What it actually takes to be a developer in Cameroon

I started programming in 2017. Within months the government shut the internet off in the Anglophone regions, where I live. So my first real taste of this career was trying to learn to code with no connection, and then having to stop and wait for it to come back. Not the smoothest start.

Years later I lead engineering teams and build systems that move real money. The actual code, the part people think the job is about, looks the same here as it does anywhere. Spring Boot is Spring Boot whether you write it in Bamenda or Berlin. The hard part of being a developer in Cameroon was never the code. It is everything wrapped around it.

Here is the honest version.

The power goes out, so I moved

I am from Bamenda. I love it there. But the power cuts got bad enough that they took my internet down with them, and you cannot ship software you cannot stay online to ship. So I left for Yaoundé. Not because I wanted to, because the lights stay on a little longer.

Even now, staying online is a daily tax. I keep data bundles on every network, MTN, Orange, all of them, because no single one is reliable enough to bet a workday on. When one drops I switch to another. That is just normal life here. You build your whole workflow around the assumption that the connection will betray you, because sooner or later it will.

There is a funny full circle in this. The 2017 shutdown is the exact thing that interrupted me when I was starting out. Today one of the things I am proudest of building is Maayo, a library that syncs data from offline first apps back up to the server. I write tools so apps keep working when the internet does not. The kid who got knocked offline grew up to make offline a feature. I did not plan it that way, but I like how it turned out.

Getting paid is its own job

I get paid by wire transfer and in crypto. Both work. Neither is simple.

Crypto is fast, which I like, but it punishes mistakes hard. I have lost money before by sending a transfer on the wrong network. One wrong setting and the money is just gone. No support line, no reversal, nobody to call. You learn that lesson exactly once, and then you triple check every address and every chain for the rest of your life.

This is the stuff nobody mentions when they tell you to just go remote and earn in dollars. The money you earned and the money you can actually hold in your hand are two different things, and closing that gap is a skill you end up learning on your own, usually by losing some of it first.

Prove you are a senior, then get offered junior money

This is the one that gets under my skin.

A client finds me. They ask for my resume and my portfolio. I send both. Then they want a round of tests, fine, I pass them. Then come the calls. A lot of calls, most of them unnecessary, where I basically sit there and demonstrate that yes, I am a senior engineer and yes, I can do the thing. And then, after all of that, after I have shown exactly what I can do, the offer lands at a number that matches none of it. Other times they just go quiet and I never hear back.

I have stopped reading it as a real question about my skill, because the work answers that question every single time. It is an assumption that kicks in the second they see where I am based. You can almost feel the rate getting cut in their head before they even say a number. Proving yourself twice and still getting lowballed is a specific kind of tiring.

To be fair, this is not my everyday anymore. I work remotely now with a team that is genuinely great, where I get judged by what I ship and nothing else. That situation exists, and it is the one most developers here are reaching for. It just took going through the rougher version first to find it.

The work itself never stopped through any of it. The stereotype says serious software does not come out of a place like this, and the stereotype is wrong. I help lead a team building systems that move real money, and on the side I am building my own social app, because the urge to build your own thing never fully goes away. Plenty of the developers I came up with are doing the same, heads down, shipping, ignoring the noise.

Why I stay

People leave. I understand why, I really do. But I am not trying to escape this place. I am trying to grow with it. I love my culture and I love my country, and I want to build here, and I want the things I build to be part of where this country goes next. That is the whole reason. It does not need to be more complicated than that.

The code really is the easy part.

If you are a developer here and you have lived any of this, the lowballs, the bundles, the money that vanished on the wrong network, I want to hear it. Tell me your story. I am collecting them, and the good ones are going to shape what I write next.