In Nigeria, distrust and lack of collaboration is deeply rooted. And with good reason. Lots of folk just aren’t trust worthy. But to every coin, there is a flip side…
As time has gone by, development tasks have gotten cheaper and one of the things that makes this possible is the vast amount of knowledge available on the internet, with sites like stackoverflow, bytes.com, daniweb, and codeproject… just to name a few, that deal with virtually any programming task.
It is incredible that experts are willing to share this knowledge as well. This has allowed software development to evolve really fast, at a pace where yesterday’s skills are outdated today. It has also made it possible for developers to hold expertise in multiple domains simultaneously.
The problem with this though is that developers think they can hold expertise in numerous domains simultaneously!
Granted, it is easier to do and also possible, but finding your development niche has never been more important. To push the boundaries of what is possible, experts have to lead the charge, and while having broad experience with various domains is helpful when you start blazing that trail, it isn’t for you to keep up with every domain and be a one man hackathon.
In Nigeria, distrust and lack of collaboration is deeply rooted, and with good reason. Lots of folk just aren’t trust worthy. But to every coin, there is a flip side. There are always people you can trust.
While taking collaboration risks however, it is important to shore up against potential future squabbles, be it legally or financially. As someone recently told me, be careful what you cannot control.
This is a call to arms of sorts. If we sampled the general opinion of Nigerian developers, it is very negative and we all may have contributed in one way or the other to this notion. In truth, people will always try to get the better of you (back to the trustworthiness issue)…but the one man hackathon mantra is getting us nowhere.
It may come off as a quixotic JAMB question, but isn’t it high time we laid a good foundation of collaboration and trust in one another, and started weaving a confidence culture into the technology fabric of this country?
Ajibola is a mobile developer. Follow him on Twitter here.
