What Andela Got Wrong
If you are thinking about working with software developers in Africa, it’s likely you’ve heard of Andela. Prior to their latest (Series D) round of funding, Andela had raised $80M to train around 1000 developers throughout Africa. They recently laid off 400 of those developers because they had been unable to find projects for them after a year on the bench.
Late last year, Andela halted their training program in nearly all locations and instead focused on recruiting mid and late-career engineers. Apparently they still have sales trouble with those engineers.
I love a lot of what Andela is doing. We’ve been recruiting from their laid-off developer pool and have found some really talented individuals with an excellent foundation laid by the Andela fellowship program. They are teaching their developers many of the right things, but they are making a few key mistakes.
I have personally approached Andela from every angle. I interviewed for a couple of jobs there before deciding to start One World Coders. I referred several people for their recruiting efforts in Rwanda. When I was still at 8th Light, I actually tried to hire Andela to subcontract when we were capacity strained. Through all of this, I’ve begun to identify what Andela got wrong.
A narrow approach to training. Their fellowship program and engineering competency model is quite good, but unfortunately, they focused on a very narrow technology stack. They picked a good one (Node.js and React) but that severely limits the projects that their team can take on. While some offices started doing python or PHP, Andela continues to tie their engineers’ identities to particular programming stacks. This immediately and drastically shrinks its potential market.
Long commitments. If you want to contract with Andela for an Africa-based programmer, you will have to make at least a 12-month contract commitment. As a professional services firm, I get it. Long contracts equal stability. But as a customer, one of the key reasons you bring in an external developer is the flexibility to be able to ramp the team down when you need to.
Hands-off responsibility: Andela wants their clients to treat Andelan engineers as their own employees. While it is a heart-warming and team-centric sentiment, this approach also means that as the client you take the responsibility for the correctness of the Andelans’ work and for their further training and development.
Elaborate developer leveling. Andela has a rate schedule with 8 engineering levels on it. The rates at the bottom end start quite reasonably, but the costs appreciate rapidly as you go up on the scale. While the competency framework is a good one, the division encourages people to only seek out their top-end talent. That’s why Andela has such a hard time placing their less-experienced engineers onto projects
Lack of transparency. You can’t meet any of the Andela engineers you are considering for your team prior to signing a contract. It’s hard to “hire” someone having never even seen biographical data on the candidates.
A one-sided approach to culture. In their training, Andela invests a lot of time in “westernizing” the engineers. They teach key cultural behaviors that Africans will need to integrate into a US-based software team. While important, this approach lacks reciprocal learning. Western software teams have plenty to learn from African Engineers when it comes to cultural values like collective code ownership. A mutual pursuit of cultural understanding ultimately leads to stronger and more innovative teams.
Andela has raised the profile of Africa-based Software development and for that, I am grateful. Promises of a lot of well-paying jobs are fantastic, but what many countries in Africa need is sustainable businesses that create jobs for generations to come. Andela has a long way to go before they have created that kind of business.
