IT industry in jordan and a Developer’s Uproar
By Omar AbdelhaqIT industry in Jordan is extremely prosperous, and brings in good money, any one who denies such a thing, will sure be a software house owner, or a manager who doesn’t want his employees to rebel on him/her because of the lousy salaries they get!
We (Jordanian Developers) start as junior developers getting paid in between a range of 180 and 350 JODs (Jordanian Dinars) in the best case, while on the other hand the company itself that hires you brings in hundreds of thousands of JODs, and yet some of them claim that they aren’t profiting at all! Well, were all this money is going? Do you want to convince me that companies which write proposals that are a million US Dollars worth or more, for big institutes, entities or organizations, and don’t accept projects that are less than 10,000 $ worth, can’t pay us more?
On the other hand, when it comes to the business hours, the most common is 8:30 am to 6:30 pm 5 days a week, or 9:00 am to 5:00 pm 6 days a week, and these are the official hours, not mentioning the extra hours. What are the extra hours? Here we come into a crossing between different scenarios; the first one is when you are working in small company, not more than 50 employees, you know everyone and everyone knows you, the relation is so close between you and any other person, sometimes a project manager or a team leader pops out asking you while you were about to pack and go home “can you stay and finish up this bug we are facing, we need to have it done before tomorrow morning, because we have a deployment?” and sure you will not refuse when you face such a nice and polite way of asking, specially if you were a dedicated person, that feel that the project you are working on is your responsibility, and they continue by saying “it won’t take more than half an hour from you”, while it could actually span over 4 or 5 hours! Not paid. Other scenarios are whatever that you can imagine, I could imagine someone being asked rudely to stay and work! You tell me.
Software companies are increasing in number, and I mean by those, the companies that make profit by selling applications, web or desktop. Yet we aren’t seeing much of a challenge in working in such companies cause the most experience you can get of those is becoming a professional web developer, but were is the experience that some people like me are seeking, are to be found? What I would like to find is, internet security related software developed by us (the Jordanian developers), wireless networking solutions that combines hardware software, and maybe new wireless security standards! All of these are possible, and they aren’t hard to do, yet there’s no real R&D going on, and can’t find someone to support us. All of what the capital holders care about is how to increase their wealth easily, and occupy the largest amount of the market share.
The petroleum of Jordan is its man power, having its petroleum better than any, is what could raise a flag saying we are Jordanians, and we are the ones who rule the software industry in the Middle East (for a starter, and maybe the whole world later). The problem is there isn’t a person willing to take a step ahead, or take an initiative to start thinking about software, hardware, or telecommunication technologies that don’t exist in the Middle East, and say we must be the ones that bring this forward one step ahead, they just go and imitate what other peers from software vendors do. You might say that I’m wrong here, in the manner that we have a very good telecommunication basis, and the technologies are rising, but if you want the real thing, let’s take VOIP (Voice Over IP) for an example. VOIP have been used in USA and other European countries for over the last 7 or more years, and till now we don’t have an official VOIP service provider in the Middle East, or let’s say in Jordan. Maybe the Telecommunication Regulations are strict, but they could be for our good, and as long as we are TRYING to catch up with technology after seeing it becoming fruitful in other countries, we will stay as we are today, dangling from the end of the technology dinosaur’s tail!
Being up to the challenge, and walking the long way towards success, is what each one of us should think about, think about how can we make history, not make money. Knowledge comes first, and money will follow. That’s merely my humble opinion, but it doesn’t mean that money is not a goal, because life needs are enormous, and without money we can’t live.
March 11th, 2006 at 10:33 pm
Great things are written here, in addition to that we can see software house owners and business solutions company owners asking the new IT, CS and MIS graduates to sign a minimu of three years contract to work with them and also to pay the company an amount between 2000 - 3000 JODs if they want to quit work.
Where can we go (Fresh Graduates)?
March 11th, 2006 at 10:37 pm
Another topic to raise here which is the lack of experience and the weak judgement of HR personnels and managers in companies while interviewing new fresh employees where managers go for exams brought fresh from the united states and most of them do not know what indicators are to be tested within this exam.
March 11th, 2006 at 10:45 pm
Rushing again…..
There are no rules or standards that control these managers and business owners while selecting new employees and allocating salaries. unlike Engineers where the minimum salary for an engineer is 220 or near it.
Another important thing which is companies hiring guys with American passports (Blue eyes experience) and giving them double and sometimes even triple the amount of the salary of a local graduate. come on people these with American passports are not different than us, on the contrary we have experience in the local market more than them and we have better personalities than them.
March 11th, 2006 at 11:22 pm
man! darabit 3al waja3,,, ill share some confidential info along with a personal experience,, and some suggestions later on, 6affashoni mn kol il balad ya man! well written dude,,
Arrivederci
March 12th, 2006 at 9:57 am
About building an R&D infrastructure in Jordan, we need three things:
1- Our government should do its best to solicite outside technological expertise and investment that can be fed into our universities and private businesses. It should also struggle to level the field for Jordanian entrepreneurs who are seeking to sell their products on the global market through trade aid agreements with other countries especially the US.
2- The top engineering schools in Jordan should ask for more funding from government and/or private businesses and they should feed this investment into a plan that seeks to achieve two things: the creation of new research fields in Jordan (the thing which implies having good graduate programs and not just undergraduate programs), and the enhancement of students’ academic skills.
3- Entrepreneurship in all fields of technology, not just information technology. It seems that we lack the entrepreneurship skills required to attract enough serious investors into putting their money in high risk fields considering the lack of a good local market and the presence of heavey competition on the global market.
March 12th, 2006 at 6:32 pm
you’re right with the R&D.
However I know one company that is innovating things with no care about the money.
March 13th, 2006 at 1:04 pm
Don’t Know what to say, but this is the case everywhere in our ArabWorld, I think we should move on to something else, Singing for example…
March 13th, 2006 at 3:27 pm
Pay scale, long working hours, lake of internal processes, no real R & D going …etc, are some of common problems in the software business at Jordan. Naturally, companies are seeking to maximum the profitability, and these problems came with such a new sector with young people in-charge.
On the other hand, software developers are highly paid compared to the public sector or even other industries in the private sector. In average, a good developer who has 5 – 6 experience is taking 800 – 900 JD. People who has 8 years or so are taking 1200 – 1400 JD.
One other major problem all of us (young Jordanian developers) are having is “the un-clear career path”. In most of the companies a 3 – 4 years experience developer is considered as a senior developer! Most of the companies are having a salary scale for 10 years of experience people and after that: nothing! All kind of questions are being asked and no one can answer them: What should I be after 10 years? Is it bad to still be a .NET developer by that time? Should I be a project manager and quit the technical side of the story?
In a banking industry for example: things are obvious, your career path, and salary scale has been setup since day one. In our industry, the future is all ours and this is what gives it the taste!
March 13th, 2006 at 9:53 pm
Guys …..!!!!!
Software house owners are really being run by young people and that could cause a big problem, cause some of you will say that 2 - 4 years of age difference between the developer and his manager or business owner will make things better because they will communicate better…..
NO NO NO….! This will make it much harder (not in all cases) because when there is an experienced mid age manager or business owner he will know what to do and how to act and the developer or the salesman or any employee will respect him more and more. and the manager his / her self have the ability to understand the needs of the young developer (employee).
March 14th, 2006 at 1:13 pm
Actually this is an important subject to discuss, what we are really need is a strategic planning for our industry and that will not come without a hard efforts from all of the young Jordanians developers, the problem is our market is small and service oriented yet not building a real industry, I suggest to establish our professional socity which can talk to goverment and assest in putting a strategic plan with goverment sector and academic institutes.
This idea is my dream of lets our professional return back from gulf, most of our guys are going there after 5-8 years experience here in Jordan since there is no place for thier experinces in Jordan.
also most of the guys are missing one of the important thing in thier life which is planning for himself, guys all if us must make our own plans.
April 6th, 2006 at 6:04 pm
i would like some information on the VOIP traffic and the interconnection rates for mobile and fixed lines in jordan ..will some1 please help me ..
i am thinking of opening a business in Jordan to deliver this sort of service and i need to make a cost estimation ..
September 19th, 2006 at 11:51 pm
I am worked in a bad IT company called ITG (Integrated Technology Group) this company relate to technology only by name,they only hire fresh graduates which ITG makes them sign a three year contract with very low salary (A company filled with poorly paid fresh graduates).
ITG earns millions for unplanned bad projects created by only 5 developers if an employee leaves company they sew him.
I hope you never end working with this company.