Launch HN: Manara (YC W21) – Connect Middle East engineers with global companies
I grew up in a refugee camp in Gaza. My dream was to become a Silicon Valley software engineer. Eventually I hacked my way there successfully, becoming a software engineer at Nvidia. I like to joke that the hardest part wasn’t escaping Gaza in the middle of the 2014 war, but rather, my first interviews... which I totally bombed. ;)
Once I got to Silicon Valley, I was surprised at the lack of women. In Gaza, more women study computer science than men! I was also surprised to learn how hard it was for companies in Silicon Valley to attract the talent we needed. During interviews with candidates I’d often think, “I wish I could hire my friends in Gaza. They’d be great.”
That’s when I re-connected with Iliana. She and I had met in Gaza when she was running Gaza Sky Geeks (GSG), the first startup accelerator in Gaza. Her work was widely covered and has a few threads on HN including https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11858963. Iliana asked me “How can we produce more success stories like yours?”
I told her that engineers in the MENA region don't lack talent, but they lack other ingredients. They're mostly not aware of opportunities outside their region, and even if they are aware, they think you have to be a genius to work at a company like Google. Also, they have no idea what sorts of resumes recruiters want to see and don't have brand names to put on them. They don't have referral networks to get their foot in the door. And they're completely unprepared for the style of interviews that tech companies go for. As we talked further, it became clear that all of these problems would be fixable with the right kind of coaching and support, and that bringing this growing talent pool to the global job marketplace would benefit both sides (accelerating the success of global companies, while redistributing wealth to the region).
We developed an approach to address those gaps - and it worked. Just last week, 67% of the people we referred to Google for internships made it past the hiring committee (they’re now waiting for their job offers, so if you work at Google and have internship headcount, let us know!) We’ve heard Google interviewers say several times, “This is the best junior engineering interview I’ve ever done.”
I want to emphasize that we are not a zero-to-hero bootcamp. Manara is a career accelerator for skilled software engineers at all levels with a focus on junior engineers. Students learn the technical and soft skills they need to pass interviews and get introductions to companies with jobs that are either remote or on-site (in Europe or Canada). We charge an affordable fee to both candidates and companies, only if a successful match is made.
We focus on MENA (and specifically Arabic-speaking countries in the region) for a few reasons. On the business side, that's where we're from and where our connections are, so we understand the dynamics and have comparative advantage there. Second, the region has a huge opportunity: the youngest population in the world, 2x more university graduates than 10 years ago, women studying computer science at high rates (in some countries more women study CS than men: 52% in Palestine, 62% in Tunisia, 70% in Qatar), and so on. Third, it lends itself to scale. Our graduates have a high sense of affiliation and loyalty to the region, which means that as soon as we place 1 candidate at a company that’s growing, s/he comes back to us looking for 3 more to hire.
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111 comments
[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 181 ms ] threadOne of the problems people here have is getting paid from companies abroad. I think it would be good to conduct interviews with people who may be having the same problem, and either offer a solution or explain it on the website. Many people work as freelancers, and the way they get their money is Herculean.
Also, many, especially here, neither are Arab nor identify as such [native population and ethnicity before 7th century invasions]. Many also do not share the language or other common attributes. Therefore, if you're not ethnicity based, but based on the "region", I guess North Africa, and Middle East are the terms that would work better.
Again, congratulations. There a lot of very talented people in these countries who will not work abroad for different reasons. Staying not to leave family behind is a very, very, common reason. Making remote work easier for them, whether positions or ease of payment, is huge.
This is encouraging even for those who are willing to move but aren't invited to because they haven't reached the skill level required for an employer to incur that cost, and they haven't reached the financial level to incur that cost themselves. I guess your product hits that niche as well.
Regarding payments, this has been coming up and we’ll need to pick your brain as we develop solutions. For now we are managing payments for companies that hire remotely by wire transferring the funds ourselves. In other words, the companies send the money to our US entity and then we do the transfer. We’ve also been looking at https://pilot.co/ https://www.boundlesshq.com/ and https://www.letsdeel.com/. Are you familiar with those? What do you think? Btw Pilot is also a YC company that initially planned to be a full-time remote work marketplace, but switched to facilitating payments because there was such a big need there.
You’re right of course that in North Africa (the Maghreb) many don’t speak Arabic nor identify as Arab. When we call it “the Middle East and North Africa,” we also get feedback that it’s inaccurate. I wish there were a better word! We’ll keep iterating until we get it right.
PS: My co-founder Iliana has spent lots of time in Morocco and some in Algeria… and can’t wait to go back! She speaks some darija… and picked up a few words of Berber. :)
Congratulations on getting Manara up and running!
My contact information is in my profile. I'll forward to some people I know who had several problems with that. The last one I talked with worked with a company in the U.K. with the restriction the "worker" had to have a bank account in their country of residence, not in any other country. Explanations on exchange rates below. They know more about this, and know more people in that situation.
>We’ve also been looking at https://pilot.co/ https://www.boundlesshq.com/ and https://www.letsdeel.com/. Are you familiar with those?
Unfortunately, no.
What I also meant by payment problems is the disparity between the conversion rates in banks and on the streets. The disparity can be huge, so if you wire X euros to someone's bank account, it is automatically converted to the local currency at rate X and they get Y, when they could get 1.6Y or 1.7Y (60% or 70%) more on the streets. A 70% delta is a lot.
Some networks have developed to enable people to get the full "street value" of their money.
>When we call it “the Middle East and North Africa,” we also get feedback that it’s inaccurate.
Well, as someone in Algeria, if I were looking for work and visited the site and it said: "You're in North Africa", that's a fact of geography. It said "Hire the best Arab software engineers", I'll think "I'll forward the link to Arab software engineers I know since they're specific".
There are a lot of competitions, hackathons, or events that use this terminology, and I know many very talented people who do not participate because it's not for them. They'd rather go to another continent, and they do, where their ethnicity is acknowledged than submit a form that contains an inaccuracy that perpetuates a denial they've been facing for a long time. You are trying to optimize for brevity and clarity and you have to put something on the page, and I get that. I'm just saying and I think that you have lived through enough exclusion and non representativity that you understand that a message on a landing page that excludes you defacto kind of stings.
>PS: My co-founder Iliana has spent lots of time in Morocco and some in Algeria… and can’t wait to go back! She speaks some darija… and picked up a few words of Berber. :)
Well, I don't need to tell you that you are welcome. Hit me up if you are around. You might find the students groups to be interesting. In the meantime, I'll float the site around.
EDIT0: I sent it to someone who has a group. They sent the following:
> Them: Too bad, I'm an infrastructure engineer.
They're specialized in "Microsoft, VMware, IT infrastructures, etc."
EDIT1: Sent it to the admin of a group of around 7.4K engineers and technicians (not just software). Some might be interested and share it to their networks.
The situation with the exchange rate in Algeria is a real problem. Like you said, the banks’ exchange rate is much lower than it should be. When I was there I spent a day with a friend’s friend who runs a side business exchanging money, so I saw some of what this looks like on the ground. I’ll reach out now to pick your brain more on this topic.
Thank you again for your feedback & for spreading the word! So grateful.
This is also a problem where I live (Nigeria).
It's exhausting explaining black/parallel currency markets to clients/employers in countries with more stable currencies. Way too often I get the knee-jerk reaction that I'm doing something shady/illegal.
>It's exhausting explaining black/parallel currency markets to clients/employers
What's the delta like there between parallel/official rates?
I've settled on maintaining a domiciliary bank account (denominated in USD) - SWIFT transfers take a few business days, but that's not a problem for steady income and clients can usually be persuaded to eat or split the fees. Plus it's easier to tell people I prefer to receive and hold USD than to explain the state of the economy. Also WorldRemit recently added same-day direct-to-bank deposits of USD in Nigeria-based USD-denominated accounts; I've only received money that way a couple of times though.
So are there any solutions we should be looking into beyond cash transfers / Western Union? Are any startups working on this problem?
The Jan threads are now closed (HN threads close to new comments after 2 weeks) but there will be another one on Feb 1. No guarantees, of course, but people definitely get work that way.
Good luck! I hope you find something soon.
Manara solves this problem by setting up partnerships with companies for our candidates. Have you thought about joining Andela?
Best of luck to you two.
Disclosure: We (Apollo Agriculture) share an investor with them, so I've met a couple of their folks at social events.
Came here to say the same -- I grew up in the US, but my family is Kabyle and you definitely don't want to call my father Arab!
Edit: edited this now in the text above!
(Also, hey! First time I’ve run into another Kabyle on HN)
Congratulations on the launch. Your story is great and I love the premise. I myself am the Founder, CEO + CTO of a medical education company working on revolutionizing the future of meded-tech in MENA, so in the near future I'll be looking into hiring from your platform.
Be well and good luck!
Azib
They probably didn't want to embarass you (and this isn't really a problem here, but it might be a serious issue SEO-wise).
(Curious about that by the way, since we have only seen one other company - Klarna - start with a logic test. Do you know if this is common? Is it an effective screening approach? In the USA people are sometimes wary of how standardized tests of this type may impact untraditional candidates in particular)
But back to your point - that name issue is really disappointing. We'll have to put some more thought into it but my first reaction is to do a little more polling to see how widespread this association is in our primary markets (MENA and countries that do a lot of hiring of software engineers, so mainly USA, Germany, Poland, Sweden, UK, Canada, Australia, etc)
Italy isn't a major source of software engineering positions and has systemic issues with companies being too small and unwilling to invest / partner with others / grow. My (non-quantitative) opinion is that that sort of approach doesn't work that well - hiring is far from a solved problem - but is likely less discriminatory than whatever hunch-based interview processes would otherwise be in place. I'd describe it as progressive-in-context.
It is true that the artist is very famous and has even done some tech-related work in the past (I think he designed boxes for GPUs or modems, I forgot), but it's not like you risk being confused.
You may get some mileage out of talking with Globant (https://globant.com) or a similar company in South America to hear what their experience was. They have a different model, but do a lot of the same things you've outlined.
Also true about the fact that this sort of thing has sprouted in other regions, including South/Latin America. We've been trying to connect with them & share lessons learned because we think there's a big need in this space & we should all help each other succeed. I'm not sure I understand how Globant is similar to us though, is it an agency?
The ones we've spoken to so far that are pretty similar to ours (last-mile prep for job placement) include: PestoTech (engineers in India), PAZ.AI (refugees in Europe), Shift.org (veterans in USA), Insight Fellows (data science in USA), Talently.Tech (devs in LatAm), Laboratoria (women in LatAm), Outtalent (devs in Eastern Europe).
So far it seems to me that they're not far ahead of us, but nevertheless they've made enough progress to share some important lessons. First, it's important to start with and maintain quality. Quality for candidates means getting a job that's much better than what they would've gotten on their own, within 2-6 months of meeting our requirements. On the demand side, quality means that candidates meet or exceed the expectations of their standard talent selection process and performance post hire. Second, it's important to take a talent-first approach because that's what attracts the top talent. This includes being careful not to charge the talent an unreasonable rate. Employers may not all pay for the talent at the beginning when we're establishing our reputation, but ultimately that's where the main financial opportunity is - and charging a subscription fee ensures long-term mutually beneficial relationships.
Of course there's also the outsourcing agency/staff augmentation model that has existed for decades in Eastern Europe and South Asia... Andela is a more recent/visible example in Africa. Those are more easily profitable, but we've avoided that approach for now because we see that the top engineers prefer to work directly for great companies (whether remotely or on-site) and it is more beneficial for their career growth to do so.
Their business model isn't similar, but their methods are. They are a development house, somewhat similar to say, ThoughtWorks. But, they spend a lot of time with new hires, many straight from university, training them. Not just technically, but "US business speak/culture", helping them with the CV that's presented to potential clients, understanding schtick-of-the-day stuff like "Scaled Agile" and so on. And client-specific training, like how to speak FinTech, Insurance, Airline, or whatever.
One of the problems we noticed in the Middle East & North Africa is a lack of agencies / development houses that do this at a high quality. In Eastern Europe lots of people go from college into a dev house for 2 years, and then qualify for great remote jobs (which usually require at least 2 years of experience).
We believe there's value to getting talent straight into the top tech companies, and that we will be able to develop a more scalable approach to teaching them these skills (communities are powerful & scale quickly). But it can be a challenge to get companies to hire engineers that have just graduated from college and have no work experience, so we'll need to find solutions to that. One approach that is working well for us is internships. Companies like Google have great programs and our talent has been doing really well interviewing for those opportunities.
We’re currently most familiar with the bands in Palestine, Egypt, Jordan, and UAE. What we’re seeing there varies widely, but can probably be thought of as breaking down into two separate scales/salary bands: those paid by local companies and by international companies sourcing talent in the region primarily for affordability, and those paid by international companies sourcing talent in the region primarily because they need strong engineers.
In the former, the band for junior engineers straight out of college with no work experience is ~$800-$1800/month. In the latter, it’s $2500-$4500/month. For senior engineers, in the former it’s around $5k/month and in the latter it’s $6k-$10k/month.
Of course startups sometimes seek strong talent but can’t afford the range, so they may pay on the lower end but make up for it with equity, career growth, etc.
I am not the original commenter, but compensation was also my first thought and worry. Regardless, I still filled out the form and look forward to speaking to someone from your team.
The reality is that hiring is hard. It is doubly hard when you don't have a name brand company, and doubly hard again when you are not VC-backed and can't pay salaries competitive to those companies.
We're a tech company on our way to becoming independently owned again (after a small angel round many years ago), and bootstrap our growth according to revenue. This fact leads us to be very fiscally conservative (especially for a startup). A consistent pain point for us has been the fact that we need engineers to take on larger (or more) projects, but we can't afford them (they'd cost more than a project would bring), but we also can't take on these projects without more engineers, so we've been in a holding pattern unwilling to pull the trigger for quite awhile.
I presume this is not a new story to you. This situation is the only reason we cannot hire locally, we literally cannot afford it.
Laila is personally meeting with all of our potential new partners because we really care about understanding your customers’ needs & making sure that our solution addresses them. Will be interesting for you to discuss this with her. (Assuming you booked a call? You should have received an invite after you filled out the form.)
Quick question: why are the companies with on-site jobs restricted to Europe and Canada (if they are in fact restricted)?
Thanks!
So far our participants have ended up primarily in Germany and Poland, and we're seeing possibilities in Sweden, France, and the UK too. We're still figuring out what the Canadian visa situation is for junior engineers but it seems possible (probably best for them to apply for residency first and then get a job).
If you have any more insight on this do let us know!
EDITED: Also, when I worked at Upwork as a PM, most of our software engineers were from Eastern Europe (Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, etc) and we had almost no women on the team.
P.S. Also worth mentioning that this is some of the most exciting volunteer work I've done...it's a small part of what I do each week but it keeps me disproportionately energized even throughout the rest of my week!
Then something similar showed up again. But this time the business is for Europe, Asia and Latin America: https://techcrunch.com/2018/05/23/youteam/
Then I joked with my friend: "Maybe you should build something similar but for South-East Asia." (We live in SEA.)
Then the similar business showed up again today but for Middle East and North America. So I guess it's about time when something similar shows up but for SEA (or other parts of the world). :)
The vision of these organizations is similar, and they take slightly different approaches. For instance, Andela is an agency (they hire the talent) and YouTeam and Andela are both remote-only. We took the approach of helping talent reach their dream jobs whatever they may be (including jobs at companies like Google in Europe) because that makes it possible to attract the best talent, and because ultimately we believe that will have bigger impact.
I’ve seen at least one example in SEA so far: https://pesto.tech/ If you find others, let us know!
Congrats to you Laila and Iliana for the launch and I will definitely be sharing this with fellow Tunisian developers :)
I'd like to introduce you to some friends in North America who will be very interested. Please check out my profile for an e-mail, and let's talk.
Shukraan habibti!
Interesting that the proportion of female CS students is so high in those countries, I imagine it's more like 10% in most Western countries. Based on you inside perspective, do you have any theories about why this is so?
Anecdotally, I've worked for a lot of startups in Scandinavia, and one in Jordan, and that one had the most women!
Because there is a stronger economic incentive in Middle Eastern countries compared to western countries, more women go into STEM fields.
More women choose STEM in college in the Middle East because the humanities contradict their religion (unlike STEM) and women are on the whole more religious than men.
No it's not. You are actually considered a genius if you work in STEM in general
> sitting at your desk "playing" with computers is probably not respected as much as elsewhere.
I'd say this changed in the last decade a lot. But there is a difference between sitting home playing video games while jobless and working in STEM.
The high proportion of women studying STEM is definitely not a reflection of men not being interested in these fields. Engineering of all types are admired in the region, and computer science has gained traction in the past 5 years. There's increasing participation in competitive programming competitions... and that's mostly men so far.
Until about 5 years ago both men and women in Palestine were pressured by their parents to study medicine. That has changed because people have become aware of the opportunities in the tech sector and the unemployment facing all other fields. There's an exam you have to take at the end of high school in Palestine called "tawjihi"... it's similar to the A-levels in the UK or the matural in Poland, closest equivalent in the USA would be the SATs. At one university I know of in Palestine, 5 years ago a "tawjihi" score of 78 could allow you to study computer science. Now it's 92+. So it's a more in-demand field amongst both mena and women. (That's one reason it makes sense to start Manara now: the pool of super smart talent in computer science is growing quickly.)
As for why women study STEM and do so well in it... Laila always tells me that it was so normal to her that she didn’t really think about it. Women studied Physics, Electrical Engineering, Computer Engineering, etc at high rates. I remember telling a woman in Gaza once about the stereotype that we have in the United States that men are better than women in these areas, and her response was, "Are you kidding? We all know women are super stars in those fields."
The fact that women do well in STEM starts off early: it's the only region in the world where girls outperform boys in high school math (and again, not because the boys are underperforming).
I have a hypothesis for this but it’s really just a wild guess. I ran across one study in the USA in which middle school girls’ math scores improved dramatically & quickly as soon as their math classes were separated by gender (i.e., girls did better when studying this subject with just other girls). In countries like Palestine most elementary, middle, and high schools are separate for girls and boys, so that might be a part of the reason for girls' confidence...
Anecdotally, I am Muslim and I notice that Muslims who grow up in the West have this pattern. If they are very Westernized in morality and thinking, then they are less likely to work in STEM fields. If they are religious they are almost 100% likely to work in STEM fields. I think religious Muslims get their source of ultimate truth from somewhere other than humanities and philosophy so they aren't drawn to them in college and thus they all funnel into STEM.
Women in the US are probably drawn to humanities and men probably drawn out of them in college (where feminist/sexuality lens is high in humanities), which could possibly lead to STEM being highly male.
How I wish this works for Africa as well.
Here in Africa (Nigeria) to get a good tech job can take like forever... I am so happy you're helping out. Cudos!
Their layoffs are way too much and recently they've gone full gigs. They used to employ Engineers that work on foreign projects but ever since they came to the limelight and the main Nigerian co-founder left they've lost the good reputation they previously enjoyed.
TL;DR; It's no longer the place it used to be.
We'd love to learn anything we can from their journey. We know that growing can be challenging, so we want to start thinking now about the strategies that will be most successful for both our talent & our hiring partners.
Last year I fired an off-shored team of 10 otherwise excellent Egyptian engineers because their homophobic statements on LinkedIn and in Slack made people in the company uncomfortable.
If your company's engineers lean more right-wing/republican, then middle-eastern engineers are probably a great untapped resource. If your company is more of a Silicon Valley company, they are a liability which can get you sued.
Following the logic in your own statement equating Republicans to Middle-eastern homophobes, mid-west engineers will(!) have significant problems working with more liberal/woke companies. They have a strong(!) tendency to be homophobic/transphobic/misogynist. They are a liability which can get you sued.
Does that sound like a correct, or even fair, assessment to you?
I'm a Republican software engineer from Kansas and it doesn't to me.
Beyond that, from my time living in Beirut and traveling the Middle-east I can assure you there are many, many liberal (in both the Western and US sense) and metropolitan software engineers who would have no "problems working with more liberal/woke" companies".
I've directly managed 6 teams in Istanbul / Beirut / Cairo, another 4 in Belarus / Kiev, and one somewhere in Russia (I forget, it's been 20 years). Those in Belarus were by far the best, probably because they aren't mobile (it's very difficult to emigrate from Belarus into Europe or the USA). They work hard, are paid well and retention is great.
The worst were in Cairo, by far. I enjoy working with Istanbul engineers, but I steer away from Ankara / Konya teams because they tend to be conservative and just aren't great for startup environments, they're more well suited to work for the financial industry or the large retail holdings.
Beirut isn't a fair comparison, because it's a fairly liberal / western city (heck, they even do their day to day transactions in dollars instead of lira). Most of the engineers I've recruited there were also female.
And yes, my preference is to avoid mid-western / southern engineers. I don't hire people I wouldn't want to socialize with after work. I always vet hires and contractors on LinkedIn / Facebook. If I see pro-trump / anti-lgbt / proudly / qanon activity, their resumes are round-filed. If the firm's owners donated to trump, those firms are blacklisted.
I wouldn't hire you into the companies where I tend to work. If I worked in something more soulless like advertising / finance / government where I just wouldn't care about my job or employer, I would hire you because you'd fit in.
Call it discriminatory hiring, I don't care, my projects succeed, my teams are successful, and my engineers are loyal, some have followed me around for 25 years.
https://www.fossjobs.net/ https://github.com/fossjobs/fossjobs/wiki/Resources