Even in current seemingly dim scenarios, I heavily bet on Information Technology careers in Nepal. Nepali IT will grow if Nepalese economy has to grow because we do not have other options. The government putting IT as “strategic industry” just validates my point further. I will provide guidance on few areas that I believe freshers want to know but do not have a reliable way of knowing.

Salary

The base salary is standard in almost all “established” companies. They are not released publicly. So everyone has to make an educated guess or tell from their own experience. I do not have huge collection of people who are willing to disclose their salaries honestly and neither do I have ways to cross check the salaries. But I do have a general idea of market rate.

What you receive will depend on your negotiation skills, indispensability in the organization, rapport in the team and your perception in the company. If you have made the manager feel that you are indispensable, then you “might” get higher salaries.

As a rule of thumb, here is the salary breakdown:

• Intern=15,000 Rupees per month
• Entry Level=30,000 Rupees per month
• Add 0-10 thousands increments each year you stay in the same company. Offshored to Nepal companies which pay higher base salaries will provide lower increment. In house Nepali companies who provide lower base salaries will provide higher increments as you go on.
• You “could” double your salary by switching jobs.

Companies on profit provide annual bonuses. Dashain bonus is mandatory.

I do not want to bring glassdoor data and put here. It will not be accurate. There are some websites like salaryinbox in Nepal. But I do not trust them on their collected data.

Support vs Development

There are two types of business functions within companies. They are:

• Development
• Support

Generally Development is the team that brings revenue for the company. And support is something that company has to do in order to keep the product working. It does not generate new business.

That is the reason why the salaries of development team will be usually much higher than their support counterpart.

Examples of Development team:

• Software Engineer / Developer (Frontend, Backend, Full-stack)
• Mobile Developer (iOS, Android)
• Data Engineer
• Machine Learning / AI Engineer
• Embedded Systems Engineer
• Solutions Architect

Examples of support team:

• DevOps/Platform Engineer
• DBA
• Security Engineer
• IT Support
• System Administrator
• QA/Test Engineer
• Network Administrator
• Cloud Operations
• Site Reliability Engineer
• IT Security/Cybersecurity Analyst
• Technical Support Engineer
• Product Manager
• Project Manager

SRE,PM can be thought of as hybrid roles i.e. somewhere between support and development. Because that role revolves around both categories. They can demand higher salaries unlike generic support work.

I have to explain myself for this rigid classification of support vs development. Downtime kills revenue, but uptime does not directly generate revenue. So it can be thought of in many ways. It is just my observation in the Nepalese IT landscape. It might change. Both, my opinion and the IT landscape in Nepal.

About learning

Companies that deal with clients who value certifications will make you take many certifications exams. So “learning” will be there. Some of the companies that deal with such clients are Max International, Digital Network Solution(DNS) and Adex International. They will make you take many trainings and give many certification exams.

However another form of learning which is “implict learning” happens when working in complex products. Which is what product based companies that work on interesting products provide.

Remote work

Nepali companies usually do not offer flexible working conditions. Mainly because there is no incentive for them. This is true specially for juniors. Maybe they would allow some flexibility to retain their seniors.

To find remote job, I have heard of few good ways(I myself have not been able to get one).

Way 1

Step 1: Visit producthunt

Step 2: Find the new startups listed there.

Step 3: Go to their careers pages.

Mail them with resume+cover letter.

Way 2

Try himalayas.app. It is a remote jobs scraper website. It collects remote jobs from various websites and publishes in its site.

Way 3

Start posting content in places where recruiters live and breathe. For example: Linkedin. Consistently write posts on the field you want to work for. Appear as an enthusiast if you are a fresher or authority if you are experienced. This increases visibility. And in turn increases chances of getting a remote job.

You can always cold email people from Nepal who work for remote companies. But I doubt the hit rate of such brute force methods.

My experience

I worked as a fresher production support engineer in Nepali Tech Company.

What did my day to day life look like?

• 9 AM: Standup
• 10AM: Tickets are assigned. You sort them based on priority(example: production being down will be looked upon first).
• Start solving the tickets.
• Keep the clients informed timely. Even if the ticket is still being solved, keep the clients informed about it.
• 5PM: Report to manager regarding today’s tasks.
• Update the clients regarding the remaining tickets.

If there are issues that need to be escalated, escalate them timely to the relevant team. Keep track of escalated tickets of their progress.

Most of the support work is analyzing logs. So having intermediate linux terminal skills helps a lot. You can do it even without fancy command line skills, but it will be time consuming and annoying for yourself.

Restarting services was actually most frequently done thing in support. Many freshers think restarting means rebooting the computer. But what I mean by restarting services is restarting specific services like web server. For example to restart nginx server on Linux, you would use systemctl restart nginx.

Skills required for the support work:

• SQL (basic one line querying)
• Linux terminal(intermediate level required)
• Kubernetes troubleshooting(basic GUI troubleshooting)
• Communication skills(written and verbal)
• Shell Scripting(basic understanding of shell scripts)
• Computer Networking fundamentals
• Web servers fundamentals
• Stress and Anger management
• Patience
• Correct Identification of Problem. Is it database issue, or network issue, or application issue?

About AI

There are various ways people look at AI taking jobs. Nobody can be sure about the future. In my honest opinion, products which do not need any creative appreciation by the user of that product will be the first to be eaten by AI. And software is one of them. People do not use software to appreciate the creation. They use to do the job faster.

Nepalese employees are usually cheaper than AI subscriptions from the west. But that also means that there will not be higher package for employees. Knowledge workers have became a commodity.

Likewise, DevOps, system administration is looking bleak. AI will reduce the number of junior hires. Leading to the death of the industry.

But we need to work hard in our field of interest keeping all of that worries and speculations aside. Worries, which we can do nothing about. If you’re sinking, entire world is also sinking along with you. So no need to worry at all.