For the vast majority their names won’t ring any bells. Similarly, you won’t think of them when reading about HH Sheikh Mohammed’s new fund worth AED2 billion ($544 million) to finance the emirate’s future positioning as a fully innovative society.
However, the slightest hint of a misstep on their part could seriously hamper any innovation or an entrepreneurial endeavour, be it of fledgling businesses or the plans of the country’s leaders to implement long-term projects.
So who are they? They are software developers, the tech-savvy people responsible for eternally changing the way we live.
“Software is eating the world,” wrote Marc Andreessen, founder of Netscape, one of the first Internet browsers, five years ago.
More than a decade before publishing that article, a photo of him sitting barefoot on a golden throne on the front cover of TIME magazine’s ‘Golden Geeks’ issue had clearly signalled the growing influence of software developers in business.
Not only as a top-notch engineer, but also as a co-founder of Andreessen-Horowitz, a venture capital firm that has invested in Facebook, Groupon, Skype, Twitter, and many others, Andreessen confidently pointed out that more and more major businesses and industries were being run on software.
Borders’ 2001 fateful decision, based on its assumption that online book sales were non-strategic, to hand over its online business to Amazon was cited by Andreessen as one of the many examples of how software ate a traditional business.
With today’s products and services, organisations and even society as a whole relies on software. As a result, the demand for those who can code is extremely high.
Organisations of all kinds, from small businesses to governments, compete on the basis of the quality and the speed at which they write software, making developers their priority employees.
The question that arises is whether there is a golden throne for them in the UAE.
According to Dr. Ayesha Habeeb Al Mutawa, director of strategy and corporate excellence department at the Ministry of Health, there should be.
“Innovation is a must do in our organisation,” she says. “That’s why we need to open our minds and doors to different scales of talents. People work with well-established local consultants, but I want to identify local pioneers.”
Various initiatives from HH Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, the UAE’s Vice President and Prime Minister and Ruler of Dubai, have encouraged out-of-the-box thinking.
Launched in 2014, Smart Dubai is a smart city initiative focused on six main areas – smart life, smart transportation, smart society, smart economy, smart governance and smart environment. The crucial piece of legislation for the initiative’s implementation – the Dubai Open Data Law – was issued in mid-October last year. It removed the remaining legal obstacles for those interested in investing in the city’s digital economy.
Furthermore, the recently announced Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum Fund To Finance Innovation is designed to support projects dreamt up by local innovators in the seven sectors outlined in the emirate’s National Innovation Strategy – renewable energy, transport, education, health, technology, water and space.
A number of other factors have also contributed to the rising demand for software skills in the GCC region, such as the boom in online marketplaces for goods and services or the fast growth of mobile devices and the app economy. Most recently, Strategy& predicted that gaming alone is expected to grow from 19 percent to 22 percent of the digital media market from 2014 to 2019. The next phase might come with the Internet of Things (IoT), wearables and smart clothing.
Skilled coders will be the backbone of most, if not all, of these projects.
Dr. Al Mutawa, who is also the CEO of Innovation at the Ministry of Health, explains that a few achievements of the UAE’s smart healthcare systems unveiled in 2015 – the implementation of the National Unified Medical Records (NUMR) project and the latest international disease coding system – are just the tip of the iceberg.
“Today you need to be very agile, even at our level,” she says. “Today’s government organisations are different from before. There are high expectations, agility is key, if you don’t change, you will be changed.”
Dr. Al Mutawa is planning to roll out an automated system for idea generation this year by gathering a closed group of locally-based, young software developers – “freelancers or young talented individuals.”
The system should serve as a platform for creative people to propose innovative ideas and systems.
“We are starting at a smaller scale. It’s more of an engagement programme. It’s also an avenue to produce ideas that will influence,” she explains.
“For the starting point, we’d like to create a system that would offer a platform to help produce ideas that would contribute to the improvement of healthcare at large, but also our performance. It’s because if we perform well, the healthcare sector will automatically perform well.
“At the end of Q1 2016 we should be able to have a pilot version, not necessarily a prototype. We cannot cover the whole organisation at once, we [first] have to test it on few departments. We will roll it [out] in a smaller scale and then we will try it outside the ministry.”
Dr. Al Mutawa is not alone in her quest for skilled junior software engineers. The vast majority of employers – 45 percent – are looking for junior executives, according to the Bayt.com Job Index survey conducted by Dubai-based job website Bayt.com.
“We always see healthy demand for entry-level candidates in the GCC,” says Suhail Masri, vice president of sales at Bayt.com. “In the IT, technology, and engineering fields in particular, Bayt.com currently has more than 650 job openings that are targeting only fresh grads.
“After all, especially in the software engineering field where different companies use different programming languages and internal processes, many hiring managers often prefer to hire interns and fresh grads, because they can be trained accordingly.
“Of course, that is not to say that companies are not looking for candidates with work experience, because they are as well. It all depends on what each company wants.”
“There are two facets to it,” Dr. Al Mutawa says, of the reasons behind her decision. “Number one is the engagement of individuals who are very enthusiastic and very much exposed to the developments such as Cloud, the Internet of Things, and similar.
“They have that kind of drive, energy and enthusiasm to help us even if they haven’t done something similar. But they have the capability and the skills needed to develop something unique for us and then we can consider it an innovation.
“At the same time, from our perspective, with that engagement we will tap into a new market that we haven’t explored yet. Through a small network of those kind of individuals we can tap into the next, bigger circle because people know each other, they inter-connect nowadays.
“You need that level of flexibility also in the relationship as well as in the thinking process. You tap into one, they connect you to the next one, and then you create a product that is so unique.
“Eventually, the goal and the purpose of this engagement is to find a new way of doing things rather than going for a big consulting company.”
However, according to Bayt.com, employers of young coders face a particular set of challenges.
When hiring software engineers, Masri explains, employers often mistakenly focus too heavily on the technical part of the job, rather than evaluating the candidate’s ability to solve problems, think creatively, and work successfully as part of a team.
“Ability to learn, ability to teach others, and mentality. You don’t want someone who will keep knowledge all to himself,” Bassem Zohdy, a technical consultant, explained on Bayt.com Specialties, a professional Q&A platform, when asked what he looked for in a junior candidate.
Sajjad Kamal, a 26-year-old Dubai-born software developer, designed software for two of the city’s recent start-up success stories – Beneple, an HR software management platform, and AlemHealth, an online platform that connects hospitals in developing countries to a global network of medical professionals and services.
“There are people [software developers] who see a problem and then they are product-driven. That’s how innovation starts,” he says.
“They look and say: ‘These technologies exist, but let me take that problem and translate it into a product’. That’s what creates these big entrepreneurs.
“So it’s not just about problems and giving somebody steps to implement exactly that. When he follows these specific instructions, he’ll only go that far. But I feel there’s a massive lack in the market of people with experience in products. It’s growing and we need to develop these kind of developers.”
Casually dressed in a blue T-shirt and jeans, Kamal tells StartUp a day after his first meeting with Dr. Al Mutawa, that in addition to graduating at the University of Waterloo in Canada, one of the world’s best technology schools, the engagement on multiple tech projects sharpened his software skills.
Learning how to problem solve, design, and express himself via technology was an endless process of trial and error, Kamal says. It started with his first Dubai-based start-up – United, a telecom software company – which he developed at the age of 14, and continued with internships at Apple and BlackBerry during his studies.
“There is a big disconnect between training and theory and the reason is that there’s so much change every single day, especially in technology. Academia cannot adapt fast enough,” he says.
Wamda’s MENA Talent Competitiveness Index 2015 also pointed out to a mismatch between educational systems and job market needs in the region – the so-called “digital gap” between the demand and supply of ICT talent.
Partially it is due to the specific nature of the industry itself.
Mehmood Khan, a senior web programmer, explained on Bayt.com Specialties that staying on top of trends was the most challenging thing about being a programmer. “You need to be ready for all latest technologies that come out all the time, especially front-end technologies like responsive design. It is very challenging,” he said.
Dr. Al Mutawa is aware that giving young people a chance will require her to be patient. “When I want to involve university students, I need to allow them to experiment and make mistakes, and [I need to] be tolerant of that. That is the key of innovation,” she says.
“We need to allow things to run through tests before we say: ‘This is a perfect product.’ You need to allow some space for experimentation.”
Not many are willing to go through this learning curve.
Scorify is a Moroccan start-up that tests developers’ technical abilities and connects them with recruiters and companies. It launched in 2014 out of need on the part of the recruitment industry to overcome inefficiencies in the classical interview-based approach when hiring software engineers.
The platform has proved helpful to employers who look only for the perfect match for a certain technical role. They are now able to browse Scorify’s database of around 700 developers, which were all requested to complete an online assessment of their technical skills.
One corporate customer agreed to pay $500 to receive and review each developer’s profile, Wamda reported.
Another two were willing to pay $3,000 for a six-month unlimited-use subscription for candidate testing.
Not only does this risk-averse attitude, Kamal explains, hinder the development of local tech talent, but it affects the potential outcomes of their innovations. “If you look at the last five or six years of investments that have come out of Dubai, a lot of that has been on the e-commerce side and marketplaces,” he says.
“There are interesting angles to these businesses, but I feel that investors here don’t have enough experience and there’s a big resistance to inventions.
“It’s the trend of ‘Let’s get innovated, but let’s get 10 percent better’ while the Silicon Valley mindset is ‘Let’s get 10x better’. So it’s about whether you want to slowly start innovating and take just a little bit of risk to do that or you’ll say: “Let’s completely change the industry”.
Dr. Al Mutawa is well ahead of her time also when it comes to handling risk. “There is a risk in everything. Even when you go with well-established consultants, they might not meet all your requirements,” she says.
“There is a performance risk, a financial risk, and all kinds of risk. What we will plan ahead is the testing of any product. That will offer us an ability to mitigate any risk.
“When I go with a freelancer I will have more ability to test the prototype whereas with more established [companies] what I’ve seen most of the time is that there are restrictions to whatever they can offer. This young person can run around, experiment, and engage others.
“So the risk that lies in their ability to deliver on time can be overcome through earlier testing. The earlier we test whether this product is delivering what we want, the faster we can move ahead.
“Also, cost-wise, the risk can be controlled because this person doesn’t require an office. For example, I can bring him to sit in my office and do the work. I will have more oversight of what he or she is doing.”
Countless time management issues have often been associated with the work of tech developers, which Zaid Rabab’a, a software engineer, admits is the most challenging thing for all coders. “You can’t be 100 percent accurate when putting deadlines or estimating tasks,” he wrote on Bayt.com’s platform.
Electric Cloud, a US-based tech vendor, revealed after surveying 443 software developers that collectively all the non-design and non-coding tasks took up 22.4 hours per week, out of the 41.5 hours they worked in total.
Kamal explains that what matters is how developers are treated while working on projects. Rather than money, he says, most of them are motivated to create first-of-its-kind products or solve big societal problems.
In 2009 Kamal worked as a student programmer in Bangladesh to help set up special telemedicine kiosks in all branches of Grameen Bank, the Nobel Prize-winning micro-finance institution for poverty reduction. The idea was to enable the provision of basic healthcare services to the poor across the country, in addition to banking services.
“The guys in Silicon Valley try to solve high-cost problems, but in real life there are so many problems to be solved,” he says, adding that he has developed a keen interest in the healthcare sector after witnessing how technology can radically change people’s lives.
“The most basic things, like mobile phones, which we use for chatting, save people’s lives. There people would walk six hours to the closest pharmacy to find out it was closed. So just having that mobile phone bridges that gap.”
He explains that many find it difficult to work towards achieving these goals if they are considered as nine-to-five employees.
“We all need to do some convincing,” Dr. Al Mutawa concludes. “They also need to be tolerant to the amount of questioning.
“There is a desire to open up and engage young entrepreneurs, but there is a learning curve for them about how to engage with big corporations.
“It’s a mutual, two-way [learning] but I think it’s the very beginning of understanding how to involve young entrepreneurs in different ministries.
“We are testing, they are testing, and we need to allow that learning curve to happen.”