Shashi Hansjee

The banks and corporates will complain to anyone who’ll listen that they’re constantly struggling to find, and keep, good tech talent. It’s a running joke that, with a few exceptions, everyone in the banking world has worked for everyone else. Why is it so hard to retain talented programmers? One reason is that the best get snapped up as soon as they click the open for work button on LinkedIn. Anyone can learn coding on Udemy, but it can take years of honing to reach proficiency. And if it wasn’t hard enough to hire, in a lesson learned in the time of the pandemic, locals are now being employed by overseas companies, with internationally competitive salaries, without having to leave the country.

But many thousands have left, to the US, the UK, The Netherlands, among other shores, leaving local companies to fight over the limited pool. After all, there’s plenty of work to be done here, and South Africa is seen as a global leader in financial services, and much coding work is offshored to places like India and Ukraine. How do you staunch this flow of talent?