Two of the leading multinational technology corporations, Microsoft and Amazon have started recruiting African developers who have recently completed a bachelor’s or master’s degree in computer science, engineering or similar discipline and have at least a year of working experience in programming languages like Python, Java and PHP.
Microsoft, recently recruited Timi Bolaji, a Nigerian graduate of the University of Lagos, who passed the organisation’s assessment instituted to evaluate computer science graduates. Timi joined Microsoft in Seattle, Washington, U.S a year later and has since, been working with the Xbox cloud gaming team.
The company has now returned to Africa to recruit more creative minds like Timi with enticing offers, like relocation, a better pay package and training.
Similarly, Amazon has joined its competitor in a race to lure the best African minds to its organisation. According to people in the know, Amazon, the world’s leading e-commerce company has commenced interviews in Nigeria with a robust pay package, relocation option and many more.
Quite a number of Nigerian students who would be interested in the amazing opportunities Amazon and Microsoft have to offer are most probably held at home in regards to the ongoing Academic Staff Union of University (ASUU) strike which has been on for six months with no definite end in sight.
The struggle for some of Nigeria’s finest minds is in line with the growth of software engineers in Nigeria and Africa as a whole in the last 10 years.
Data from Andela, estimated the continent’s developers to be about 716,000, in which some of them are now startup creators, creating a continuous effect that motivates and inspires young graduates and students across the continent.
Most Nigerian programmers are self-taught with the majority of them relying on online courses, peer groups and other computer programming focused Non-Governmental Organisations (NGOs) to help them with basic materials for learning, and in some cases, get them laptops.
Universities in the country have been on strike in the last six months forcing many students to seek an alternative or find comfort in online training like computer programming with a long-term plan of working for foreign companies and eventually leaving the country (popularly known as Japa in local slang).
On average, a Nigerian remote programmer earns between $1,000 (N710,000, using a black market rate) to $5,000 (N3.55 million) a month, depending on experience. That is 2,267% when compared to Nigeria’s minimum wage of N30,000.
“We may not have that many engineers who can operate at the scale of these large companies, but that’s just an implementation hurdle that’s easy to hop over, at the risk of trivializing it,” says Justin Irabor, a developer who works remotely in Nigeria for a European company. “As with all kinds of professions, there is a wide variation of talent quality, but I strongly believe we have good engineers here.”