleworth's sentiment that "Africa is the future", and I decided to put my actions where my mouth is :p

I could go on for a long time, we really like it here.

Oh yeah, and TTCL deploying a good country-wide fiber optics backbone did help as well :)

I have a 2Mb/s symmetric link to my house, which is faster than I could get in many many places, including the US midwest.

There is an interesting crowdfunding campaign for a documentation going on right now which will provide insights into this topic: https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/africahacktrip-the-movie

That project is definitely cool enough to warrant it's own post! Why haven't I heard of this before?

Well I'm disappointed to not see a bunch more people promoting their local tech hubs, dev communities and such if they have them. Zambia has the people over at -> http://bongohive.co.zm and a few more that aren't involved with that hub.

I know I have many "dark matter" programmers as friends. A lot of Africa in my experience as tribaal pointed out has a great many hurdles that need to be overcome in order to be a programmer. For example I have to pay the same price he does for internet access, US$60 and it's only a 512k line. Worse, service has been so bad lately I'm lucky to have more than an hour of stable uptime at a time at an average of 10kb/s.

http://www.siliconcape.com/

We are here!(Tanzania) Mostly working in shy demoralizing banking IT departments. I have began looking into immigrating probably to Canada or Australia due to their immigration policies.

Yay!

Many more Tanzanian programmers than I expected on this thread!

Out of curiosity - what kind of technologies do you use during your day job? Is it a typical choice for the banking industry in Tanzania, in your experience?

For my day job I use mostly SQL Server and a beast of an application which is written in VB and C#.Net by some developers in another country, I am only allowed to touch the configuration and scripting layer (C#) on this one and the thousands of configuration options it contains. But I do mostly Android in my spare time if I have the energy.

Pole sana.

I hope the android "app" concept catches on as adoption increases - I'd love to see the same kind of local intelligence applications as in Europe here!

I find buying things intelligently is hard here for example, since the knowledge of where things are at what price is not transparent (you must know people).

Habari, American new to TZ (but not E. Africa) here. Is there much of a tech community around? I stopped by Kinu and Buni. Both seem nice but sparse...

I have very good contacts with my ISP (habari node), and the tech crowd here is mostly centered around the Arusha Linux User group, so it might not be super relevant for you if you're in Dar.

I suspect Dar would have more tech stuff going on - the ubuntu-tz LoCo seems to be mostly based in Dar for example.

There is also http://www.teknohama.or.tz/. Their events seem to be geared mostly toward beginners and not to people already in tech. A lot of the events are organized at awkward times for someone with a 9-5, participants are also very young, I'm 31 and was probably the oldest at one of the Samsung events that was held at Kinu. This is not necessarily a bad thing though.

I follow some African programmers on twitter. They aren't totally unheard of. I suspect most emigrate to Europe or America to find work, and no longer identify as African Programmers.

A fair point, but as an African that emigrated and is naturalised, I still identify myself as very much African as opposed to anything else. I suspect most Africans have very strong identities in that respect, but I can only speak for myself.

I used identify in the outward sense, not the inward. I.e. in a tag-line on twitter one wouldn't have "A rails developer in Mombasa," if they were really in Antwerp.

The dev environment in Africa (at least in Nairobi, where I live) is growing quite quickly. Co-working spaces (mostly with attached incubators) like the iHub[1], 88mph[2], etc. are extremely vibrant spaces. In the iHub, we have frequent talks by prominent figures from the technology community (Larry Wall, Marissa Mayer, and Eric Schmidt are some of the ones I knew about). IBM research opened an office in Nairobi, and I hear they're recruiting Kenyan programmers.

[1] http://www.ihub.co.ke/

[2] http://www.88mph.ac/

Edit: Fixed links.

For what it's worth, Rwanda is attempting to become a local tech hub: http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/the_next_silicon_va...

If you're an African programmer, or even a programmer living in some country where you do have internet access but little or no local market: Please apply next time the 'who wants to be hired' thread rolls around. It's in my opinion one of the most direct ways in which HN can help you improve your situation, either by being noticed and to get hired remotely or by giving you a ticket out. Though the latter is a nice example of brain drain and evaporative cooling in action it is at the same time a very clear and direct way to get you into a substantially different situation. What you do if/when you get employed is up to you, I know plenty of stories of people that went abroad, made some money and then somehow found a way to leverage that into improving the situation for a whole slew of people back home. So I'm not adverse to this at all, in fact I think it is a good thing, it sure beats being unemployed.

Okal Otieno [1], creator of hackershelf.com [2] a site I discovered on HN and get all kinds of value from.

1: http://justokal.com/

2: http://hackershelf.com/browse/

Africa is a large heterogeneous continent ... I'm a software developer from north Africa (Tunisia). You can find here some regular white-collar jobs. But the startups scene is nonexistent.

"Where are the Ghanaian Programmers" would have been a more appropriate title. I'm Kenyan. Articles like these presume we're operating within the same market conditions when nothing could be further from the truth. The disclaimer in the first paragraph seems to acknowledge this, but talking about "African programmers" is neither useful nor helpful IMO. All we have in common is the fact that we live on the same land mass.

Monocle did a great story last week on the female-oriented Jigeentech Hub in Dakar, Senegal (see the 2:00 point at http://monocle.com/radio/shows/the-entrepreneurs/136/). This may not be the next Silicon Valley, but it sure seems like a start in the right direction and an inspirational model for other developing nations.

Nigeria is the only African country where I'm familiar with the tech industry, they have some jobs available in Telecom and Petroleum for trained locals - though getting one of these is far from guaranteed even with a degree. Both industries require quite a few coders. There's also the computer crime industry which I suspect is one of the largest employers of programmers.

Anecdotally, Egypt produces a lot of high quality computer scientists.

South African here, there are plenty of African coders/hackers. If they are not blogging does not mean they do not exist.

Though, i have personally felt that community is lacking in other countries.

I have been traveling in other parts of Africa. I usually check in on Meetup.com before traveling to see for any interesting hacker events, out of 4 countries i have been too in the last 3 months only Kenya had events i could find.

Zimbabwean. Bootstrapping couple tech startups (some profitable) here in Africa for way over a year now.

Most (good) devs I know are self-taught. Employment opportunities pushing code are so scarce it's hopeless for most which is why most move out or go into sys admin/networking. The jobs don't pay that good as well but you can strike out well with consulting.

Thanks to the internet Git, SASS, Heroku, AngularJS, Golang, NodeJS, Docker and all other hacker goodness is adopted just as much (by the few willing) so it's not like we're making sites with bash. We also have a few tech podcasts and the occasional meetup.

Just that our communities are much much smaller and far apart that it's like we're not there at all (thanks economy). Good developers are also hard to find because most see no point in developing skills you never get to use. Things are picking up though

This is a cool project. But don't let the fact that you are building an app distract from the main goal (building a community).

I would suggest you first go to as many universities as you can, get their computer science students on-board, and then connect to their alumni network.

And start organising meetups, hackathons and other events. You need to start a small fire and it will kindle.

A simple website is good enough and you can start today. http://www.hackcampus.io/ is doing something similar in the UK.

A directory might not be so useful at this point.

I would also love to see the Tech space in Africa mature. I expect great things to come out of that continent, and building a community Is definitely a great place to start.

Put the code up on Github and I'll contribute.

I suppose I too am an African programmer. I never thought of myself as one because I first touched a computer after I left the continent. However, here I am writing Machine Learning code.

I'm amazed that posting this article here resulted in good discussion while posting it to Reddit's /r/programming (http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/276oxb/where_ar...) only results in downvotes... That probably says something about differences in outlook between those two forums.

The one point I do not see mentioned in the comments is that most Africans do not need software but probably something such as food, shelter, farming tools, books, medicine/clinics, roads, clean water.

I am a Comp Sci graduate but honestly cannot think of a software product that will make a difference to my cousins still in the village. I see software as a luxury.

The problem of "missing" developers in Africa cannot be solved with another database (there's already DevelopersInAfrica [1], and I think there could be more). What I have identified as the problem since I started running DevCongress [1] with a couple of friends and the general community of programmers in Ghana is, ironically, community and activity.

You see, Ghanaians generally a quiet people, and it pierces all our circles. It's hard to shake that dumb silence off, it's hard. Just look at participation in our Google group [3] and how it's dominated by just me. That's not what we wanted, obviously. So we set out solve the problem of programmers restricting themselves to absolute silence. That familiarity among ourselves would lessen the barrier to participation was our riskiest assumption. So we started yet another project, namely, #eXchange (you can see episodes here [4]). So far we are engaging really well via the videos, and more importantly we're exposing the humans (and their humanness) behind the big names in the programmer community in Ghana. It's been successful so far.

Last but not least of our attempts is FORGE [5]. Oh I so love FORGE! We have plans to launch before the end of June but funds (we foot all the bills ourselves) are holding us back a little. We are preparing to approach GitHub Community [6] to ask for help. Since you're in Ghana we should link up to discover even more ways that we can pull ourselves up to an appreciable, non-mediocre level.

To all non-African programmers, please consider actively mentoring us even though we can't afford to pay you. Also think about offering us internship and job opportunities without paying significant attention to our CVs because tbh, they're mostly crap.

[1] http://www.developersinafrica.com [2] http://devcongress.com [3] https://groups.google.com/forum/?hl=en#!forum/devcongress [4] https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCJdep9xo0Y8UTvKehbhey2g [5] http://forge.devcongress.com/faq [6] https://community.github.com/

I suspect I'm one of the dark matter programmers Scott spoke of. I'm from South Africa by the way

Some African programmers like me build products from Africa... but brand our products to look American/European. I guess some Asians do that also. This move increased our sales considerably.

>A place where anyone can search programmers based on say, community, programming language, project interests, gender, age brackets etc

gender? really?

If you can search by age,then why not gender? Both should have zero influence on your abilities, and yet it's ok to discriminate against one but not the other.

I can see your point, although your age can reflect your experience, whereas your gender provides no information about your ability. I guess you could argue that for a company willing to be more diverse (like Google recently), it actually IS important to know people's gender for a kind of affirmative action.

A lot of them in Ghana go to this school: http://meltwater.org/

I've been asking this question for a long time...any african programmer in Berlin or Germany ? check my contact :)

They're all playing football.

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