Working in Dubai

I came across this interesting and informative post about the reality of working in Dubai. I believe it would be interesting and useful for any Egyptian considering to work in Dubai, UAE or any other Arab gulf country.

ITI Grads

ITI, the Information Technology Institute in Egypt, started long before FCIS (Faculties of Information and Computer Sciences) were established in Egypt. The ITI gained a good reputation that some software companies in Egypt started explicitly mentioning in their job ads they wanted ITI grads. That's quite a testimony of the quality of ITI grads. Though not all ITI grads are excellent, yet many of them are rally good. To get the 9-month IT related training at ITI you do not have to be a graduate of Engineering (except for a specific branch at the ITI) nor FCIS, you can be a graduate of any faculty in Egypt provided you pass the tests and interviews for selection at the ITI.

Establishing the ITI was a strong step by the Egyptian government towards establishing a base of software developers in Egypt. Establishing FCIS faculties was another strong step towards achieving that same goal. The third step was providing condensed IT training to Egyptian university grads through scholarships. This ambitious program aimed at training five thousand Egyptian university graduates on software development and other IT technologies. Although such a program was not a tremendous success, yet it did produce many excellent software developers from among the large numbers that have graduated from it.

Being good in software development depends on your personal liking of programming. It also depends a lot on the level of your English language proficiency. There are many excellent developers who are graduates (or even students) of non-technical faculties, the Faculty of Commerce for instance, and have not even attended any of the training programs I just mentioned. Programming is a talent and depends on ones efforts end experience. Yet, from what I have witnessed, those who have strong academic background in software development usually win over those who do not have it. Exceptions do exist but in my opinion they are exceptions and not the norm.

Recruiting Software Developers in Egypt

Recruit FCI or FCIS graduates (preferably Computer Science department) (7asibat wa ma3lomat). Recruit from Ain Shams, Helwan then Cairo universities. You may also recruit Engineering graduates (Computer Department): Alexandria, Ain Shams then Cairo University. Those are the best to attempt for. Make aptitude and English tests. If you recruit from those places and do those tests you are SAFE. You never have to worry about developing software in Egypt as long as you've used this winning formula. Then do the technical tests and interviews. This can make you bring an excellent team.

You can provide them with short training and give them books to read on the technologies you will be using. Remember, they love to learn and continuously improve their skills. If they feel at any point in time during their work that their skill-set is not going any further, that they are not learning something new or not improving their technical skills or doing the same thing again and again, be sure they'll start looking for work at some other place.

Scrum Seminar at FCI

Last Saturday I delivered a short seminar about Scrum at FCI, Cairo University. Scrum is one of several agile methodologies for managing the development process of software projects. FCI is the Faculty of Computers and Information Sciences. The seminar started at 10:30 AM and took 1.5 hours. What I liked most about the audience, who were mainly third and fourth year students, was that I got intelligent questions from them during the seminar.

I'll try to upload the video of the seminar to Google Videos and link to it from here when I get hold of it.

Orbit Channel Visits

A team from the Orbit channel visited me today for an interview. That was an exciting thing! They asked me about what a blog is and about the blogging scene in Egypt. I then made a quick demo for them to show how I write in this HR Egypt blog of mine and publish what I write instantly. I'm looking forward to seeing the program on Orbit.