Where are South Africa's Software Developers?

I've seen some offer R7K but I do not look at them as real jobs in IT.

I'm sorry but you cant be selective just because it doesnt suit what you think graduate salaries should be. Look at Zazyx - with 3 years of experience, he is not earning R15k yet. And there are adverts for grads for jobs that pay less than R15k. They may not be good jobs but they are jobs.
 
A stronger example than ‘mild’ would be Dr. Sheldon Cooper from the TV sitcom ‘The Big Bang Theory’. His human relationship dysfunctions are played for laughs but I don’t think someone like that could cope in the real world. His autism is stronger than ‘mild’. A balance must be struck to survive.

Have a mate who is very much like him. He now lectures at UKZN engineering at the age of 31.
 
I'm sorry but you cant be selective just because it doesnt suit what you think graduate salaries should be. Look at Zazyx - with 3 years of experience, he is not earning R15k yet. And there are adverts for grads for jobs that pay less than R15k. They may not be good jobs but they are jobs.

You sound like a manager. You probably pay your people sub-10K as well.
 
I have gone through over 50 candidates (Java-, HTML-/web development-, Linux-, Tomcat-skills) with the intention to offer up to 40K for the right skill-set in the last 2 months.

TBH, 90% could not even find a severe (but obvious) bug in sample code provided. Out of 100 internship applications only 3 will go for actual interviews. That should give you a good indication of how skewed the job market is at the moment.

Hiring a junior (who wants to "manage staff and not write code in 2 years time and complete his MBA") seems to be more common now then during my time in development.

The way I see it at the moment: there is a great divide between high-end-salary-demanding junior-/unskilled IT staff (work-experience in years does not matter, but if you come for an interview and have 5 years of Java experience, one could expect that you can explain how you read data from a DB) and highly-skilled professionals who all want to be architects, managers etc. Makes me wonder who will actually pick up the slack and write code....

At previous companies we had the same hiring-issues and additionally had to face that corporate "BEE/must-fill quota non-sense".
 
I have been reading Mybroadband for years and thank the owners for a great site. I have never signed up but have to say this topic is way to tempting.

I am a managing partner in a software development house, which delivers solutions into the corporate market, as well as in house products, which we sell to the international market with good success. As a company we believe in motivation through equity ownership if it is required. We had two in house development teams, which we have got rid of and have out sourced our development to India.

Working with developers in India has been an excellent experience and I would recommend it, it is refreshing to work with developers who are keen to have a job and are excited by work. Not just looking for self-improvement and who are looking to jump ship regardless of the implications to the companies that are involved with. The risk these types of developers expose companies to is not worth the money.

Due to cost efficient out sourcing, programming is becoming a commodity-based resource; India is pumping out graduates at a rate over and above any other country. First world countries have worked this out; South Africa is working this out and soon these hard done by local junior developers who are demanding un reasonable salaries are going to find it hard getting into the market. There are resources that are prepared to work extremely hard for the pittance you claim is your salary.

Post a job on vworker.com elance.com or freelancer.com and see resources swooning to be worked with.
 
I've thoroughly enjoyed reading this thread. It's really hard for developers with no experience to gain experience. No one is willing to provide one with the opportunity. I've been out of work for many months and have been applying wherever I could, but all the jobs basically say the same thing: We want someone with x years of experience that knows abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz. So sad that a qualification counts for nothing without experience.
 
I have been reading Mybroadband for years and thank the owners for a great site. I have never signed up but have to say this topic is way to tempting.

I am a managing partner in a software development house, which delivers solutions into the corporate market, as well as in house products, which we sell to the international market with good success. As a company we believe in motivation through equity ownership if it is required. We had two in house development teams, which we have got rid of and have out sourced our development to India.

Working with developers in India has been an excellent experience and I would recommend it, it is refreshing to work with developers who are keen to have a job and are excited by work. Not just looking for self-improvement and who are looking to jump ship regardless of the implications to the companies that are involved with. The risk these types of developers expose companies to is not worth the money.

Due to cost efficient out sourcing, programming is becoming a commodity-based resource; India is pumping out graduates at a rate over and above any other country. First world countries have worked this out; South Africa is working this out and soon these hard done by local junior developers who are demanding un reasonable salaries are going to find it hard getting into the market. There are resources that are prepared to work extremely hard for the pittance you claim is your salary.

Post a job on vworker.com elance.com or freelancer.com and see resources swooning to be worked with.

My experience of those outsourced-from-India developers has been mixed. I've encountered both extremely capable and extremely incompetent. For example, when the outsourced developer contracts ended during the recession, I was given their code base to occasionally do new features in addition to my usual job.

When I completed the first batch of new features, I asked the team lead to just go through them once to make sure he's happy to release it. He then discovers that the code in the repo does not match what was last deployed live - there were bugs in various places that I had to fix because the last group to touch the code couldn't be bothered to commit or even document all their changes. I then had to check their PC's for any code that seemed to be a later revision but had not been committed, and found nothing. I then had to spend the next few months fixing issues in several places - one even caused a stack overflow :wtf:

I eventually left because even though my regular work was being released without issue, this one minor feature release was held up for months while I discover even more bugs while fixing the ones I found previously, and I was the one being held accountable for it.
 
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