The situation with the exchange rate in Algeria is a real problem. Like you said, the banks’ exchange rate is much lower than it should be. When I was there I spent a day with a friend’s friend who runs a side business exchanging money, so I saw some of what this looks like on the ground. I’ll reach out now to pick your brain more on this topic.
Thank you again for your feedback & for spreading the word! So grateful.
This is also a problem where I live (Nigeria).
It's exhausting explaining black/parallel currency markets to clients/employers in countries with more stable currencies. Way too often I get the knee-jerk reaction that I'm doing something shady/illegal.
The Jan threads are now closed (HN threads close to new comments after 2 weeks) but there will be another one on Feb 1. No guarantees, of course, but people definitely get work that way.
Good luck! I hope you find something soon.
Manara solves this problem by setting up partnerships with companies for our candidates. Have you thought about joining Andela?
So are there any solutions we should be looking into beyond cash transfers / Western Union? Are any startups working on this problem?
>It's exhausting explaining black/parallel currency markets to clients/employers
What's the delta like there between parallel/official rates?
I've settled on maintaining a domiciliary bank account (denominated in USD) - SWIFT transfers take a few business days, but that's not a problem for steady income and clients can usually be persuaded to eat or split the fees. Plus it's easier to tell people I prefer to receive and hold USD than to explain the state of the economy. Also WorldRemit recently added same-day direct-to-bank deposits of USD in Nigeria-based USD-denominated accounts; I've only received money that way a couple of times though.
Best of luck to you two.
My contact information is in my profile. I'll forward to some people I know who had several problems with that. The last one I talked with worked with a company in the U.K. with the restriction the "worker" had to have a bank account in their country of residence, not in any other country. Explanations on exchange rates below. They know more about this, and know more people in that situation.
>We’ve also been looking at https://pilot.co/ https://www.boundlesshq.com/ and https://www.letsdeel.com/. Are you familiar with those?
Unfortunately, no.
What I also meant by payment problems is the disparity between the conversion rates in banks and on the streets. The disparity can be huge, so if you wire X euros to someone's bank account, it is automatically converted to the local currency at rate X and they get Y, when they could get 1.6Y or 1.7Y (60% or 70%) more on the streets. A 70% delta is a lot.
Some networks have developed to enable people to get the full "street value" of their money.
>When we call it “the Middle East and North Africa,” we also get feedback that it’s inaccurate.
Well, as someone in Algeria, if I were looking for work and visited the site and it said: "You're in North Africa", that's a fact of geography. It said "Hire the best Arab software engineers", I'll think "I'll forward the link to Arab software engineers I know since they're specific".
There are a lot of competitions, hackathons, or events that use this terminology, and I know many very talented people who do not participate because it's not for them. They'd rather go to another continent, and they do, where their ethnicity is acknowledged than submit a form that contains an inaccuracy that perpetuates a denial they've been facing for a long time. You are trying to optimize for brevity and clarity and you have to put something on the page, and I get that. I'm just saying and I think that you have lived through enough exclusion and non representativity that you understand that a message on a landing page that excludes you defacto kind of stings.
>PS: My co-founder Iliana has spent lots of time in Morocco and some in Algeria… and can’t wait to go back! She speaks some darija… and picked up a few words of Berber. :)
Well, I don't need to tell you that you are welcome. Hit me up if you are around. You might find the students groups to be interesting. In the meantime, I'll float the site around.
EDIT0: I sent it to someone who has a group. They sent the following:
> Them: Too bad, I'm an infrastructure engineer.
They're specialized in "Microsoft, VMware, IT infrastructures, etc."
EDIT1: Sent it to the admin of a group of around 7.4K engineers and technicians (not just software). Some might be interested and share it to their networks.