Thank you for pointing it out. I was sloppy in my wording!:)
As I mentioned earlier, I was not able to find any relevant studies with transferable insights, unfortunately. There is ample literature on primary school or secondary school interventions, or general vocational training programmes. But there’s non that
Target digital remote employment in low income counties (simply because that wasn’t feasible from an infrastructure point of view)
Do NOT target those who are already unemployed.
To be more specific. The studies you cite here are simply not relevant. It’s as if I come and suggest medical intervention X to combat diseases, and you find study A, B and C from 10 years back that used intervention Y to also combat diseases. On a very superficial level they may seem similar in the same way studying at Harvard university is similar to studying at Södertörn university. But they are hardly particularly useful in producing useful proxies for cost effectiveness of our particular intervention.
First of all, they are NOT digital skills programs. And as an aside, this type of intervention wasn’t even possible to do just 4-5 years ago because the internet infrastructure or otherwise just didn’t exist in Kenya or Ethiopia back then.
Second they are targeting currently unemployed youth or less educated youth. We do not target this group. Our intervention targets the upper segment of highly talented individuals—and most of which won’t have the resources or access to the top quality training needed to succeed.
Third, the amount of resources invested is comparatively low relative to ours. Our intervention is definitely not as scalable as some of these programs (that are intended to scale) and we instead focus on intervention targeting efficiency. That means we invest a lot more per individual and we invest much more in selection of whom we support. This is inspired by on existing research on the heterogeneity of the effectiveness of microcredit by Banerjee et al (2018), Gung ho entrepreneurs paper.
Instead, I propose that in our case, it is much more informative to look at current market data on (a) how much remote employed software engineers earn, (b) what they need to learn in order to get these jobs.
To give you some numbers, this comprehensive stackoverflow survey with 100.000 respondents from 2018 reveals that, amongst the 55% who enrolled in a coding bootcamp without already having a jobs as developers, 71.5% found jobs as professional developers within 6 months (n=6652).
With that said, we make several assumptions in the CEA and I’d love to get informed critiques of those assumptions so we can adjust and change them to be more realistic. We’ve tried our best to find good data but that itself takes time and a lot of effort. We are in the process of rolling out survey of former students and of working professionals to figure out both counter factual earnings of comparable students from earlier years from the same schools and from people who work as remote engineers. Our current estimates are in the range $300-$600/month and are based on informal surveying in both countries. Anecdotally, the ones who do get jobs have often learn the frameworks and languages themselves using pirated versions of Udemy or similar sites (even if they have CS degrees).
However, given that US software engineering entry salaries are at $12,500/month, there’s clearly ample room for potential.
I don’t think it’s a It’s not a matter of whether some of the brightest talents in Africa can compete with these 6-figure position jobs. It’s a matter of asking “what does it take” for them to get there.
Thank you for keeping the conversation going! It’s very helpful as I’m forced to flesh out my arguments. This will help prepare a long form post at some point later on!:)
Thank you for pointing it out. I was sloppy in my wording!:)
As I mentioned earlier, I was not able to find any relevant studies with transferable insights, unfortunately. There is ample literature on primary school or secondary school interventions, or general vocational training programmes. But there’s non that
Target digital remote employment in low income counties (simply because that wasn’t feasible from an infrastructure point of view)
Do NOT target those who are already unemployed.
To be more specific. The studies you cite here are simply not relevant. It’s as if I come and suggest medical intervention X to combat diseases, and you find study A, B and C from 10 years back that used intervention Y to also combat diseases. On a very superficial level they may seem similar in the same way studying at Harvard university is similar to studying at Södertörn university. But they are hardly particularly useful in producing useful proxies for cost effectiveness of our particular intervention.
First of all, they are NOT digital skills programs. And as an aside, this type of intervention wasn’t even possible to do just 4-5 years ago because the internet infrastructure or otherwise just didn’t exist in Kenya or Ethiopia back then.
Second they are targeting currently unemployed youth or less educated youth. We do not target this group. Our intervention targets the upper segment of highly talented individuals—and most of which won’t have the resources or access to the top quality training needed to succeed.
Third, the amount of resources invested is comparatively low relative to ours. Our intervention is definitely not as scalable as some of these programs (that are intended to scale) and we instead focus on intervention targeting efficiency. That means we invest a lot more per individual and we invest much more in selection of whom we support. This is inspired by on existing research on the heterogeneity of the effectiveness of microcredit by Banerjee et al (2018), Gung ho entrepreneurs paper.
Instead, I propose that in our case, it is much more informative to look at current market data on (a) how much remote employed software engineers earn, (b) what they need to learn in order to get these jobs.
To give you some numbers, this comprehensive stackoverflow survey with 100.000 respondents from 2018 reveals that, amongst the 55% who enrolled in a coding bootcamp without already having a jobs as developers, 71.5% found jobs as professional developers within 6 months (n=6652).
With that said, we make several assumptions in the CEA and I’d love to get informed critiques of those assumptions so we can adjust and change them to be more realistic. We’ve tried our best to find good data but that itself takes time and a lot of effort. We are in the process of rolling out survey of former students and of working professionals to figure out both counter factual earnings of comparable students from earlier years from the same schools and from people who work as remote engineers. Our current estimates are in the range $300-$600/month and are based on informal surveying in both countries. Anecdotally, the ones who do get jobs have often learn the frameworks and languages themselves using pirated versions of Udemy or similar sites (even if they have CS degrees).
However, given that US software engineering entry salaries are at $12,500/month, there’s clearly ample room for potential.
I don’t think it’s a It’s not a matter of whether some of the brightest talents in Africa can compete with these 6-figure position jobs. It’s a matter of asking “what does it take” for them to get there.
Thank you for keeping the conversation going! It’s very helpful as I’m forced to flesh out my arguments. This will help prepare a long form post at some point later on!:)
Best Simon