Even in current seemingly dim scenarios, I heavily bet on Information Technology careers in Nepal. Nepali IT will grow if the Nepalese economy has to grow because we do not have other options. The government putting IT as a “strategic industry” just validates my point further. I will provide guidance on a 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 a 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 the 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 thousand increments each year you stay in the same company. Offshore companies in Nepal, which pay higher base salaries, will provide lower increments. In-house Nepali companies that 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. Dashain bonus is one month salary in hand extra paid.

I do not want to bring Glassdoor data and put it here. It will not be accurate. There are some websites like salaryinbox in Nepal. But I do not trust them for 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 the company has to do in order to keep the product alive. It does not generate new business.

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

Examples of the 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 and 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 certification 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 training courses and give many certification exams.

However, another form of learning, which is “implicit learning,” happens when working on complex products. This 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 especially for juniors. Maybe they would allow some flexibility to retain their seniors.

To find a remote job, I have heard of a 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 a resume + cover letter.

This sounds promising personally for me, if you ask me my opinion.

Way 2

Try himalayas.app. It is a remote jobs scraper website. It collects remote jobs from various websites and publishes in its site. I have not found success yet applying to these companies listed in himalays app website.

Way 3

Start posting content in places where recruiters live and breathe. For example: LinkedIn. Consistently write posts in the field you want to work in. Appear as an enthusiast if you are a fresher or an 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 in a timely manner. Even if the ticket is still being solved, keep the clients informed about it.
• 5PM: Report to the manager regarding today’s tasks.
• Update the clients regarding the remaining tickets.

If there are issues that need to be escalated, escalate them in a timely manner to the relevant team. Keep track of escalated tickets and 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 the 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 the web server. For example, to restart the nginx server on Linux, you would use systemctl restart nginx. To restart a pod in kubernetes, you could apply kubectl … (I forgot the command now, that is why I am doing 45 days of DevOps. Follow that blog for learning more about my journey.)

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
• Patience
• Correct Identification of the problem. Is it a database issue, a network issue, or an application issue? Because you would need to escalate the issue up to the relevant team.

About AI

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

Nepalese employees are usually cheaper than AI subscriptions. But that also means that there will not be higher packages for employees. Knowledge workers have become a commodity.

Likewise, DevOps and system administration are looking bleak. AI will reduce the number of junior hires. Leading to the death of the industry because at one point there will be no juniors who will transition into seniors or mid-level engineers.

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

Plus, most of us have computer science as the only degree and cannot really afford to go to university for another degree. So we do not have any options.

For these reasons, among others, I have decided to prepare for government jobs in the fields of IT and computer engineering.

I write about it in the following posts:

https://berojgarengineer.com/blog/loksewa-computer-engineer-and-it-officer-in-nepal/

https://berojgarengineer.com/blog/roadmap-to-crack-loksewa-computer-engineer-and-it-officer-in-six-months/

Note: I have shared my complete job experience as a fresher computer engineering graduate in Nepal. I am a beginner like you. Maybe I have more information due to my little bit more years of experience in the IT industry of Nepal. I repeat that I have given complete guidance in this blog. Still if you want tailored guidance, or want to just have a call with me regarding fresher IT jobs in Nepal, or want to ask some additional questions, pay Rs.2500 to the QR present in the blog below.

NMB Bank QR:

And fill the form below:

https://forms.gle/5o4XxUvpyBkAEdxr9

I will inform you within the next 24 hours and schedule a call when our time is suitable. Keep the questions prepared so that the session can be succinct.