MyBroadband’s 2019 IT Salary Survey revealed that,
“46% of IT professionals in South Africa are planning to leave South Africa permanently, or work abroad, in the near future.”
The survey was conducted in April 2019 and was completed by 3,055 respondents from a wide range of IT professions and companies.
According to the survey, the main reason for IT professionals planning to leave South Africa is political and economic concerns about the country.
Other prominent reasons for people planning to leave the country are crime, better living standards abroad, and a better future for their children.
Similarly, in its 2019 survey, OfferZen reported that 86% of South African developers were open to moving abroad while only 21.5% were actively looking to move. These high-levels of interest in emigration are partly explained by safety concerns, however earnings and career growth also play an important role. In another post we explore how tech professionals can earn more internationally than they can in South Africa.
How will this be affected by the COVID-19 pandemic and the shift to remote working and distributed development?
Personal safety was the number one reason developers gave OfferZen for wanting to relocate. Clearly this cannot be addressed by remote working. However, other factors that contribute towards developers considering leaving can be addressed through the easier and lower risk option of staying in South African, but working remoting for an international firm: growth opportunities (new roles at international companies), earning more (higher pay from international remote roles), and better companies (the choice of working for any global firm).
The cost and complexity of emigration may have kept a lid on South Africa’s tech brain drain pre-COVID. However, based on the growing popularity of remote working and distributed development, we predict more South African tech professionals will take advantage of international opportunities. Added to the top of funnel tech skills problem, remote working will further compound South Africa’s tech skills shortage.
“If a large fraction of senior and mid-level devs take their skills elsewhere it’ll leave a vacuum that will likely harm junior developers”
says Sheena O’Connell, Umuzi’s CTO and the ACN’s systems architect.
“Juniors won’t grow as quickly, and that they won’t be as useful to companies since it’ll be harder for them to get the support they need. A major South African dev house tries to maintain a ratio of two experienced devs to one junior. If that ratio were to become unsustainable, what would need to happen for the juniors to still do a good job?”
To fill these gaps, South Africa needs to train more developers in a way that enables juniors to hit the ground running. Juniors who have internalised good working practices like Agile and GitHub need less support.
Read more about how the African Coding Network plans to address the tech skills shortage through supporting self-driven, online learning.