Manara is a social impact startup whose mission is to unlock human potential and diversify the global tech sector while uplifting the economies of the Middle East & North Africa (MENA), with a focus on Palestine and women.
We are looking for a frontend engineer to help us build our next-gen platform. Imagine a blend of Udacity, Grammarly, LinkedIn, and Stack Overflow designed for this region.
Hi, no worries, thanks for asking! Curious what you’re seeing are the salary bands in competitive low-cost locations?
We’re currently most familiar with the bands in Palestine, Egypt, Jordan, and UAE. What we’re seeing there varies widely, but can probably be thought of as breaking down into two separate scales/salary bands: those paid by local companies and by international companies sourcing talent in the region primarily for affordability, and those paid by international companies sourcing talent in the region primarily because they need strong engineers.
In the former, the band for junior engineers straight out of college with no work experience is ~$800-$1800/month. In the latter, it’s $2500-$4500/month. For senior engineers, in the former it’s around $5k/month and in the latter it’s $6k-$10k/month.
Of course startups sometimes seek strong talent but can’t afford the range, so they may pay on the lower end but make up for it with equity, career growth, etc.
I am not the original commenter, but compensation was also my first thought and worry. Regardless, I still filled out the form and look forward to speaking to someone from your team.
The reality is that hiring is hard. It is doubly hard when you don't have a name brand company, and doubly hard again when you are not VC-backed and can't pay salaries competitive to those companies.
We're a tech company on our way to becoming independently owned again (after a small angel round many years ago), and bootstrap our growth according to revenue. This fact leads us to be very fiscally conservative (especially for a startup). A consistent pain point for us has been the fact that we need engineers to take on larger (or more) projects, but we can't afford them (they'd cost more than a project would bring), but we also can't take on these projects without more engineers, so we've been in a holding pattern unwilling to pull the trigger for quite awhile.
I presume this is not a new story to you. This situation is the only reason we cannot hire locally, we literally cannot afford it.
Thanks for sharing that. It is indeed really hard - and as startup founders, we understand! Just wanted to clarify that many of our engineers do want to work on startups with interesting missions… what matters most ultimately to them (and to us) is the team they’ll work with and the experience they'll get.
Laila is personally meeting with all of our potential new partners because we really care about understanding your customers’ needs & making sure that our solution addresses them. Will be interesting for you to discuss this with her. (Assuming you booked a call? You should have received an invite after you filled out the form.)
oh yeah, we've heard about that recently from a Greek friend! Thankfully it seems like the Greek language is the only one in which our name has a weird meaning (at least so far), and hopefully it’s not offensive? Manara means “lighthouse” in Arabic. We did lots of user testing with various name options and this one was most positively perceived in Europe, North America, and MENA. Now we just need to get really great SEO to show up at the top of search results :)
The Greek is probably not a problem, nobody really uses that word any more (it's as dated as "groovy" is in English). Hell, the artist is the first thing that came to my mind, aloukissas is just an old-fashioned elderly gentleman.
Oh man that's too bad! We have one partner in Italy so far (Bending Spoons) and they didn't mention this to us though... maybe that's a good sign, or maybe they were too embarrassed!
It has to be said Milo Manara is a boomer and his popularity somewhat declined in the 2000s. Nowadays even people who are familiar with his mainstream output (from ads to cartoons made with Adriano Celentano) don't necessarily know his name or the fact that he became famous with erotic comics in late-70s/mid-80s. I would not expect anybody under 30 to be familiar with his name.
It is true that the artist is very famous and has even done some tech-related work in the past (I think he designed boxes for GPUs or modems, I forgot), but it's not like you risk being confused.
They (the co-founder Francesco Patarnello to be precise) were really wonderful to speak with & work with. They seem to have done a lot to grow the entrepreneurship & developer ecosystem in Italy, and are growing fast enough to need to hire from abroad now. They also have a really high bar for who they hire. Their process starts off with a logic test (nothing related to coding) which takes more than a day to complete.
(Curious about that by the way, since we have only seen one other company - Klarna - start with a logic test. Do you know if this is common? Is it an effective screening approach? In the USA people are sometimes wary of how standardized tests of this type may impact untraditional candidates in particular)
But back to your point - that name issue is really disappointing. We'll have to put some more thought into it but my first reaction is to do a little more polling to see how widespread this association is in our primary markets (MENA and countries that do a lot of hiring of software engineers, so mainly USA, Germany, Poland, Sweden, UK, Canada, Australia, etc)
Regarding the logic test: here it's not common at all (especially outside of programming roles, it could be argued that most programming questions are logic tests), but apparently there are recruiting firms that employ them along with other even more dubious tools like psychometric questions to gauge the ability work in teams.
Italy isn't a major source of software engineering positions and has systemic issues with companies being too small and unwilling to invest / partner with others / grow. My (non-quantitative) opinion is that that sort of approach doesn't work that well - hiring is far from a solved problem - but is likely less discriminatory than whatever hunch-based interview processes would otherwise be in place. I'd describe it as progressive-in-context.
Interesting. I didn't think of it this way previously, but after hearing your description, I'll interpret it a positive sign of their culture / forward-thinkingness.
And yes, we'll need to think more about the SEO strategy! What terms do you think people would use to search for us? When we explored this before choosing the name (and we were unaware of the association so we didn't even notice the first result) we figured that someone would enter "Manara developers" or "Manara engineers" if they didn't find us immediately when searching "Manara"
Thank you! And totally, the region's entrepreneurship scene is growing quickly. Our current YC batch has at least 5 companies from MENA. We're excited to be a part of (and unlock) this growth.
Hi! Ahlan! Azul! Really appreciate your bringing these issues up.
Regarding payments, this has been coming up and we’ll need to pick your brain as we develop solutions. For now we are managing payments for companies that hire remotely by wire transferring the funds ourselves. In other words, the companies send the money to our US entity and then we do the transfer. We’ve also been looking at https://pilot.co/https://www.boundlesshq.com/ and https://www.letsdeel.com/. Are you familiar with those? What do you think? Btw Pilot is also a YC company that initially planned to be a full-time remote work marketplace, but switched to facilitating payments because there was such a big need there.
You’re right of course that in North Africa (the Maghreb) many don’t speak Arabic nor identify as Arab. When we call it “the Middle East and North Africa,” we also get feedback that it’s inaccurate. I wish there were a better word! We’ll keep iterating until we get it right.
PS: My co-founder Iliana has spent lots of time in Morocco and some in Algeria… and can’t wait to go back! She speaks some darija… and picked up a few words of Berber. :)
>Regarding payments, this has been coming up and we’ll need to pick your brain as we develop solutions.
My contact information is in my profile. I'll forward to some people I know who had several problems with that. The last one I talked with worked with a company in the U.K. with the restriction the "worker" had to have a bank account in their country of residence, not in any other country. Explanations on exchange rates below. They know more about this, and know more people in that situation.
What I also meant by payment problems is the disparity between the conversion rates in banks and on the streets. The disparity can be huge, so if you wire X euros to someone's bank account, it is automatically converted to the local currency at rate X and they get Y, when they could get 1.6Y or 1.7Y (60% or 70%) more on the streets. A 70% delta is a lot.
Some networks have developed to enable people to get the full "street value" of their money.
>When we call it “the Middle East and North Africa,” we also get feedback that it’s inaccurate.
Well, as someone in Algeria, if I were looking for work and visited the site and it said: "You're in North Africa", that's a fact of geography. It said "Hire the best Arab software engineers", I'll think "I'll forward the link to Arab software engineers I know since they're specific".
There are a lot of competitions, hackathons, or events that use this terminology, and I know many very talented people who do not participate because it's not for them. They'd rather go to another continent, and they do, where their ethnicity is acknowledged than submit a form that contains an inaccuracy that perpetuates a denial they've been facing for a long time. You are trying to optimize for brevity and clarity and you have to put something on the page, and I get that. I'm just saying and I think that you have lived through enough exclusion and non representativity that you understand that a message on a landing page that excludes you defacto kind of stings.
>PS: My co-founder Iliana has spent lots of time in Morocco and some in Algeria… and can’t wait to go back! She speaks some darija… and picked up a few words of Berber. :)
Well, I don't need to tell you that you are welcome. Hit me up if you are around. You might find the students groups to be interesting. In the meantime, I'll float the site around.
EDIT0: I sent it to someone who has a group. They sent the following:
> Them: Too bad, I'm an infrastructure engineer.
They're specialized in "Microsoft, VMware, IT infrastructures, etc."
EDIT1: Sent it to the admin of a group of around 7.4K engineers and technicians (not just software). Some might be interested and share it to their networks.
Hi, Iliana responding this time. I can’t emphasize how much we appreciate your feedback! You’re totally correct about the word “Arab” - we should’ve caught that and am glad you brought it to our attention.
The situation with the exchange rate in Algeria is a real problem. Like you said, the banks’ exchange rate is much lower than it should be. When I was there I spent a day with a friend’s friend who runs a side business exchanging money, so I saw some of what this looks like on the ground. I’ll reach out now to pick your brain more on this topic.
Thank you again for your feedback & for spreading the word! So grateful.
You're welcome. I just sent the link to someone who can be very useful: he has experience working in freelance and probably can share many problems from the field. He also has lead a youth organization here and placed many people in internships and positions in companies all over the world, has been around, and has a deeper understanding of the several hurdles, from visas to payment problems.
> What I also meant by payment problems is the disparity between the conversion rates in banks and on the streets.
This is also a problem where I live (Nigeria).
It's exhausting explaining black/parallel currency markets to clients/employers in countries with more stable currencies. Way too often I get the knee-jerk reaction that I'm doing something shady/illegal.
Hi @filleduchaos, a Nigerian here, pls, if you don't mind could give few pointers on how you scored your first few foreign jobs. I've sent out so many resumes and cold emails, I have as many rejection letters to prove so. I know there's sth I'm not doing well. Currently studying all sorts of Algo books. Thank you
The Jan threads are now closed (HN threads close to new comments after 2 weeks) but there will be another one on Feb 1. No guarantees, of course, but people definitely get work that way.
This is what Manara candidates often have experienced too, even when they're excellent. It can be very hard to get the attention of tech companies if you're applying from a country they don't usually work with, especially as a junior engineer. Some companies get 2k applications/role so the resumes go into an automated system to be processed.
Manara solves this problem by setting up partnerships with companies for our candidates. Have you thought about joining Andela?
I know, right?! People who haven't experienced it don't get it. I think the knee-jerk reaction impacts Nigerians especially unfortunately. (My parents used to live in Nigeria and when my dad tried to buy something on eBay, they froze his account. Later when he lived in Venezuela, people were more sympathetic.)
So are there any solutions we should be looking into beyond cash transfers / Western Union? Are any startups working on this problem?
There's https://sendcash.africa - it uses cryptocurrency to facilitate transfers to (Nigerian and Ghanaian, but there are plans to expand throughout West Africa and beyond) bank accounts from anywhere. It's powered by Buycoins (YC S18) - maybe you could look into working with them?
Thank you! Will check in with them when we're exploring more robust payment solutions. Hopefully by then they'll have solved this problem & expanded to North Africa etc...
It fluctuates depending on how far up its own behind the central bank has its head, but usually isn't too bad - it can stretch out to ~1.5x while the official "market" is in denial, but usually stabilises at about 1.2x to 1.3x depending on currency and source.
I've settled on maintaining a domiciliary bank account (denominated in USD) - SWIFT transfers take a few business days, but that's not a problem for steady income and clients can usually be persuaded to eat or split the fees. Plus it's easier to tell people I prefer to receive and hold USD than to explain the state of the economy. Also WorldRemit recently added same-day direct-to-bank deposits of USD in Nigeria-based USD-denominated accounts; I've only received money that way a couple of times though.
I appreciate these public comments on logistics issues like exchange rate and the sharing of service providers very much. As a freelancer in Viet Nam, this came up multiple times whilst I started out and even though my rate delta was only about 20-25%, that was already something.
Manara is a social impact startup whose mission is to unlock human potential and diversify the global tech sector while uplifting the economies of the Middle East & North Africa (MENA), with a focus on Palestine and women.
We are looking for a frontend engineer to help us build our next-gen platform. Imagine a blend of Udacity, Grammarly, LinkedIn, and Stack Overflow designed for this region.
Apply at: https://manara.breezy.hr/p/1cebbb12d138