A step in the right direction. But I still think you don’t fully get it (IMHO), but what do I know anyway? All the best with your initiatives.

MIH should consider being more open about the super-cool stuff that they are pioneering (note the word pioneering, not cloning).

Working on Twitter clones and the equivalent of anything that already exists (e.g. Facebook, digg, ebay), whether in China, Eastern Europe or Brazil simply won’t attract the talent that you are looking for. These types are too smart for that and there are many star programmers who make (excellent) twitter clones and such stuff as hobby projects. Why do they need you for that?

Show them an exciting concept, direction or product that you are working on they haven’t seen or heard of before and be loud about it.

Show them your pioneering efforts. They will come in droves.

Also, don’t discount the youngsters who are not even out of high school yet. You’d be surprised at how many would run circles around University graduates. (e.g. Firefox is the brainchild of 14 year old Blake Ross. Thank goodness he was’nt lugging around the cranial weight of Six-Sigma and the concept of SDLC conventions – otherwise we’d all be stuck with the 2001 version on Internet Explorer /* shudders */)

I think you’re on to something good here, but lumping it under opaque “corporate goodness” speak is just not going to attract the Rockstars you seek.

They have no interest in convention, and the fact that you’re a spinoff of a print publication giant does not help your cause either (we all know where that section of the industry is headed).

It raises questions, especially about just how much of the corporate “old guard” mentality has filtered down into your unit. So you’re at a slight disadvantage because of that, meaning you’ll need make more of an effort to distance yourselves from that stigma and make it really attractive for stars to want to associate themselves with you. Take some pages from Google, Apple and Silicon Valley culture for inspiration.

So where can we change our culture? Or what can business do to inspire a developer? One of the things that I find at university is that yes it teaches you how to learn, how to be analytical and my particular course exposes me to a lot of different fields of expertise. The problem I have is that it does not feel as if I am making a contribution to the academic field. A project is just another project to pass a module. There is no prize for exceeding really or recognition. As you might know, most university student aim for 50% and nothing more. This means you are only 50% capable of doing something. In schools however, the one I came from, students excelled more as they wanted to be guaranteed to get university acceptance. Why do companies not make it clearer that 50% is not enough? A 50% student will not even dare to send his CV to Google. Why? A culture in Google has been established, you are the best if you work there. A lot of the satisfaction comes from working for Google as well because of this culture.

Back to the problem, what can your company possibly do as recruitment and simple job advertisements do not work. Advertise a problem for the specific developer you are targeting. Only developers that pass the problem can progress for the job. Only developer whom are truly inspired, whom have the right personality and skills will attempt this problem. Goodbye 50%-students. This is a great way to advertise your company’s culture as a place for rockstars. You have awesome companies like Tencent, why not advertise it. It is an marketing in itself like Google and Facebook.

Advertise Tencent’s achievements like Google does with applications. Some of these applications are not completely functional, but it shows the developer community that they are continuously busy inventing and trying new ideas. They are not a stagnant company.

The problem Jacques described (absence of Rock Star developers in SA) is directly linked to the fact that the internet has really not “arrived” in SA yet. It might be in a few hundred thousand households, but even in these households it has not really and properly “arrived” yet. Very few in SA “live” the internet. Like the people do in Europe. Night and day. Internet this, internet that. Here life revolves around the internet. In all households.

The statistics show that internet penetration and use by the SA community is still comparatively low. I look at this fact every weekend, when I peruse the Google Adsense user reports of my blog and see how “non-existent” South Africa still is in the world when it comes to internet consumption. Already on Fridays the visitor stats from SA drops down to almost nil (as people leave offices early to go on their long weekends). No-one surfs from home over weekends (I mean in SA…the rest of the world stays connected!)

On Mondays the numbers pick up noticably slower from SA than from other places in the world. In short, SA is not an internet country (yet). (Work ethic is a topic for another day! And I don’t want to make foes here…)

Why is that the case? No, it has nothing to do with race. (Caught you out, heh?)

It has to do with Telkom and the fact that the state has had a monopoly on communications infrastructure and service for most of the last years – and still practically has.

In Germany competition has seen several upgrades of broadband speed in the last 8 years (since I came here) and everytime the connection became faster, it became cheaper, as more people are interested and get hooked. Cheaper brings more, again. And so there has been a “virtuous cycle” at work here, which quickly turned the internet into culture and put it in the centre of life – business life, private life, every facet of life.

This still has to happen in SA. And will in the next 5 or so years, I think, thanks to Joe Venter and Google’s satellite initiative etc.

Affordability, speed, stability of connections – all of these things will really introduce the people of SA to the internet in the following few years. And link Africa together in a single community as never before. And it’s not impossible that the internet penetration rates can one day equal the penetration rates of cell phones in SA. We all know how high that is…

Until the internet hasn’t arrived in SA, there won’t be “begeesterde” “rock-star-type” developers in SA.

Blame it all on Telkom and the monopoly the state gave Telkom shortly before Naspers went into the internet with a bang in 1998 (not to speak about hundreds of millions of rands).

Of course, the clever guys at Naspers should have foreseen this problem, before spending all that money, but that is (also) a topic for another day.

But yes, @herman_smith, they mean what they say with “awesome” projects, and not “awesome” in the traditional corporate kind of way.