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Ask HN: Experience working with African developers

23 points by throwzaway ↗ HN
Last year, our obviously racist hiring manager hired a remote African developer with the intention that he was going to be cheap labor and a code monkey for the menial dev jobs we had around. None of us objected.

This developer(in his mid-twenties) turned out to be the most knowledgeable/complete programmer we had ever encountered. Everyone on the team has been unconsciously deferring to him anytime we are stuck on a complex problem. We have two ex-googler senior devs who practically worship him.

He's a very modest fellow naturally, but he keeps claiming he's just an average developer in his West African country and i find this hard to believe because he is definitely beyond an average developer in the US.

What are your experiences working with African developers in general? The only other one I've ever met seems to be more of a Math genius than a programmer.

14 comments

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PaulHoule
People who manage to get a lot of education in Africa often turn out to be pretty smart.
smt88
Necessary to include "in Africa" in that sentence? Isn't it true of humans in general?
pmichaud
A lot of education isn't a very strong signal in places where education is trivial to access.
stuxnet79
This is actually a very good point. I'm from Africa and currently living in North America. It is interesting to compare and contrast my views about the value / benefit of education vs my parent's. In a lot of countries in Africa, education is a privilege (I was VERY lucky). Few can access it so it is a rather strong signal.

I do agree with the spirit of the parent comment however, in that there are a lot of false and unconscious assumptions about "Africa" held by NAers that need to be rooted out and extinguished.

ud0
Not just education but also quality education is a priviledge.
brudgers
People who don't manage to get a lot of education also turn out to be pretty smart at the same rate.
[deleted]
(comment deleted)
smt88
You know Africa is a continent with 1.2B people on it, right? Dozens of countries, thousands of cultures.

Any generalization you get is going to be anecdotal far beyond the point of being meaningless.

There are amazing devs in every country. A better question is how to find out whether someone is a genius before hiring her and how to search for such people efficiently.

tchaffee
> Last year, our obviously racist hiring manager

> African developers in general?

Don't be your racist hiring manager. Stop trying to generalize.

edimaudo
If you are looking for great African dev check out Andela.
elorm
Breadth and Depth of education in Africa vary from country to country but the anglophone countries usually stick out more.

If your developer is from Nigeria or Ghana there is a high chance he may be speaking the truth. Churn rates of good developers in those countries are pretty high. Focus on mathematics and algorithms are used to weed out the weak developers.

South Africa and Kenya also produce very talented developers and my general experience with them has been mostly pleasant.

If you're looking for Native English speakers with manageable accents, look no further.

hawkice
I won't touch the geography of it all, but if a very good developer told me they were just average (as far as they knew), I'd say they're just being kind. True no matter where they are -- but I think more likely for remote workers, where getting along well is the best protection against office politics they can't see remotely.
developuh
How did you go about hiring him ?