Closing

Final thoughts

Solutions Ideas and wishes for the open challenges

This document is not only meant for software development engineers or students. We vulgarized some terms and tried to write for a broad audience, we hope to reach business owners, entrepreneurs, government representatives and anyone who can invest in this field.

If we want to be more optimistic, we can throw some ideas out there, hopefully the government look into them:

• Algeria has a national mission to ensure cyber security, and if the ministry of defense and its subsidiary are leading a lot of projects in this field. In the same time we see that Algeria's cybersecurity professionals find that Mandatory military service is one of the challenges, they even consider this one of the reasons to flee the country...

  Can we have a national program to involve students and professionals into this mission, checking the box on the national mandatory military service while developing and exploiting the potentials we have in the country. This idea is in place for many other countries.

• The black market is a threat to the national economy, however its rates are the standards for a lot for citizens (and tourists now). Algeria is putting a lot of efforts in regulating activities, but we still have a lot to do. We need more push for modernizing banking systems, more use of e-payment solutions, and having official currency exchange offices. Algerians should feel safe and comfortable to receive their wages in foreign companies, and to keep them in their bank accounts, then to be able to use them to pay for services.

A tbd...

Although we put a lot of effort, time, energy, emotions and some money in this work it remains incomplete, and it will never be.

Our work is based on data collected from a survey we pushed very hard on social media, and it only collected 517 entry. These entries are not all significant, we had to filter a lot of them. Our data lacked a lot of profile that would have been interesting to explore (QA engineers, more R&D Engineers, etc). Hopefully with this work we gained the community trust, and we have more inputs in our survey for 2025 (إن شاء الله).

Few hours after publishing the survey on February 1st, I knew I missed having some important questions to ask, I wish I designed the survey better and asked whether our participants work in public or private sectors, and in which industry... These two questions would add more value to our analysis.

We respected our participants, we did not add, remove or change questions after clicking the button to make it live.

We did not share raw data with non-authorized people and only kept it private to those who worked on it. We were asked to "sell" our raw data by some parties and we refused because we promised you, our participants that we won't do it.

We squeezed hours in our workdays and sacrificed our holidays and weekends to work on this job, so we took this long to perfect it, and get it to a respectable state.

We held ourselves from getting into rabbit holes and studying big topics and only talk about them from a software engineer, or more of a software developer point of view.

So, if you are reading this document from the future, be sure that we finally pulled the trigger and published this work after long months of work. If you still think that it's incomplete, you will be right, and the next sections might be for you.

Topics to explore more

TLDR; EVERYTHING. Algeria is a greenfield.

The next titles were amended in parallel to the work we were doing, we picked some of the topics here as TODOs for us and covered them, and to not get into rabbit holes we left you, the community some ideas to explore!

Cybersecurity

To not shift away from the generic "State of Algerian software engineering" domain this report covers, I would just scratch the surface on this topic.

Cybersecurity topic needs to be covered by professionals, this topic needs a lot of research and investigation due to the lack of -recent- data that covers Algeria.

In some academic publications, researchers claim that there were/are gaps in Algerian regulations. This has to be investigated by technical/legal people.

A field study has to be done to investigate whether laws and decisions are applied, if the different agencies are actually working on the field and they are collaborating with talents, and what tooling tooling and practices used by engineers and teams can also be explored.

Internships

When I was at university, it was clearer and easier for me to get an internship abroad than in Algeria. But from this survey's data I see that there are opportunities, these opportunities sometimes offer good salaries for interns!

Students and newbies in Algeria need to know more about this, we need to democratize information about internships and other ways to break through the professional world.

A document has to be published to show how to get internships? What's needed form the university? How and where companies can publish their positions? What's the legal framework in such situations?

Job portals should offer and promote positions for interns if possible.

E-Commerce

Algeria made big steps in this field, with new laws and regulations, more promotion for using POS terminals and payment gateways.

And lately, there's a big hype around it, with more events and conferences. This hype can both create more "noise

A report about e-commerce in Algeria has to be done to ride these first waves, and to create a good base for having historical data for the next iterations.

Education

Unanswered questions or unexplored correlations

We engage in answering questions about our project and sharing our findings through various public forums such as interviews and social media platforms. We also encourage bloggers and content creators to analyze and challenge our findings, and explore our data further more. We have created a page dedicated to collecting articles and recordings of discussions about this report: Mentions and Discussions.

If you think that we still did not answer your questions in this work, let us know. But please, consider supporting us to continue maintaining this project.

I, Abdeldjalil won't be happy to work with Excel or Python to find anymore correlations for free. A donation may make me change my mind, or pay Oussama to do it for me.

Final words

I hope we delivered an insightful document with a decent quality, and I hope that some people see into the challenges and act on them.

This document intentionally tried to have a positive note despite of the necessity to be objective. Finding opportunities and lifting challenges are one of the promises we promoted our work with, and we do believe that there are hunters who would see business opportunities in our data.

This document has bits and pieces that pin-point to the fact that things are moving forward, not judging if it's the right timing, the right speed, or in the right directions. We just wanted to draw a landscape and show its green parts.

I'm sorry if this work was incomplete, or it wasn't up to your standards, or if you had to read through long pages without getting the value you expected.

I hope we will have a more solid work in the next one, with sponsors and with a dedicated and a professional team.

سُبْحَانَكَ اللَّهُمَّ وَبِحَمْدِكَ، أَشْهَدُ أَنْ لَا إِلَهَ إِلَّا أَنْتَ، أَسْتَغْفِرُكَ وَأَتُوبُ إِلَيْكَ