Tuesday, June 19, 2012

What's a programmer to do in Indonesia?

One question that often comes up during an interview, "What do you expect from working with X company?"  Considering that the question is often asked somewhere along the end of the interview I would think it's only casual chat.  But I'd know better.  So, what do you expect from working with X company?

Sometimes I would blurt out (especially after a rough interview) and say something like, "All of it--good salary, nice environment, awesome colleagues, successful products or services."  Or would you rather hear someone say, "I love programming so I would like to have a lot of challenges coming my way.  I get a kick out of torturing my soul day in and day out."

Basically what I'm trying to say is that, no, economic situations in Indonesia won't allow a regular programmer to ever become successful enough to live well.  I'm talking about the small salary, yes.  I'm also talking about high property rates, poorly distributed IT companies across Indonesia (they all flock in central Jakarta), and bad traffic.  So the rhetoric is why would anyone want to pursue this kind of career in Indonesia at all.

Here's some loose calculation.  With perhaps up to 10 years of experience, one might land a decent position in the management--one out of, what, 50 people?  Suppose one is a highly accomplished senior programmer then.  The standard salary, I think, for a senior programmer here is currently at maximum 15 million rupiahs with a standard threshold of 30% and few lucky ones reaching over 25 million rupiahs.  The question is how long will it take from the moment one starts receiving salary decent enough to save up (10 million say, at age 27) until he owns himself a decent house.  Consider one is lucky and steady, with 30% of salary to save, standard 10% annual increase (loosely considering inflation and GDP trend), for a house worth 600 million rupiahs it will take about 11 years until you can finally own it--which is doubtful because once you reach age 30 you become much less marketable in the programming field (in Jakarta).

It's the fault of frameworks I'd say.  There are so many frameworks to build your application upon that enable companies to only hire average fresh graduates and have it up and running.  Hardly any companies need you to be a guru at it.  Hardly any companies nowadays (in Indonesia) will require you to be adept with lexical analysis, Z notation, serialization mechanisms, or even kernel scheduling. Chances are along the way in the future more and more experts will find it very hard to land a job befitting their expertise.

So I would instead say, "I expect to leave--have someone to remind me to leave even, to leave the company the moment I save up enough to start my own business."