Updated on 19 Nov, 2021

Introduction

Egypt's tech market is a bit vague. You can't access information regarding salaries, popular technologies, and companies' environment without finding yourself having to get in contact with employees working inside the company. Famous reviews websites like Glassdoor aren't much of a help since most employees don't disclose their salaries even anonymously and only angry employees decide to write reviews on Glassdoor.

This unintelligibility makes anyone who wants to value themselves in the market fail to do so. A lot of people often ask me: Which technologies should we learn to increase our chances in the market? Or how much should I ask for? And so on. While it's true that some companies are technology agnostic when it comes to hiring where they test you in your Problem Solving and Design skills, most companies, in Egypt, favour hiring someone who is already comfortable with their tech stack.

A few weeks ago, I started a side project trying to hack this. I created a survey to collect some data, I chatted with 10s of Software Engineers in startups, scale-ups, Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) and Multinational Corporates, checked reviews websites like Glassdoor and Stack sharing websites like Stackshare. I had responses from ~500 engineers, in the coming section I will post my interpretation and analysis to these responses.

Disclaimer: This by no means is a comprehensive overview of the market, it's biased toward my network and the companies I'm interested in. Having said that, I assure you that I made an effort trying to clean the data and make it fair. I didn't include anyone working for a remote company, all the data that we analyse here are shared by Software Engineers working in companies operating in Egypt.

Tech Market in Egypt and the Rise of Startups

Previously, the career choices for a Software Engineer in Egypt were limited, startups couldn't compete to hire the best and as a result, the market bar was determined by both Software Houses providing services abroad (e.g Robusta, ITWorx, etc.) and large Corporates operating in Egypt (e.g Valeo, Vodafone, Orange, etc.)

But now, everything is changing fast. Egypt's startup scene is growing exponentially. VCs are funding startups in Egypt like never before.

Most of these startups are solving problems through tech, which is why they need to hire and retain the best engineers in the market; to do so they aren't only trying to provide higher salaries, but also other perks like shares, modern stack and a strong value proposition that makes you feel you actually are making a difference.

Data Segmentation

I had around 471 responses in total. Most of the participants were Backend Engineers, Front-end Engineers, Full-stack Engineers or Software Engineers (Embedded, R&D, C++ or any other Software Engineer who is not working in the web applications).

Most of the participants were from 0-5 years of experience

Participants working in startups were more than the ones working in Multinationals or Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs).

And the majority of the participants are working in a product-based company.

Technologies Marketshare

One of the question I asked in my survey was about technologies used in companies. I created word count for these technologies trying to determine the marketshare of each one.

You can press on "Backend" on the codepen to expand it.

Both Java and .Net are being used heavily in Backend Development, followed by PHP, Node.js and Python.

Frontend Development on the other hand is being dominated by Angular and React. They remain untouched. Angular has a slightly upper hand though.

Mobile Development wasn't so insightful, yet it gave me the impression that Kotlin is becoming more popular for Android Development.

And for the overall marketshare I had the impression that Java/C#/React/Angular are a winning bet.

I had conversations with Engineers in almost all the top funded startups and I had an impression that there's a growing trend to migrate to Go for backend services. Most of them prefer React over Angular and Vue.js for front-end development. If I get to make a bet, I would also bet on Go and React.

Salaries

In this section I will try to focus on salary ranges versus years of experience if you're Backend/Frontend/Fullstack/Mobile/Software Engineer.

0-1 Years of experience

Overview

I received 69 responses including salaries for this group. The average was 8000 EGP and the median was 7000 EGP. The maximum was 20,000 EGP.

The following chart represents each response's salary.

Fields

The majority of participants from this group were from SMEs. Multinationals tend to offer higher salaries than both SMEs and startups in this group.

1-3 Years of experience

Overview

I received 204 responses including salaries for this group. The average was 10,320 EGP and the median was 9000 EGP. The maximum was 32,000 EGP.

The following chart is represents each response's salary.

Fields

The important thing to note here, the 2 highest startups brackets are either 5-8 or 15-20 (More than the double), this probably differentiates between well funded and not funded startups.

3-5 Years of experience

Overview

I received 121 responses included salaries for this group. The average was 16,861 EGP and the median was 16,000 EGP. The maximum was 62,000 EGP.

The following chart represents each response's salary.

Fields

Startups for this group offer higher salaries than Multinationals and SMEs. If I had to draw a conclusion here it probably would be that well funded startups who are planning to hire and retain their talents probably prefer engineers with few years of experience, maybe? Share your thoughts in the comments!

5-8 Years of experience

Overview

I received 39 responses included salaries for this group. The average was 21,885 EGP and the median was 21,000 EGP. The maximum was 56,000 EGP.

The following chart represents each response's salary.

Since the majority of responses from this group were team leaders or tech architects/leads, it didn't make much sense to categorise salaries on the base of fields like we did in the previous groups.

The data are too little to draw conclusions about startups or multinationals here, so I will leave it to you but would urge to share what you think in the comments!

Previous Surveys

Automatest Testing Engineers Salaries

Few months ago Automatest created a survey to gather QA / Testing Engineers salaries data. It has very rich information about QA salary ranges. You definitely should check it out if you're working as a QA/Testing Engineer.

Egyptian Geeks 2018 vs 2021

In 2018, Egyptian Geeks created a survey called "State of Arab Tech" where they collected salaries on various experience levels. The following table might give a sense of how things have changed.

Conclusion

This is my personal advice, so take it with a grain of salt. Keep an eye on the startup scene, keep an eye on the products and funding rounds. If you took a quick look on the top funded startups in 2019, you will find most of them have increased their headcount by more than 50%. Ask what technologies do they use, learn how to negotiate your salary (I recommend Grokking Comp Negotiation in Tech).

Also, finding a good mentor in for your learning process can save you a lot of times and effort, and there's a growing trend of experienced engineers offering their mentorship. I will put the links for some of these mentorship programs here.

Moustafa Meaily's mentorship

Ahmed Adel's mentorship

Ahmed Taweel's mentorship

If you're offering your mentorship, please reach out so I can add you to this list! The more experienced mentors we have the better. I can't stress enough on how much it would benefit a new graduate or a student to have an experienced mentor who knows the market to guide him.

I would like to thank everyone who took of their time to fill the form.

Final note: Most of the work in here is done by few people in their free time, I understand you might not agree or we might have made mistakes, I encourage you to analyse the data yourself and tell us if you found that we did a stupid mistake or something, I totally understand, will appreciate that and fix it immediately. Keep your feedback tone gentle, please.

New Survey

If you found this report by any means helpful, I would encourage you to participate in these new surveys. I have upgraded the salaries survey trying to get more important insights. If you had few minutes to spare, please try to fill it (Even if you filled the previous one). Here the link.

Team

This report was a group effort between:

• Mahmoud Salem
• Randa Adel
• Abdulla Tarek
• Rana Samir
• Radwa Radwan
• Mohamed Elzomor

Copy Rights

You're free to use the information in here in anyway you see fit or the the data of the responses (I just removed the companies as part of removing any Personal Identifiable Information). But please give a credit back to this article and the team. I encourage you to analyse the data in any form you see fit, create dashboards, draw conclusions and share it with the community.

Resources

The Egyptian Startup Ecosystem Report

Data submitted on the survey without any PII