Andela, the developer outsourcing company, have made a landmark move to shut down its offices, and go completely remote. This decision was necessitated by the covid-19 pandemic biting hard into the culture of work.
It would be recalled that Andela had in May, laid off 135 members of its staffing capacity, and shut down its offices globally. In the wake of events, Andela will now allow applications from interested senior developers across Africa, rather than the six countries it was initially domiciled. Andela had, before now, been operating in Nigeria, Kenya, Uganda, Rwanda, Egypt, and Ghana.
The company which has its headquarters in New York has been helping companies build engineers that either work remotely, or are outsourced to physical offices; drawing strength and numbers from the talents spread across Africa. The company itself is going completely remote, shutting down its physical campuses and training centres.
Photo credits: Andela
The CEO of Andela, Jeremy Johnson, said he believes that the new model of operation would help the company extend it’s reach to more talents across Africa, increasing the number from the 250,000 that its earlier model has been able to achieve, to more than 500,000.
The company has tested this model, and gotten some experience from running the model in Ghana and Egypt, while accepting engineers from other cities apart from the capital of both countries. In this new model of operation, instead of employing developers into Andela, the developers would now be contacted on per job basis.
Andela was founded in 2014 by four professionals, and got funding from the Chan Zuckerberg initiative. The company has since trained hundreds of thousands of developers all-over Africa, and outsourced its trained engineers to different establishments all around the world. However, this change of operation is a major shift from the founding intentions of the company. Jeremy Johnson, to this, confirms that this decision was partly to reduce the cost of operation, and create soft landing from the harsh effects of the covid-19 pandemic. Johnson also stated that this move would help in locating developers that would have been restricted if they were required to work from a physical office.
The move to go completely remote would potentially give boost to job opportunities in the tech pool, and encourage tech companies to invest in their workforce, and subsequently giving room for more hands, thereby, creating more space for the millions of people that have lost jobs in the last few months.