The Tunga Blog

On our blog, we document our journey to unleash Africa's tech talent as a remote-first organization. Browse through our stories for reliable data on a wide range of topics, including software developer salaries, insights into the global staff augmentation market, and information about Africa as a source of offshore software development.

Where the weight in software work is moving

Engineering teams that have been using AI coding tools in production for a year or more tend to show the same pattern. Output volume is clearly up. Bugs per developer are up too. Review time has gone through the roof. Something in the economics of the work has flipped, and the standard productivity numbers aren’t […]

There is a manual for hiring across cultures. I...

Hiring across cultures comes with questions you didn’t quite see coming. What’s expected of you. What’s expected of them. What you can joke about and what you can’t. Whose job it is to flag a problem, and when. Somewhere between signing the contract and the first call, you realise: nobody handed you the manual. That […]

AI’s real value is in your operations, no...

Everyone around you seems to be hiring AI engineers. AI job postings are up 143% in a year. The wage premium is 56%. The message is hard to miss: if you’re serious about AI, you need serious technical talent. But the idea of competing for machine learning talent against companies with 10 times your budget […]

Groeivoer Podcast: What Happens When AI Reshape...

Our founder Ernesto Spruyt recently joined Guido Koershuis on the Groeivoer podcast (episode 390) for a wide-ranging conversation about building teams across cultures, what AI means for the future of software development, and the things that should never be automated. Some of the topics covered: The podcast is in Dutch. Listen on Spotify: Watch on […]

The SaaS sector is supposedly dying. Here’s wha...

If you run a SaaS company, you’ve been reading a lot of alarming things lately. AI will make your product irrelevant. The “SaaSpocalypse” is here. The era of software subscriptions is over. If even half of this is true, it changes what your company is worth, who will buy from you, and whether your team needs […]

Finding Digital Talent Where You Weren’t ...

Most Dutch founders don’t have Nigeria on their radar when they think about hiring. Not as a conscious decision. It simply isn’t on the map. That’s understandable. And it’s exactly what a new Clingendael report set out to investigate. What the Dutch government wanted to know The Netherlands has a bilateral partnership with Nigeria that […]

What It Actually Takes to Be AI-Ready

Late last year I decided to get serious about AI at Tunga. Not the “give everyone a ChatGPT license” kind of serious. Structurally serious. Redesign how we work. The first question was obvious: where on earth do I start? Turns out I’m not the only one. Every entrepreneur I’ve spoken to in the past few […]

The Software Developer Market Is Not Doing What...

There is a version of this story that has become almost ambient. AI is replacing software developers. Demand is collapsing. The market has fundamentally changed, and whoever hasn’t adapted yet is about to find out the hard way. I hear this regularly. In news articles, on LinkedIn, in conversations at events. It is stated with […]

Why Your Certificates Don’t Matter (And W...

A lot of developers believe certifications are a meaningful lever for getting hired internationally. They are not. Hear me out. Certificates can help you pass an automated screen. They signal you’ve invested time in learning. But once a human is involved, once someone is actually deciding whether to hire you, they rarely move the decision […]