The Developer Boom of Georgia: Reasons Behind It

Similar to every post-soviet nation, the country of Georgia has started to grab the opportunity of developing itself through the technology sector rather than relying on various other industries that are more common in the country.

However, this “tech boom” as some may like to call it didn’t really start the moment after the Soviet Union fell, but just a couple of years ago. The country of Georgia developed a healthy relationship with programming around 2015 when public and private schools voiced their opinions about the tech sector in general.

Parents started to expose their children to tech much more vigorously than ever before. In the past, the most attractive careers in the country had something to do with law, politics, and economics. Now though, a developer of almost every programming language with just 2 years of experience is able to have a 20 times larger salary than any other profession with the same credentials and experience.

Just like everybody says, people tend to go where the money is, but Georgia is different. Not only do young Georgians decide to learn code for better job opportunities, but for creating their own products as well.

According to statistics from Kapitali.ge, a local financial website, as many as 2 tech startups are created in Georgia ever single week. That’s 108 tech startups in a year on average. Although most of them have to do with something related to software development, there are dozens that target hardware and consumer goods.

So, now that we’ve laid this groundwork, it’s time to ask the question. How exactly does Georgia compete on the global technology market? What are their strongest tech sectors and what do they do best? Well, there are quite a lot of things that will be surprising to most people reading this.

The blockchain sector

Just a simple Google search of tech in Georgia will give you a result specifically mentioning the blockchain.

The software engineers in the country don’t necessarily focus on developing blockchain applications or systems, but they do indeed focus on mining cryptos on a very intense level.

In fact, considering that Georgia is smaller than New York State, it’s a pretty big achievement for such a country. Thanks to large mining companies as well as hundreds of entrepreneurs, the country has managed to gain 3rd place in global crypto mining volume.

Other than that, some of the largest banks in the country such as “TBC Bank” and “Bank of Georgia” have started looking into the Fintech sector, which is slowly but surely starting to be dominated by blockchain technology.

It may not be so far away to see a completely new digital currency or a crypto hub emerge in Europe.

Availability of education

The availability of education in Georgia was already on the highest level possible. Almost every single family in the country had what it takes to send their children to university without having to rely on loans or any kind of financial handout from the government or a private corporation.

The issue was the quality of education. Thousands of CS degree graduates had mentioned that the only thing they learned in university was just Java basics, while everything else was very heavy on math.

Although we all agree that programming requires math to some degree, learning to code in a specific language is pretty much something everybody expects from a CS degree, right?

Therefore, these CS degree graduates were forced to find some online courses and guides to truly learn what they were doing. This caused massive interest in the community surrounding them, thus created this culture of getting a professional education online.

This birthed hundreds of Web developers, with only a few ones specializing in slightly harder programming languages like Java and Python. Most of the developer population in Georgia nowadays focus their entire effort on Javascript.

Outsourcing market

The country of Georgia, much like every other Eastern European country has slowly become one of the best outsourcing countries in the world. Western startups, as well as established businesses, are looking for skilled developers in these countries for a much cheaper price than they would have to pay locally.

For example, an experienced Javascript developer in the UK would cost around 8,000 GBP per month, while Georgians are ready to agree on just $3000 working remotely. This has added a completely new dynamic to doing tech business in Europe, considering that companies are not able to produce good quality products for cheaper prices, thus able to charge much less.

In the end, the developer gets a significantly larger salary than the average in their country, the company gets a well-designed app or website, and the consumer gets smaller prices.

It’s likely that these types of business models will continue, thus the non-stop growth of the number of developers in countries like Georgia.