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Comment by aberkowitz | Hacker News Reader

I spent a year in Ghana in 2017, and I had the pleasure of meeting numerous software engineers and tech entrepreneurs who were doing extremely high quality work for 1-2k USD / month (if they were lucky). Having companies like twitter on the African continent will provide massive economic opportunity, and social mobility.

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Any recommendations on places to visit and stay for someone thinking of spending a few months in Africa to better understand the region? Likely this summer/fall (Ghana, Cote d'Ivoire, Nigeria, Rwanda, and Ethiopia are high on my list as I've done minimal traveling in the region outside the south).

You could honestly spend a month in any of those countries, and barely scratch the surface of all the cultures, people, and ecosystems. I would highly recommend Ghana as a base, due to its stability, infrastructure, and low corruption. If you send me an email (link in profile), I'd be happy to connect you with interesting people in most of the countries you listed as well as Kenya.

Thanks for the offer, I'll send you an email shortly!

Depends on what you want to do. There are waterfalls, national parks, mini safaris, night clubs, beaches, culinary festivals and art events. There is always something going on.

If you'd like to visit Lagos, shoot me an email (me at [username] dot com) and I can send you some tips/places you might be interested in.

(I think the weirdest tip I have about Lagos is that it's actually a decent whale-watching spot. We get humpback whales in particular from May-ish to September-ish, much more in the latter months.)

Thanks, shot you an email and can't wait to do some whale watching!

One of the big problems you tend to run in with these kind of things are visa regulations; turns out that getting a work visa for a lot of these countries can actually be harder than getting one for a Western country. Especially if you're "just a guy" rather than a big company (i.e. me) it's pretty hard.

I live in Indonesia on the "series of tourist visas" work-around. Getting a work visa is hard because I don't have an Indonesian employer to sponsor me or the money to start a proper entrepreneur visa. There are probably some work-around available by having an Indonesian found the company and "employ" me, but it's all very iffy and quickly becomes complex. When I looked at options a few years ago something similar applied to most countries.

It's their country and they can do what they want, but it seems to me that it's kind of a missed opportunity.

1-2k/mo will get you a Dutch person, too. Those are not bad wages.

Very much doubt that. Glassdoor has average base pay for SW engineer in Amsterdam at $61k/year https://www.glassdoor.com/Salaries/amsterdam-software-engine...

Well, you have to offset the cost of living too.

Under 2k/mo translates to an annual earnings around 12-15k (when you account for employee overhead) which is somewhere between 6.15-7.69/hr - even if we allow for the full 2k to be an actual employee earning you're still only looking at 11.79/hr which isn't nothing but is still absolute peanuts for software developers in euros. I guess, going by median salary, you'd probably be able to snag two devs in Belarus[1] for that much?

1. https://www.payscale.com/research/BY/Job=Software_Developer/...

As my first programming job as a junior in UK just few years ago I was paid £18k/year, so £1500 a month(so about 2K USD).

That's for a very fresh out of uni junior outside of London though. You'd struggle to find someone willing to work for that nowadays.

Isn't the minimum wager higher than that? Maybe you are mixing something up and are talking about after tax income.

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