Being a developer has its ups and downs and for the most part it is a lucrative career to go after. Looking and the rate of growth in the industry and terms like a unicorn company, it is no now wonder the field sparks a lot of interest. Before you start thinking you’ll write your next app and the accolades will follow, one needs to take a step to remember that they are in a third world country and different rules apply.
For the most part most of the information we gather about how cool the field is turns out to be true, yet when one resides in a third world country in africa, they need to view things in this filter.
I call it “African Teck Tax”‘
One of the first things to face in this filter is that at a certain development skillset, you still will battle to gain clients or battle to get a well paying job even though if you where in a first world country it could have been enough to get well off. The reality tends to be that the are not enough clients willing to pay or even interested in a solution brought by a developer because they think they don’t need it. In any case they would need to change a lot of how the business is ran. So this creates a situation where as a developer you are forced to scale up your skill set by either specializing in specific languages or becoming more business minded. Taking into consideration that this career requires the person to frequently re-study the everchanging technologies each year.
Specializing
This option has the most extreme results. If you choose a language that is to be faced out in the long term, you will be faced out yourself. There are languages that at best you can be hired on a job to maintain legacy code. So one needs to research well why they want to master a language. Understand its uses and primarily invest to a be an expert in that language. Sounds like a killing a social life for a very long time. For a lot of people this is not even practical to spend 5 to 10 years without getting any realistic income due to having been exposed to the industry late to begin with. Most of the time under this filter we tend to be exposed to programming after high school or after working in a dead end job for a while. Which in theory should be fine but the ideal point to be exposed to programming would be starting high school. This gives a great opportunity to specialize. An expert becomes in demand for the highest paying jobs or even those high paying clients, which is not that many.
Business minded
This is actually a much more practical approach. Third world countries have third world problems, so you can’t really create an app then lease it to a company who solves that problem. You have to start that type of business that solves that problem then use that app solution that you have. So if the site is about people buying something that people can use then, the focus is more the logistics of having it delivered more than the site to start the process. So as a developer you have to widen up your skillset to go beyond IT itself. I will prove to be a lot of work as well, yet it will yield better results sooner depending on the business you go into solving.