Remote work is a new paradigm for the African tech ecosystem & the world
I’ve written and tweeted a lot about remote work in the past and I think that many people(especially managers, entrepreneurs, founders and CEOs) fail to acknowledge one thing:
Remote work is a new paradigm of work.
Retrofitting concepts of work from the 19th and 20th centuries will result in chaos. This is why you have the kinds of arguments that were held on Nigerian Twitter last week, resulting in very weird name-calling from people who are leaders.
I’ll like to touch a bit on how we got here — like in my former remote work post, there wouldn’t be a lot of facts or numbers or anything like that here so please calm down with the fast facts. This will mostly be anecdotal.
- 19th century. This century came with industrialisation which brought us machines to help us work better and factories to optimise the production of goods. People needed to leave home and go to a physical place to produce items.
- 20th century. This century brought us the personal computer and globalisation. It meant I could produce an item in China and sell it in America. This type of activity was happening pre-20th century but the industrialisation of the 19th century coupled with cars, ships and trains made globalisation faster.
- 21st century. The use of the internet escalated rapidly across the globe further reducing the dependence of any type of origin of work. Covid further accelerated the dependence on the internet for work but this origin of work e.g is the article produced in Nigeria or in Ghana for readers in the US has impacted a lot of things.
A couple of things are happening globally as a result of the proliferation of the internet and are not just an effect from tech in Nigeria.
- There is not enough engineering tech talent to serve the global job market. Andela, Devcenter, TalentQL, Hirefreehands and eWorker are just some of the companies that have tried to plug the gap in engineering talent for the tech industry.
- The status is even worse for the non-engineering roles. There are not enough growth marketers, product marketers, HR leaders and customer success leads for the Nigerian tech industry and global tech industry at large. If you’re reading this and you’re on the talent side, it means you need to step up your game.
- Startups want to hire highly experienced staff. I recently saw a job posting for a company hiring multiple growth marketing managers. It requested at least 5 years of experience in the field. I doubt they are going to find enough growth managers at that level in Nigeria. If there are, they are gainfully employed(remotely or locally) and are getting paid top dollar or being rewarded in equity.
- Because of all of these things, it’s become increasingly difficult for anyone in certain fields of our industry to do just one job. I literally get poached at least twice every week and the recruiters are often willing to bend to any of my demands. I instead make recommendations to the recruiters. I’m frankly tired of recommending the same 5 people — they’re also tired of talking to recruiters. One of them recently resigned from a job and he said to me “I’m 29 now, this is a lot of stress to manage”.
- It’s also become very hard for less experienced talent to get jobs. So my cousin who’s certified by top institutions globally cannot find a digital marketing internship. The guy in my church who just finished from semicolon can’t find a software engineering internship. This is a much bigger problem. P.S: Pls message me on LinkedIn if you’re hiring
- Nigerian work conditions aren’t great. We’re not yet at the stage of our country and ecosystem where we have great, inspiring and admirable leadership. Founders are nice on Twitter but are complete assholes to work with. This needs to be said. Many founders are simply horrible and terrible leaders and you can see this with constant employee churn at certain companies.
- The Naira is falling fast and is one of the worst currencies to earn income. In the last year, its value has fallen by almost 30% while food inflation is between 100% and 400%. Anyone who hasn’t had their salary increased, would have found themselves in struggle mode. It’s much worse when the organisation isn’t saying anything about this. If you’ve not reviewed salaries in the last year, it’ll become difficult to keep talent by the end of 2021.
- CEOs and Founders must realise that we’re now in the phase of our industry where it is a talent’s market. It’s nothing to throw tantrums about and it’s definitely not nice to call people greedy, claim they don’t have passion, etc(you’re making hiring more difficult for yourself). These are emotionally manipulative words. They’re not the fact on the ground. The fact is you sometimes cannot afford the experienced talent you desire and where/when you can afford it, the talent is already working at a much better opportunity with much better terms and in a better working environment.
- I asked many times on Twitter last year what “full time” means. What we’re seeing happen is the erasure of the 20th century’s paradigm of work. Full time means nothing if I can achieve the 9–5 work within 2 hours in a day and still take on 2 other gigs. Forcing people to work within the 9–5 makes no sense — the literal point of technology is to be more productive — do more in less time — so why do people(especially in the tech industry) so deeply want to box people into time.
- I’m not discounting the benefits of working on one thing and the results that come from the mind being in deep work/deep thought about a problem that needs to be solved but the rebuttal talent give is: founders manage multiple teams and organisations, many founders built the building blocks of their current startup while at their previous organisations while also holding multiple jobs. It’s a bit weird to not tell people to chase their dollar or relocation dreams when you’re chasing all of your dreams
In some situations, talent are choosing to work for Nigerian/African startups because they either love the leadership and team or love the problems the team is working on. They typically would have another non-conflicting remote job that pays much better in cash and equity.
I like to use myself as an example. While I led marketing and communication efforts at a Nigerian startup for two years, it was easily my least paying job at any point in time. I remember working on a gig in late 2016 for a Dubai-based company and earning a $70 minimum rate per backlink placement on their SEO project. Nobody in Nigeria could afford to pay me this back then and nobody today can afford these types of costs. I basically optimised to work very high paying side gigs so I could work there. I stayed for two years because I genuinely enjoyed solving the specific problems it was trying to fix and loved working with the founders and the team.
Like I said in What Career Games Are You Playing?, people optimise for different output at different stages in their career. There are no good or bad games. I currently don’t optimise for monthly income but at some point in my career, I had to so I could buy a new laptop. At another time, I had to do it again so I could move to a better house. If this suddenly makes me a bad person, so be it.
In the early days of the African tech ecosystem, the story founders told was that people shouldn’t go work in large FMCG or consultant firms because they were making less ‘impact’. We realise today how ridiculous that sounds.
The solution to the problems back then was that founders took less experienced talent who weren’t optimising for large paychecks and literally took them beneath their wings. While I was in university, I had long internships at hotels.ng where I moved from a social media intern to leading its paid marketing efforts. Today, founders know that if you need to hire great marketing talent, you find someone who came from the hotels.ng system. I don’t know that there are any companies today that are known for creating talent in any specific field. What networks do I look for if I want to hire the best designers? Or the best QA Engineers? Or the best writers? These are the hard questions.
Founders need to do this again. They need to be leaders & mentors who give less-experienced people a shot and groom them to grow and in turn become leaders within the organisation and the ecosystem. Andela is known(globally) for producing engineers with great skill, deep expertise, and amazing work ethic. This is a lot of work and isn’t going to come easy but it needs to be done.
So who’s going to give people a shot?
