We're In a People Business, Not a Computer Business

We recently wrapped up hiring for an intern and wow are there a lot of great candidates interested in technology for development. However, I’ve noticed a disturbing trend; I had a number of conversations with great people who were afraid they maybe would not be qualified because they “weren’t techie enough." Most of these people were women.

Tech for international development is in some ways a terrible misnomer. It’s not a tech business. It’s a people business.
Of the best ICT people I know very few of them have been professional programmers or systems and network engineers. As a matter of fact, the sorts of skills and personalities that excell in those fields may not be the ones that will help design and implement a great tech-focused program with a legislature in Zambia.

To be good at this job, you have to really enjoy tech - someone who likes to play and tinker and have fun with tools, read up on the space, keep on top of all the new stuff coming down the pike. Then you have to be creative and excited about the possibilities of using these ideas to do development in new ways to reach way more people or empower them to somehow live better.

Sometimes we’re like Tom Smykowski from Office Space; we’ve got the people skills to deal with non-technical politicians or partners, and enough technical skills to understand the jargon of developers or consultants. It’s easy for generalists to get rolled by tech vendors with flashy presentations or indecipherable paragraphs of impressive jargon; we have to both stop that and translate the general program goals a team has into an actual technical scope of work in a contract. It's a different language. Of course, in this line, sometimes it literally is a different language on top of that.

Now that’s not to say that that tech skills are a bad thing - far from it. Go teach yourself Python (please- then come talk to me since we need help.) Learn Linux. But most of all, read and tweet and experiment and tinker and blog about what this radically changing tech landscape means for improving the lives of billions of people in the developing world. Then take that and march into your next ICT job interview brimming with confidence that you are the bridge that these two communities needs.