Show notes
This is the 14th episode of HackerRank Radio, a podcast for engineering leaders interested in solving developers’ toughest problems today: Hiring the right developers. Hosted by Vivek Ravisankar (CEO & Co-founder, HackerRank). You can subscribe to us on iTunes and Google Play. One of our favorite discussion topics at HackerRank is the widely debated talent shortage. Is there a real lack of tech talent in the market? Or are we missing qualified candidates when we source? The latter can certainly be true, especially if you limit your talent pool to your backyard. But casting a wider net isn’t always a go-to strategy for most companies. Andela is on a mission to change that. The company specializes in engineering-as-a-service and enables organizations to accelerate their product roadmap. How? By building globally distributed engineering teams with Africa’s top software developers. It may not be the first place you think of when sourcing developer talent, but the continent is home to an up and coming, fast-growing tech scene. In our latest episode of HackerRank Radio, our CEO and Cofounder Vivek Ravisankar spoke with Jeremy Johnson, CEO and Cofounder of Andela. The two dive into everything from the tech talent shortage, the experimental advantage startups have, and the industry shift to building distributed teams. Listen to the episode or skim through the transcript below. Jump ahead: The birth of Andela Hiring candidates with non-traditional backgrounds Overcoming inherent bias The future of work: Industry shift to distributed teams Building trust-based human relationships What’s next for Andela? Vivek: Welcome to HackerRank Radio episode 14. Today’s guest is at the forefront of putting Africa’s developer talent or the map. Andela helps companies build distributed engineering teams with Africa’s top software developers. I have the pleasure of speaking with their CEO and Cofounder Jeremy Johnson. Welcome, Jeremy. Jeremy: Thanks Vivek. It’s great to be here. Thank you for having me. Vivek: Good. How’s it going? Jeremy: It’s going really well. It’s going really well. Vivek: Okay. Are you excited to be at this podcast? Jeremy: Yes, I’m excited. Of course. We’re big HackerRank fans in general. Vivek: That is good. That is, by the way, for all the listeners that was not planted that was totally all Jeremy. I gave a quick intro about Adela but just like a couple of lines, maybe would love to get an overview of about you, about Andela. If you can get started. Jeremy: Yeah, of course. So, you know, my background has been in the technology space essentially since college, I after winning a business plan competition dropped out of Princeton to start a company designed to try to facilitate the college admissions process for students from underrepresented high schools around the US. And that came out of growing up in Trenton, New Jersey, and being sort of pulled between two worlds between Trenton and Princeton growing up. I’ve stayed in and around that space for most of my life in that sort of education technology vertical. I co-founded a company called 2U after that, which we took public in 2014. I was invited at the beginning of 2014 in January out to Nairobi to give a talk for the MasterCard Foundation. That kicked off a series of conversations, in large part, around why there was so little business interaction between the tech ecosystems that were growing rapidly across the continent of Africa and the more established and visible ones in the US, like, you know, Silicon Valley and you know by that point New York as well. And, you know, rapidly expanding across the, across the country. And so, as that progressed and we started to dig in we realized something that we thought was pretty profound, but also really simple, and that’s that aptitude and cognitive ability are completely evenly distributed around the world. You’ve probably heard the phrase talent is evenly distributed, opportunity is not. It’s one that we’ve spent a lot of time trying to help the world see. When you think about what happens in the tech world over the past. you know, five to 10 years you’ve seen a pretty significant shift towards comfort with not needing everyone to be in the same location so distributed teams. Initially, it was remote and then distributed and if you believe that brilliance is evenly distributed, and you believe that you can quantify the output of engineers and therefore are comfortable with distributed teams, all of a sudden Africa becomes the most obvious thing in the world. It’s the youngest fastest-growing continent on the planet. You have a very large English-speaking population and you have a generation of young people that understand the impact technology can have and the smartest, most driven people wanting to be software developers. And that’s a very different phenomenon and set of circumstances than you’re going to find anywhere else in the world and it’s created I think a lot of the foundation for Andela’s success, you know, fast forward five years. Vivek: Yeah that’s a fascinating story. And it’s amazing that the reason why we started HackerRank was based on a very similar thesis, which is what we call ‘skill over pedigree.’ What matters is are you able to do the job versus which college did you go to, or which company you worked at before. I think what matters is do you have the skills to do the job or not. So it’s based on a very similar thesis. Walk us through your early days. The birth of Andela Jeremy: There were two separate streams that came together. One was that that conference and I was invited there by Christina Sass or co-founder and longtime president and I also had a friend and mentee who had gotten to know over the couple years before this, who was a young Nigerian entrepreneur, who reached out to me in the middle of my 2U days to ask for feedback on his prior startup, which was essentially trying to build a MOOC platform, a Massive Open Online Course platform, that was Africa focused. And You know, I met him for the first time in Europe was like, all right, this guy’s awesome. Well, I’m happy to help them whatever I can. And so we became friends. And when I got back from that trip to Nairobi, he happened to be coming through New York and had decided that the company wasn’t going to evolve the way that he was hoping it would. And so wanted to figure out what is going to do next and asked for advice and we sat down and I pitched him on the notion of thinking a little bit differently about how you connect extraordinary talent and potential talent into the global tech ecosystem, leveraging a very like high-quality version of education technology. He and his co-founders, the previous company were like, that sounds super interesting. Yeah, we’ll give it a shot. And so, you know, the four of them, me, Christina decided to kick off a pilot and there’s six of us. And so it’s, it was a fascinating founding group because you one large number of co-founders, but also three from Africa and three from North America, and I think that was actually a critical part of really why Andela was able to find its footing on both continents early on. You know, two people from Nigeria one from Cameroon two from the United States and one from Canada, so it was a diverse cast of characters. We decided to pilot an experiment in Lagos in mid-2014 where we would see basically what would happen if you were to offer to pay people to become software developers or better software developers. And with no website, we ended up getting, through Twitter alone, 700 applicants for four spots. And we thought it was a fluke. Like what’s going on here? So we decided to run it again and this time we added in basic aptitude test and this time around, still no website, looking for 20 people we end up with 2400 applicants. But what was even more interesting was the testing service we were working with at the time called us a couple of days in and they were like, what are you guys doing? It was almost frantic, and we said, what are you talking about? And they said, we’ve 1) Never had so many people apply for a job and 2) of those applicants 42 are in the top 2% aptitude and problem-solving of any people on the planet. Vivek: Wow. Jeremy: And we looked at each other and realized that this was not a fluke. And this is something we had to do that had to exist in the world. And, you know, from there, now five years in we’ve had over 150,000 applicants to Andela. We’ve accepted 0.7% and we are Africa’s most elite engineering organization. We’re a company now of a little over 1400 developers spread across six countries in Africa. And, you know, continuing to grow very rapidly. Vivek: Yeah. Wow, that’s a fascinating story. It’s amazing. I’ve always been amazed by how really great companies start off almost as I was an experiment. ‘Oh, we’ll just try and see where it goes.’ And then it sort of like balloons because you get like so much demand inbound and then you say, ‘oh, wow, like we’ve actually created something real.’ This is very, very similar. For us, like, you know, Hari and I, my co-founder, we went to the same college and this was really like a side project that we got started. Until like companies started to use us a lot more and we decided, ‘okay, you know what we really need to quit and do this full time.’ It’s pretty amazing to see your story arc very, very similar to that. Jeremy: Yeah, that’s the birth of many great things and I think it actually speaks to one of the key advantages that startups have is that you’re just able to test things in ways that you wouldn’t be able to in a much larger, more established organization or they’re just really structurally difficult. The bigger, you get the harder it is to experiment. And startups are able to just in some ways just kind of see how the world responds to things in a much more agile way. And as a result of it. You got the chance to test things that would otherwise sound crazy to a number of smart people and sometimes you’re right. Hiring candidates with non-traditional backgrounds Vivek: Yeah, absolutely. So as you continue to grow from the early hundreds of applicants to now you have like over 1400 people in staff, so you have like hundreds of thousands of applicants. I’m assuming a lot or maybe a majority of them don’t have prior computer science background or coding skills. Jeremy: It’s a bit more varied at this point. We don’t require prior experience. We don’t require a college or high school degree, but there’s a massive amount of self-selection. I think one of the things that the traditional tech world gets, you know, fundamentally wrong, and there are a few of these, but about Africa, is just how much existing talent there already is. In every major urban area across the continent, you have significant and growing tech ecosystems that are yes young, but they feel like New York in 2008, you know it is still very exciting and bustling and they’re cool things happening. And I feel like the world generally misses that and so there is a lot of talent that doesn’t have a way to show the world just how good they are because the world doesn’t have a good way of trying to look for and evaluate them. And so a lot of what Andela ends up doing in terms of breaking down the barriers between like opportunity and brilliance, like the barriers that separate them, is relatively straightforward. Things like how do you attract incredible talent, how do you then assess really effectively? How do you then help nurture that talent and then provide the kind of support and oversight that a global team needs to be able to scale effectively? Because building and managing distributed teams is hard. You know, we make those things a lot simpler for both companies and engineers. So when a company is thinking about how am I going to scale? How am I going to advance this product roadmap anywhere near as fast as I need to? We just become the most effective option possible. Vivek: Yeah no absolutely, totally get it. But when you’re getting these applicants who obviously don’t fit into the traditional mold of ‘I did my computer science degree’ or ‘I went and worked at this company’ you’re really betting a lot on their potential to grow and develop and learn which if you get it right. It’s going to be like a giant upside like a 10X upside. But if you factor it wrong, it’s going to be a disaster or a pretty bad outcome. What have you learned over the course of like five or six years on the ability to spot potential when you don’t have the relevant experience and candidates? Jeremy: You know, it’s been an evolutionary journey. We obviously knew early on things like aptitude and problem-solving ability were going to be important. We knew that communication would matter but we certainly didn’t know how much, but we also learned a lot along the way. An example of something that I was really surprised by, although in retrospect makes complete sense, was looking early on, at how much people demonstrated that they just found the notion of solving problems with technology interesting. And so, not how good they were at it at the moment, but how interesting they found it. And what we realized was that over even a relatively short span of time the people that found coding interesting, even if they weren’t quite as like as high like output from an aptitude standpoint, they were, long term, going to end up being the best developers. So does intelligence matter? Of course. But whether you are in the top 2% or top 1% turned out to matter a lot less. Whether you are really interested in software development and solving problems with technology–that matters immensely. And it’s going to be wildly deterministic in terms of your overall likelihood of success. Another thing that we found that I also was really surprised by but in retrospect makes total sense: someone’s ability to take feedback directly corresponds to their ability to learn. So if you immediately respond to feedback with how are you going to argue against it then it, it almost doesn’t matter how smart you are. And in fact, there can be a little bit of an inverse correlation, because the smarter you are, the more you’re able to argue against feedback effectively as opposed to listening to it. And the people that actually grow the fastest are the ones that get critical feedback and think to themselves, how could that possibly be true and if it is true what can I learn from it? If you meet people like that, they are the ones that are going to be able to leverage a learning experience to dramatically alter their career path and life and it’s just awesome to see. Vivek: Yeah that is that is definitely pretty, pretty cool. So do you do incorporate this part of this point of understanding if they will respond to feedback and others in your interview process? Have you added this to the rubric? Jeremy: We do in all sorts of ways. We now have over 60 different assessment criteria that we’re looking at, and measuring each in multiple ways. And so it started off as a very simple, simple process and has become significantly more complex over time. Overcoming inherent bias Vivek: Interesting. Interesting. Now let’s maybe, maybe we can move to the other side, which is the companies. Can you talk to me about your early your first few customers? How did you convince them to say, hey, we have an amazing pool of software developers who we have vetted, we have screened. They’re working and now you need to outsource your projects, there’s going to be NDA that’s going to be like, you know, all sorts of things—confidential code. Like this probably, like a lot of challenges you might have faced until you crossed the threshold of ‘Okay enough companies use us and its pretty common.’ Can you talk to me about your early days on the company side? How did you convince them? Jeremy: Yeah. The short version is it was really tough. In the early days. It wasn’t just convincing them that the sy…
Full show notes at the publisher 
Our TOPPODCAST Picks 
Stay Connected
